Papers with iterative process
InstructCoder: Instruction Tuning Large Language Models for Code Editing (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | InstructCoder is the first instruction-tuning dataset designed to adapt LLMs for general-purpose code editing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to edit code based on user instructions . they use a dataset to adapt LLMs to general-purpose code editing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly improve code editing performance compared to proprietary models . the proposed model is based on a human-written execution-based benchmark . |
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rui Zheng, Hongyi Guo, Zhihan Liu, Xiaoying Zhang, Yuanshun Yao, Xiaojun Xu, Zhaoran Wang, Zhiheng Xi, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yang Liu, Hang Li
| Challenge: | Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent. |
Concept Over Time Analysis: Unveiling Temporal Patterns for Qualitative Data Analysis (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Concept Over Time Analysis is a machine-learning-based feature that allows users to define, refine, and visualize concepts of interest within an interactive interface. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the Discourse Analysis Tool Suite with Concept Over Time Analysis extension that allows users to define, refine, and visualize their concepts of interest within an interactive interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to define, refine, and visualize their concepts of interest within an interactive interface. |
How Many Layers and Why? An Analysis of the Model Depth in Transformers (2021.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | In deep transformers, weights are tied across layers, resulting in multiple layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant of Albert that adapts the number of layers for each token of the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model implements the key specificity of Albert and iterates on token representations over time. |
Co-DETECT: Collaborative Discovery of Edge Cases in Text Classification (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Chenfei Xiong, Jingwei Ni, Yu Fan, Vilém Zouhar, Donya Rooein, Lorena Calvo-Bartolomé, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Zhijing Jin, Mrinmaya Sachan, Markus Leippold, Dirk Hovy, Mennatallah El-Assady, Elliott Ash
| Challenge: | Social scientists often need to develop codebooks that can be reliable but require significant human effort. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-initiative annotation framework that integrates human expertise with automatic annotation guided by large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates human expertise with automatic annotation guided by large language models. |
Self-Harmonized Chain of Thought (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought prompting have limitations . arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks are challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that unifies diverse solution paths into a consistent reasoning pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 2.8% on reasoning tasks. |
Towards Linear Time Neural Machine Translation with Capsule Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an endto-end learning approach to machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule network with dynamic routing for linear time Neural Machine Translation . they map the source sentence into a matrix with pre-determined size and apply a deep LSTM network to decode the target sequence from the source representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network achieves comparable results with the Transformer system on English-German and English-French tasks. |
Higher-Order Coreference Resolution with Coarse-to-Fine Inference (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to coreference resolution uses a span-ranking architecture as an attention mechanism to iteratively refine span representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully-differentiable approximation to higher-order inference for coreference resolution . they propose introducing a coarse-to-fine approach that incorporates a less accurate but more efficient bilinear factor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves accuracy on the English OntoNotes benchmark while being far more computationally efficient. |
Reassessing Active Learning Adoption in Contemporary NLP: A Community Survey (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a longstanding strategy to reduce annotation costs is active learning . data annotation is expected to remain important and active learning to stay relevant . |
| Approach: | They conduct an online survey to assess the perceived relevance of data annotation and active learning . they propose a strategy to reduce annotation costs using active learning, an iterative process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategies reduce setup complexity and uncertainty cost while maintaining model performance. |
Learning Unsupervised Multilingual Word Embeddings with Incremental Multilingual Hubs (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has found that a shared bilingual word embedding space can be induced by projecting monolingual word embeds from two languages without any bilingual supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning unsupervised multilingual word embeddings that mitigates instability issues for distant language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two downstream tasks outperforming even supervised baselines. |
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Yaoke Wang, Yun Zhu, XintongBao XintongBao, Wenqiao Zhang, Suyang Dai, Kehan Chen, Wenqiang Li, Gang Huang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve large language models' ability to understand and reason are limited by external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-free reflection mechanism that requires only a single inference pass without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on an industrial e-commerce benchmark and public datasets. |
Annealing Knowledge Distillation (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a powerful model compression technique for deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to feed the rich information provided by teacher’s soft-targets incrementally and more efficiently by annealing the teacher output incrementally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on image classification and NLP language inference tasks with BERT-based models on the GLUE benchmark. |
Weakly-supervised Text Classification Based on Keyword Graph (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification ignore keyword correlation, thus ignoring it . existing methods treat keywords independently, thus not exploiting correlation between them . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explore keyword-keyword correlation on keyword graph by GNN . they use a self-supervised task to pretrain annotators and fine-tune them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on long- and short-text datasets. |
PullNet: Open Domain Question Answering with Iterative Retrieval on Knowledge Bases and Text (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimentally PullNet improves over the prior state-of-the-art open domain question answering systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for learning what to retrieve and reasoning with heterogeneous information to find the best answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over the prior state-of-the-art in open domain question answering . it is weakly supervised, requiring question-answer pairs but not gold inference paths . |
Understanding Iterative Revision from Human-Written Text (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | This work describes IteraTeR: the first large-scale, multi-domain, edit-intention annotated corpus of iteratively revised text. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate iteratively revised text using a multi-domain annotated corpus that generalizes to a variety of domains, edit intentions, revision depths, and granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves automatic evaluations by integrating edit intentions with writing quality. |
Zero-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities of Large Language Models Iteratively without Gold Labels (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated remarkable performance through supervised fine-tuning or in-context learning using gold labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm termed zero-to-strong generalization that prompts LLMs to annotate unlabeled data and retain high-quality labels by filtering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pre-trained language models on extensive classification and reasoning tasks on multiple model sizes. |
Using Lexical Alignment and Referring Ability to Address Data Sparsity in Situated Dialog Reference Resolution (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on exophoric reference resolution for situated dialogs is limited to a literary model . et al., 2010) showed that it is possible to improve dialogic reference resolving by incrementally adapting word semantic model parameters to idiosyncratic language use by dyad partners. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a logistic regression model to adapt a model to idiosyncratic language . they first train a log regression model and then use it to learn the general referring ability of each word . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve dialogic reference resolution without annotation of referring expressions even with little background data. |
Cognitive Graph for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension at Scale (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering is needed to cross the chasm of reading comprehension between machine and human. |
| Approach: | They propose a CogQA framework for multi-hop reading comprehension question answering in web-scale documents that builds a cognitive graph in an iterative process by coordinating an implicit extraction module and an explicit reasoning module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best competitor in the hotpotQA dataset in F1 . it provides explainable reasoning paths and accurate answers, while giving accurate answers . |
GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating stories with complex plots rely on detailed prompts, which inadvertently limit the creative potential of the generated stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce to enhance stories’ complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables generating more diverse plotlines from human-written stories. |
Grammatical Error Correction as GAN-like Sequence Labeling (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional GEC models learn from sentences with fixed error rates . sequence labeling approaches suffer from a couple of key problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a GAN-like sequence labeling model with a grammatical error detector and a generator to correct grammamatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the state-of-the-art in GEC and improves on benchmarks. |
EvoPrompt: Evolving Prompts for Enhanced Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition with Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a low-resource task that requires supervised learning, but practical scenarios lack annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose an Evolving Prompts framework that guides the model to better address these issues through continuous prompt refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows consistent performance improvements on four benchmarks. |
A Self-Training Method for Machine Reading Comprehension with Soft Evidence Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension lack evidence labels for training models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three MRC tasks on seven datasets. |
Unsupervised Alignment-based Iterative Evidence Retrieval for Multi-hop Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is a critical stage of question answering (QA) . Several multi-hop QA datasets have been proposed recently . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that uses only GloVe embeddings to soft-align questions with justification sentences and an iterative process that reformulates queries focusing on terms that are not covered by existing justifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all previous methods on the evidence selection task on two datasets: MultiRC and QASC. |
Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompting to perform iterative refinement . they propose to combine the two methods to produce a more favorable outcome . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process . the results show that the prompt chaining method produces a more favorable outcome . |
Creating a Dataset for Named Entity Recognition in the Archaeology Domain (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, there is no way to find 'by-catch', single finds of a different type, in the metadata of excavation reports. |
| Approach: | They propose to train NER classifiers on Dutch excavation reports to help archaeologists find structured information in archaic documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 31k annotations between six entity types (artefact, time period, place, context, species & material). |
Classification-Based Self-Learning for Weakly Supervised Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Effective projection-based cross-lingual word embedding induction relies on the iterative self-learning procedure. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification-based approach to self-learning that allows for integration of diverse features into the iterative process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves bilingual lexicon induction on a weakly supervised setup with 28 language pairs. |
P3: Prompts Promote Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt optimization have shown effectiveness of using multiple components to optimize models . however, such unilateral approaches often yield suboptimal results due to interdependent nature of these components. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that optimizes both system and user prompts . they use offline optimized prompts to promote online prompt optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on general and reasoning tasks. |
PerCQA: Persian Community Question Answering Dataset (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Community Question Answering (CQA) forums provide answers to many real-life questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to make Persian dataset PerCQA public to encourage more research in Persian CQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 989 questions and 21,915 annotated answers from the most well-known Persian forum. |
A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict accuracy curves and improve accuracy over multiple rounds. |
Extracting the Essence and Discarding the Dross: Enhancing Code Generation with Contrastive Execution Feedback (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | erroneous code generation methods amalgamate feedback and correct code as target sentences . a new approach to code generation with feedback is needed to improve model performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based code generation model with execution feedback that integrates feedback and correct code as target sentences. |
| Outcome: | a new model with execution feedback shows improvements in generating accurate code and understanding error correction. |
SummIt: Iterative Text Summarization via ChatGPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text summarization systems generate summaries in a single step, but are often inadequate due to the issue of hallucination and the lack of accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative text summarization framework based on large language models like ChatGPT that refines the generated summary iterativly through self-evaluation and feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework refines the generated summary iteratively through self-evaluation and feedback, closely resembling the iteration humans undertake when drafting and revising summaries. |
InfiniPot: Infinite Context Processing on Memory-Constrained LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | InfiniPot is a KV cache control framework that can handle long input contexts without additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose a KV cache control framework that can handle long input contexts efficiently without additional training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained for long contexts in various NLP tasks and is highly efficient and versatile. |
Transfer-Aware Data Selection for Domain Adaptation in Text Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve domain adaptation do not guarantee improved adaptability, but may negatively impact model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can effectively improve model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual “Gradients” (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, then complex tool-using annotations like DFS. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that synthesizes user queries and generates valid tool-use chains . they propose a dataset with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that tools trained on ToolGrad outperform expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs. |
Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle with highly specialized situations that require extensive domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates additional information from an LLM-based generator to enhance query performance and train the retriever to better discriminate the relevant documents identified by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by a large margin and leads to substantial improvements in retrieval quality across a wide range of application scenarios. |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiang Hu, Hongyu Fu, Jinge Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhikun Li, Renjun Xu, Yu Lu, Yaochu Jin, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate research ideas rely on retrieval or prompt engineering to generate ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses iterative planning and search to boost creative potential of LLMs by integrating external knowledge with broader and deeper insights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in generating 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuchi Wang, Yishuo Cai, Shuhuai Ren, Sihan Yang, Linli Yao, Yuanxin Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Xu Sun
| Challenge: | Existing recaptioning methods suffer from inaccuracies due to missing fine-grained details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines captions through visual reconstruction using a text-to-image model and a visual reconstruction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on CapsBench and CompreCap by 10%. |
War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances LLM reasoning without finetuning by using test-time scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models in both budget and model size. |
Defending Jailbreak Prompts via In-Context Adversarial Game (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, but concerns regarding their security persist. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial game that leverages agent learning to extend knowledge to defend against jailbreaks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game shows that LLMs safeguarded by ICAG exhibit significantly reduced jailbreak success rates across various attack scenarios. |
Seeing Beyond Words: MatVQA for Challenging Visual-Scientific Reasoning in Materials Science (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) outperform existing benchmarks in both natural language and coding domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable benchmark that integrates vision and language modalities to address this gap by eliminating textual shortcuts. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in both natural language and coding domains. |
D2CS - Documents Graph Clustering using LLM supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Document clustering does not inherently ensure thematic consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs a similarity graph over document embeddings and applies iterative graph-based clustering algorithms to partition the corpus into initial clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a similarity graph over document embeddings and applies iterative graph-based clustering algorithms to partition the corpus into initial clusters. |
Toward the Automatic Detection of Word Meaning Negotiation Indicators in Conversation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Word Meaning Negotiations (WMN) are sequences in conversation where speakers collectively discuss and shape word meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose to detect WMN indicators in conversations where a speaker signals the need to clarify or challenge word meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models have better precision than previous regular expression based approaches and show some generalization abilities, but have moderate recall. |
SpiralThinker: Latent Reasoning through an Iterative Process with Text–Latent Interleaving (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing latent reasoning methods lack mechanisms to ensure stable reasoning dynamics in latent space and a systematic way to interleave implicit and explicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs iterative updates over latent representations while enabling interleaved reasoning across latent and textual steps. |
| Outcome: | SpiralThinker achieves state-of-the-art among latent reasoning baselines. |
Identifying the Achilles’ Heel: An Iterative Method for Uncovering Factual Errors in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenxuan Wang, Yuk-Kit Chan, Zixuan Ling, Shi Juluan, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Yifei Zhang, Wenxiang Jiao, Zhaopeng Tu, Michael R. Lyu
| Challenge: | Current methods for evaluating LLMs’ veracity are limited by the need for extensive human labor, test data contamination, or limited scope, hindering efficient and effective exposure of errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts fact triplets to generate diverse question types using rule-based natural language processing techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can trigger factual errors in up to 55% of questions in large LLMs while maintaining coverage of questions. |