Papers with model retraining
Thesis Proposal: Efficient KV Cache Reuse for Multi-Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.eacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face efficiency bottlenecks in prefill due to attention mechanism, and traditional KV cache only accelerates decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-document KV cache reuse framework for multi-doc RAG workloads . they propose to resolve position and context misalignment while eliminating document-specific quadratic complexity in prefill. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework solves position and context misalignment issues while eliminating document-specific quadratic complexity in prefill. |
SCAIR: Schema-Conditioned Agentic Iterative Reasoning for Enterprise Knowledge Graphs (2026.acl-industry)
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Prateek Chaturvedi, Yuqicheng Zhu, Hongkuan Zhou, Dongzhuoran Zhou, Yunjie He, Steffen Staab, Fei Du, Jie Tang, Evgeny Kharlamov
| Challenge: | Existing agentic approaches for Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation fail to generalize to real-world enterprise Knowledge graphs (KGs) dense, schema-driven, and operationally constrained, requiring a training-free framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that integrates structured planning with controlled iterative reasoning by injecting schema-conditioned structural priors and enforcing schemas during multi-hop reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves on a real-world enterprise-oriented benchmark constructed from a Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB). |
Self-Regulated Sample Diversity in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Mingyue Liu, Jonathan Frawley, Sarah Wyer, Hubert P. H. Shum, Sara Uckelman, Sue Black, Chris Willcocks
| Challenge: | Existing methods that require expensive setups or maintain static values during inference are inflexible and require expensive training. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-regulating approach that adjusts sample diversity parameters dynamically based on the input prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the quality of responses generically without model retraining or fine-tuning. |
TopicGPT: A Prompt-based Topic Modeling Framework (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | TopicGPT uses large language models to uncover latent topics in text . topic models represent topics as bags of words that require "reading the tea leaves" topic models also offer limited control over formatting and specificity of topics . |
| Approach: | TopicGPT uses large language models to uncover latent topics in text . authors propose a prompt-based framework that produces topics that align better with human categorizations . |
| Outcome: | TopicGPT produces topics that align better with human categorizations compared to competing methods. |
RelayAttention for Efficient Large Language Model Serving with Long System Prompts (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a long system prompt causes throughput/latency bottlenecks as the cost of generating the next token increases w.r.t the sequence length. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention algorithm that reads hidden state from DRAM exactly once for a batch of input tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces the need for redundant memory accesses in existing algorithms. |
How Credible Is an Answer From Retrieval-Augmented LLMs? Investigation and Evaluation With Multi-Hop QA (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented large language models (RaLLMs) are reshaping knowledge acquisition, offering long-form, knowledge-grounded answers through advanced reasoning and generation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking system to evaluate RaLLMs' correctness and Groundedness to determine their reliability in multi-hop question-answering tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based evaluation pipeline for multi-hop question-answering tasks reveals that the model generates inaccuracies when dealing with flawed or partial knowledge. |
RecGPT: A Foundation Model for Sequential Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches fail in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios where new users or items lack sufficient interaction history. |
| Approach: | They propose a foundation model for sequential recommendation that achieves genuine zero-shot generalization capabilities by deriving item representations exclusively from textual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves zero-shot generalization capabilities in cold-start and cross-domain scenarios. |
Mitigating Shortcut Learning via Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve shortcut learning performance are limited by manual definition of shortcuts and inherent confirmation bias during model training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of Smart Data Augmentation based on Large Language Models to identify shortcuts and generate their anti-shortcut counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an improvement of 5.61% across various natural language processing tasks. |
FairSteer: Inference Time Debiasing for LLMs with Dynamic Activation Steering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to sensitivity to prompt changes . fine-tuning-based techniques incur substantial computational overhead and catastrophic forgetting . |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that encodes fairness-related features into separable directions in the hidden activation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs inference-time debiasing without requiring retraining or prompt design . it detects bias signatures in activations and then computes debiased steering vectors . the proposed framework is available to download in the u.s. |
HeteroSpec: Leveraging Contextual Heterogeneity for Efficient Speculative Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive decoding limits the inference throughput of Large Language Models due to its sequential dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates verification effort in proportion to candidate uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | Speculative decoding achieves an average speedup over state-of-the-art methods . a small subset of high-confidence predictions accounts for most successful verifications . |
Finding the Sweet Spot: Preference Data Construction for Scaling Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate unintended outputs due to their unsupervised nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct preference pairs of selected and rejected LLMs by repeated random sampling to improve alignment performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance as the sample size increases. |
Towards Teachable Reasoning Systems: Using a Dynamic Memory of User Feedback for Continual System Improvement (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using simulated feedback, our system (called TeachMe) continually improves with time, and without model retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment a QA model with a dynamic memory of user feedback, containing user-supplied corrections toerroneous model beliefs that users identify during interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves with time and without model retraining, and with real users, by 15% on a hidden test set after teaching. |
Where Am I From? Identifying Origin of LLM-generated Content (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative models have produced high-quality content, but they pose security risks . a new framework for deep learning systems enables the tracing of AI-generated content back to its source . |
| Approach: | They propose a digital forensics framework that embeds a secret watermark into the generated output and a "depth watermark" this watermark strengthens the link between content and generator, enabling accurate tracing while maintaining the quality of the generated content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures accurate tracing while maintaining quality of generated content. |
Peering into the Mind of Language Models: An Approach for Attribution in Contextual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for question answering . lack of explicit references or attributions hinders ability to verify accuracy of answers . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for attribution in contextual question answering . they use hidden state representations of large language models to identify copied segments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than GPT-4 at identifying verbatim copied segments in LLM generations and attributing these segments to their source. |
BeliefBank: Adding Memory to a Pre-Trained Language Model for a Systematic Notion of Belief (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models can produce inconsistent answers when probed, even after specialized training. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed a pretrained language model in a broader system that includes an evolving, symbolic memory of beliefs that records but may modify the raw PTLM answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves belief consistency in the overall system by revising beliefs that clash with others and generating queries using known beliefs as context. |
Evaluating and Characterizing Human Rationales (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines how human rationales perform on automatic metrics . human-generated rationale evaluation is difficult because of its ambiguity . |
| Approach: | They propose to use model-dependent baseline performance to evaluate rationale quality . they propose to also use "fidelity curves" to reveal properties such as irrelevance and redundancy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods characterize rationale quality based on model retraining and using "fidelity curves" the proposed methods lead to actionable suggestions for evaluating and characterizing rationales . |
FAME: Towards Factual Multi-Task Model Editing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models embed extensive knowledge and perform exceptionally well across tasks. outdated knowledge or factual errors within LLMs can lead to misleading or incorrect responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to enhance the practicality of model editing to correct inaccurate information within LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs excellently across tasks and scenarios, confirming its practicality. |
FAEDKV: Infinite-Window Fourier Transform for Unbiased KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current compression strategies, including token eviction and learned projections, often lead to biased representations and may require costly model retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free KV cache compression framework that equalizes the contribution of all tokens to the compressed representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures unbiased information retention in the KV cache. |
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining. |
Disentangled Information Bottleneck for Adversarial Text Defense (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have proven that these deep models are super vulnerable to adversarial examples, which are slightly modified inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel text defense method that separates the robust and non-robust features with a disentangled two-line framework rather than the one-line compression network in IB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms six baselines on four datasets with accuracy improvements ranging from 3.8% to 20.7%. |
VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuliang Liu, Zheng Qi, Jesse Jiaxi Xu, Yibo Yan, Junyan Zhang, He Geng, Aiwei Liu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Yik-Cheung Tam, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks into outputs . they combine localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, contextual attention patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows lower PPL and higher BLEU than conventional methods with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC). |