Papers with absolute accuracy
Cross-Encoder Data Annotation for Bi-Encoder Based Product Matching (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to match seller listed items to appropriate product are computationally heavy and require computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to annotate or refine human annotated training data for bi-encoder models using a cross-encoding model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves 4% absolute accuracy when no training data is available and 2% when annotated training data exists. |
Transductive Auxiliary Task Self-Training for Neural Multi-Task Models (D19-61)
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| Challenge: | Multi-task learning and self-training are two common ways to improve a machine learning model’s performance in settings with limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a transductive auxiliary task self-training procedure that trains a model on auxiliary tasks and test instances with auxiliary labels generated by a single-task version of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy by 9.56% over the pure multi-task model for dependency relation tagging and 13.03% for semantic taging. |
Increasing Diversity While Maintaining Accuracy: Text Data Generation with Large Language Models and Human Interventions (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate text data for training and evaluating other models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use logit suppression and temperature sampling to diversify text generation but at the cost of data accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can increase diversity but at the cost of data accuracy. |
Collective Entity Disambiguation with Structured Gradient Tree Boosting (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on structured gradient tree boosting for collective entity disambiguation is limited to regular classification or regression problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured learning model that uses gradient tree boosting to disambiguate named entities in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art neural system by near 1% absolute accuracy on the popular AIDA-CoNLL dataset. |
K-hop neighbourhood regularization for few-shot learning on graphs: A case study of text classification (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | We show that few-sample word-document graphs can be used for improved learning in low-resource settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to utilize word-document graph properties for improved learning in low-resource settings by using a regularizer for heterogeneous graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a baseline TextGCN with 17% accuracy over eight languages while performing on par with the state-of-the-art models. |
Natural Language to Structured Query Generation via Meta-Learning (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Conventional supervised training is a pervasive paradigm for NLP problems . however, examples of the same problem may vary widely . a few-shot meta-learning scenario is used to learn multiple models . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning protocol that treats each example as a unique pseudo-task . they use a few-shot meta-learning scenario to reduce the original learning problem to a single example . |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning protocol achieves 1.1%–5.4% accuracy gains over non-meta-learning counterparts on a WikiSQL dataset. |
Turbocharging Web Automation: The Impact of Compressed History States (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing web automation approaches ignore the importance of history states to accomplish tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a web history compressor approach to turbocharge web automation using history states by concatenating history states with other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 1.2-5.4% accuracy improvements over baseline methods on Mind2Web and WebLINX datasets. |
Graph Reasoning for Question Answering with Triplet Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer complex questions require reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) state-of-the-art methods constrain retrieved knowledge in local subgraphs and discard more diverse triplets that are disconnected but useful for question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve the most relevant triplets from KGs and then rerank them, which are then concatenated with questions to be fed into language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on commonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets with 4.6% absolute accuracy. |
SyncThink: A Training-Free Strategy to Align Inference Termination with Reasoning Saturation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning with Chain-of-Thought prompting, but long and redundant traces substantially increase inference cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free and plug-and-play decoding method that reduces CoT overhead without modifying model weights. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K, MMLU, GPQA, and BBH show that SyncThink achieves 62.00% average Top@1 accuracy using 656 generated tokens and 28.68s latency, compared to 61.22%, 2141 tokens, and 92.01s for full CoT decoding. |
Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus on identifying slots and values, but in reality, customer service agents follow multi-step procedures derived from explicit company policies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fully-labeled dataset to study customer service dialogue systems in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models but still lacks 50.8% absolute accuracy to reach human-level performance on the dataset. |
A Structured Variational Autoencoder for Contextual Morphological Inflection (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | morphological inflectors typically trained on fully supervised, type-level data, but how can we improve their performance? et al., 2016: a novel latent-variable model for semi-supervised learning of inflection generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent-variable model for semi-supervised learning of inflection generation . they use a wake-sleep algorithm to enable posterior inference over latent variables . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 23 languages and shows 10% accuracy improvement . the proposed model is based on the wake-sleep algorithm . |
Value-Agnostic Conversational Semantic Parsing (2021.acl-long)
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Emmanouil Antonios Platanios, Adam Pauls, Subhro Roy, Yuchen Zhang, Alexander Kyte, Alan Guo, Sam Thomson, Jayant Krishnamurthy, Jason Wolfe, Jacob Andreas, Dan Klein
| Challenge: | Existing models rely on rich representations of dialogue history that include all previously generated components of the output. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that abstracts over values to focus prediction on type- and function-level context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 7.3% and 10.6% on SMCalFlow and TreeDST datasets. |
DPC: Training-Free Text-to-SQL Candidate Selection via Dual-Paradigm Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating SQL queries lack the ability to self-evaluate correctness without an execution oracle. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates SQL selection from a probabilistic guessing task on hidden data into a deterministic verification task on visible data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BIRD and Spider show that the proposed method outperforms baselines. |
Neural-Symbolic Inference for Robust Autoregressive Graph Parsing via Compositional Uncertainty Quantification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models excel at graph semantic parsing with rich annotated data, but generalize poorly to out-of-distribution and long-tail examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositionality-aware approach to neural-symbolic inference informed by model confidence to capture different aspects of the graph prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on an English resource grammar parsing problem on standard in-domain and seven OOD corpora. |
Are AI-Generated Text Detectors Robust to Adversarial Perturbations? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors for AI-generated text lack robustness against adversarial perturbations, with even minor changes in characters or words causing a reversal in distinguishing between human-created and AI-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese calibration technique to train the model to make equally confident predictions under different noise, which improves the model’s robustness against adversarial perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baseline methods on four datasets and is more generalizable in cross-domain, cross-genre, and mixed-source scenarios. |
Neural Transductive Learning and Beyond: Morphological Generation in the Minimal-Resource Setting (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing lexicons have limited coverage for learning morphological inflection patterns from labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose two new methods to solve paradigm completion, the morphological task of generating missing forms, given a partial paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the previous state-of-the-art by 9.71% absolute accuracy on a 52-language benchmark dataset. |
RoLoRA: Fine-tuning Rotated Outlier-free LLMs for Effective Weight-Activation Quantization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves training efficiency by updating only a small portion of the weights in Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a rotation-aware scheme to fine-tune rotated outlier-free LLMs for effective weight-activation quantization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves low-bit LoRA convergence and post-training quantization robustness. |
TT-SI: Self-Improving LLM Agents with Test-Time Training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for language model fine-tuning are expensive and inefficient . existing methods rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time self-improvement algorithm that generates a sample that model struggles with . they also explore Test-Time Distillation, which leverages 'stronger supervisors' |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. |
Efficient End-to-End Visual Document Understanding with Rationale Distillation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-processing tools such as optical character recognition (OCR) can map document image inputs to textual tokens, then large language models (LLMs) can reason over text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates outputs of OCR tools and larger multimodal models as intermediate "rationales" a student model is trained to predict rationales and answers based on visual documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the base model on three visual document understanding benchmarks with only 1% higher computational cost. |
Diverse Distributions of Self-Supervised Tasks for Meta-Learning in NLP (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Meta-learning considers learning as an efficient learning process that can leverage its past experience to accurately solve new tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide task distributions for meta-learning by considering self-supervised tasks automatically proposed from unlabeled text to enable large-scale meta- learning in NLP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed distributions show that human learning models perform better on the few-shot benchmark than previous methods. |
R-VLM: Region-Aware Vision Language Model for Precise GUI Grounding (2025.findings-acl)
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Joonhyung Park, Peng Tang, Sagnik Das, Srikar Appalaraju, Kunwar Yashraj Singh, R. Manmatha, Shabnam Ghadar
| Challenge: | Existing vision-only GUI agents ground elements from large and cluttered screenshots, requiring them to process substantial irrelevant information that compromises their accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual agent model for GUI automation that leverages zoomed-in region proposals for precise element localization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves state-of-the-art grounding accuracy by 13% across diverse GUI platforms on the GUI grounding benchmarks ScreenSpot and AgentStudio. |
Mind the Context: The Impact of Contextualization in Neural Module Networks for Grounding Visual Referring Expressions (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior implementations of NMN use pre-defined and fixed textual inputs in their module instantiation. |
| Approach: | They propose to parameterize the module arguments to reduce the number of modules in NMN by up to 75% without any loss in performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on CLEVR-Ref+ dataset with +8.1% improvement in accuracy and +4.3% on full test set. |
Learning Dense Representations of Phrases at Scale (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing phrase retrieval models rely on sparse representations and still underperform retriever-reader approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn phrase representations from reading comprehension tasks using negative sampling methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over previous models by 15%-25% absolute accuracy and matches the performance of state-of-the-art retrieval models. |
Few-shot Learning with Multilingual Generative Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xi Victoria Lin, Todor Mihaylov, Mikel Artetxe, Tianlu Wang, Shuohui Chen, Daniel Simig, Myle Ott, Naman Goyal, Shruti Bhosale, Jingfei Du, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Sam Shleifer, Punit Singh Koura, Vishrav Chaudhary, Brian O’Horo, Jeff Wang, Luke Zettlemoyer, Zornitsa Kozareva, Mona Diab, Veselin Stoyanov, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Large-scale generative language models such as GPT-3 are competitive few-shot learners. |
| Approach: | They train multilingual generative language models on a corpus covering a diverse set of languages and study their few- and zero-shot learning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-3 on 171 out of 182 directions with 32 training examples and surpasses the official supervised baseline in 45 directions. |
LSRL: Process-Supervised GRPO on Latent Recurrent States Improves Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Latent-recurrent language models solve tasks by iteratively refining hidden states rather than emitting chain-of-thought tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-supervised variant of Guided Reward Policy Optimization that rewards latent steps at every latent step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves absolute accuracy by +4.27 points on GSM-8K and +2.06 points on MathQA. |
This is not a Disimprovement: Improving Negation Reasoning in Large Language Models via Prompt Engineering (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Negation reasoning remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) a negative token attention score (NTAS) is introduced to quantify attention to negation words. |
| Approach: | They propose two genres of prompts that improve negation accuracy by up to 3.17% . they also propose a negative token attention score to quantify attention to negation words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompts improve negation accuracy and absolute accuracy by 3.17% over baselines. |
SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yubo Ma, Zhibin Gou, Junheng Hao, Ruochen Xu, Shuohang Wang, Liangming Pan, Yujiu Yang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | SciAgent surpasses other LLMs with the comparable size by more than 8.0% in absolute accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented scientific reasoning setting that supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets and builds a benchmark to evaluate LLM’s abilities with tool assistance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed setting augments LLMs with scalable toolsets and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. |
Crossing the Threshold: Idiomatic Machine Translation through Retrieval Augmentation and Loss Weighting (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented models to increase the accuracy of a strong pretrained machine translation model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques improve the accuracy of a strong pretrained model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13% in absolute accuracy, and holds potential benefits for non-idiomatic phrases. |
G-LoRA: Global-Local Decoupled Low-Rank Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) improves the fine-tuning efficiency and performance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptive approach that decomposes update matrix into global and local adapters and assigns them to local and global adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 2.7% accuracy improvement over LoRA and its variants on commonsense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. |
Localized Low-Rank Adaptation within Clustered Parameter Subspaces (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) for large language models has been successful in various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform low-rank updates within clustered parameter subspaces . they group rows/columns of update matrix into locally coherent, uncorrelated subspace blocks . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) is better than global adaptations in various domains. |
MERMAID: Multi-perspective Self-reflective Agents with Generative Augmentation for Emotion Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models struggle to handle ambiguous emotional expressions and implicit affective cues, which are crucial for affective understanding but largely overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that integrates a self-reflection module, an emotion-guided visual augmentation module, and a cross-modal verification module to enhance emotion recognition. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that MERMAID outperforms existing methods and achieves absolute accuracy gains of 8.70%–27.90% across diverse benchmarks. |
ReFLAIR: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning via Structured Reflection and Reward-Guided Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing training methods for large models do not address the trade-off between reflection and accuracy. |
| Approach: | a unified framework teaches large models to perform structured reflection via an explicit $think re-think answer $ format and hybrid reward learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance on mathematical benchmarks and reduces inference cost by nearly 23%. |
Routing with Generated Data: Annotation-Free LLM Skill Estimation and Expert Selection (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyi Niu, Justin Chen, Genta Indra Winata, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Supriyo Chakraborty, Sambit Sahu, Yue Zhang, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Mohit Bansal
| Challenge: | Existing approaches typically assume access to ground-truth labeled data . Existing methods require a classifier to select models given an input . |
| Approach: | They propose a routing setting where routers are trained exclusively on generated queries and answers from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed router outperforms the best query-answer router by 4.6% absolute accuracy when trained on weak generator data. |
REVEALER: Reinforcement-Guided Visual Reasoning for Element-Level Text-Image Alignment Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-image alignment evaluation rely on coarse-grained metrics or static Question Answering pipelines that lack fine-grounded interpretability and struggle to reflect human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement-guided visual reasoning framework for element-level text-to-image alignment evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on four benchmarks and surpasses the strong proprietary Gemini 3 Pro and Training-based baselines. |