Papers with scalable framework
Constrained Policy Optimization for Controlled Self-Learning in Conversational AI Systems (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent self-learning methods based on user satisfaction metrics and contextual bandits have shown promising results to enable consistent improvements in conversational AI systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-gradient learning approach that adjusts constraint violation penalty terms adaptively through a user-defined meta objective that encourages balanced constraint satisfaction across domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports fine-grained exploration targets for individual domains via user-defined constraints. |
MADS: Multi-Agent Dialogue Simulation for Diverse Persuasion Data Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLM-based agents exhibit superior moral and emotional language performance compared to humans, raising expectations for their deployment in persuasive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating persuasive multi-turn dialogues via agent self-play using user agents designed to simulate diverse persona-driven behaviors, a Dialog Agent executing task-oriented persuasion strategies and an Optimization Agent evaluating and refining dialogue outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improved the persuasion capacity of small LLMs, increasing the organic traffic conversion rate by 22.4% (from 1.83% to 2.24%) . |
When Speed Meets Intelligence: Scalable Conversational NER in an Ever-evolving World (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at understanding conversational semantics, but lack of data makes them impractical for production deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating multilingual conversational NER datasets with minimal human validation and a framework that leverages LLMs as semantic filters combined with catalog-based entity grounding to label live traffic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on public and private conversations by 97.12% on CoNLL-2003 and 83.09% on OntoNotes 5.0. |
BigTokDetect: A Clinically-Informed Vision–Language Modeling Framework for Detecting Pro-Bigorexia Videos on TikTok (2026.eacl-long)
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Minh Duc Chu, Kshitij Pawar, Zihao He, Roxanna Sharifi, Ross M. Sonnenblick, Magdalayna Curry, Laura DAdamo, Lindsay Young, Stuart Murray, Kristina Lerman
| Challenge: | Social media platforms face escalating challenges in detecting harmful content that promotes muscle dysmorphic behaviors and cognitions (bigorexia). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for detecting pro-bigorexia content on TikTok using an expert-annotated multimodal benchmark dataset of over 2,200 Tiktok videos labeled by clinical psychiatrists. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on fine-grained subcategories while commercial models achieve the highest accuracy on primary categories. |
Towards General-Domain Word Sense Disambiguation: Distilling Large Language Model into Compact Disambiguator (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Word Sense Disambiguation rely heavily on manually annotated data, which limits coverage and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models as knowledge distillers to build silver-standard WSD corpora by combining generation-based distillation and annotation-based disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on general-domain benchmarks by 50% on the most challenging test set and by 1000 times fewer parameters. |
Frame-Semantic Knowledge Injection for Event-Level Inference in LLMs (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are fluent but often brittle when interpretation depends on external information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that injects frame-semantic knowledge into Large Language Models via LoRA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize beyond surface cues in large language models. |
Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
A Parallelized Framework for Simulating Large-Scale LLM Agents with Realistic Environments and Interactions (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large language models lacks a realistic environment and parallelized framework to support complex interactions between agents and environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates realistic societal environments and parallelized interactions to support simulations of large-scale agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can support simulations of 30,000 agents faster than the wall-clock time with 24 NVIDIA A800 GPUs and the performance increases linearly with the increase of LLM computational resources. |
LLM as a Meta-Judge: Synthetic Data for NLP Evaluation Metric Validation (2026.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for natural language generation are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes LLMs to generate synthetic evaluation datasets . they propose meta-correlation to measure alignment between metric rankings and human benchmarks based on synthetic data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves meta-correlations exceeding 0.9 in multilingual QA and replaces human judgment with synthetic evaluation datasets. |
CrossVQA: Scalably Generating Benchmarks for Systematically Testing VQA Generalization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual question answering models leverage spurious biases and take shortcuts to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automatic framework for generating disentangled shifts by introducing a controllable visual question-answer generation module that generates highly-relevant question-announcer pairs with the desired dataset style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates highly-relevant and diverse question-answer pairs with the desired dataset style. |
High-Quality Medical Dialogue Synthesis for Improving EMR Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating EMRs from doctor-patient dialogues produce rigid and repetitive dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Intent Graph Planning, Dual-Agent Simulation and Rule-Reward Quality Control to generate realistic doctor-patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances realism, diversity and downstream EMR quality, reducing physician editing efforts. |
In-Context Learning Boosts Speech Recognition via Human-like Adaptation to Speakers and Language Varieties (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to adapt to unfamiliar speakers and language varieties . however, there are significant gaps in the adaptation of certain varieties based on the test speaker, variety, or recording conditions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for in-context learning in Phi-4 Multimodal . they find that as few as 12 example utterances reduce word error rates by 19.7% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces word error rates by 19.7% across diverse English corpora. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
Self-Steering Optimization: Autonomous Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Xiang, Bowen Yu, Hongyu Lin, Keming Lu, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Le Sun, Jingren Zhou, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Prior research focused on developing data generation methods, while insufficient attention has been paid to quality control mechanisms and often produces inaccurate and unhelpful data. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that automatically generates high-quality preference data, eliminating manual annotation requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines in human preference alignment and reward optimization. |
Teaching Language Models To Gather Information Proactively (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are often defaulted to passive responses or narrow clarifications when faced with incomplete or under-specified prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task paradigm where LLMs must identify gaps in context and strategically elicit implicit user knowledge through targeted questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms o3-mini on evaluation metrics and human annotators favor clarification questions and final outlines. |
Benchmarking and Improving LLM Robustness for Personalized Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on whether a model’s responses align with a user’s preferences, but factuality is an important yet overlooked dimension. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework for evaluating robustness of large language models in personalization and a new dataset, PERGData. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves robustness by 25% across models. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
Divide, Optimize, Merge: Scalable Fine-Grained Generative Optimization for LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiale Liu, Yifan Zeng, Shaokun Zhang, Chi Zhang, Malte Højmark-Bertelsen, Marie Normann Gadeberg, Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu
| Challenge: | LLM-based generative optimization has shown remarkable potential in improving agentic systems, but the current approach of prompting with the trajectories on the whole training dataset becomes untenable as datasets grow. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework that divides large optimization tasks into manageable subsets and performs targeted optimizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional approach by 1.6-8.6% while reducing average prompt token consumption by 56.3%. |
Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zixuan Zhang, Haoyang Wen, Zheng Li, Rongzhi Zhang, Pei Chen, Fengran Mo, Zheyuan Liu, Qingkai Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods require training a separate adapter for each user, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-time updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework that maps a user's profile directly to a full set of adapter parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based personalization and OPPU while using substantially fewer computational resources at deployment. |
Gradient-Guided Multi-Judge Prompt Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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ChenZhuo Zhao, Xinda Wang, Pu Zhao, Yue Huang, Junting Lu, Ziqian Liu, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prompt optimization trade off signal quality against computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a first-order gradient approximation to score segment importance in a continuous masking direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves efficiency and robustness by using a first-order gradient approximation to score segment importance in a continuous masking direction. |
RPC-Bench: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Research Paper Comprehension (2026.acl-long)
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Yelin Chen, Fanjin Zhang, Suping Sun, Yunhe Pang, Yuanchun Wang, Jian Song, XiaoYan Li, Lei Hou, Shu Zhao, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for understanding research papers offer limited fine-grained evaluation at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering benchmark built from review–rebuttal exchanges of high-quality computer science papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on human-verified QA pairs and contains 15K questions. |
Schoenfeld’s Anatomy of Mathematical Reasoning by Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models expose reasoning traces, yet their underlying cognitive structure and steps remain difficult to identify and analyze beyond surface-level statistics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly abstracts reasoning traces into functional reasoning steps such as Analysis, Explore, Implement, Verify, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals reproducible thinking dynamics and structural differences between reasoning and non-reasoning models, which are not apparent from token-level views. |
FLUID QA: A Multilingual Benchmark for Figurative Language Usage in Dialogue across English, Chinese, and Korean (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Figurative language is a core component of everyday communication . existing benchmarks focus on sentence-level classification or inference tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that evaluates figurative usage in dialogue . they use a sentence-level diagnostic task to embed figurativ choices into multi-turn contexts . |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates large language models' ability to use figurative expressions coherently in conversation. |