Papers with task
How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior (2026.acl-long)
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Zidi Xiong, Yuping Lin, Wenya Xie, Pengfei He, Zirui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Zhen Xiang
| Challenge: | In practice, memory designs vary widely across agents due to their diverse objectives and functionalities. |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on how memory management choices impact the LLM agents’ behavior, especially their long-term performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that LLM agents display an experience-following property, which results in highly similar agent outputs. |
Crosscoding Through Time: Tracking Emergence & Consolidation Of Linguistic Representations Throughout LLM Pretraining (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models learn non-trivial abstractions during pretraining, but it is not well understood when and how these specific linguistic abilities emerge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to track the evolution of linguistic features during pretraining by using sparse crosscoders to discover and align features across model checkpoints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can detect features emergence, maintenance, and discontinuation during training stages. |
Teaching Small Language Models to Reason (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Chain of thought prompting improves reasoning capabilities of large language models but only emerges in models with tens of billions of parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a student model on chain of thought outputs generated by a larger teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves task performance across arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning datasets. |
Context-Aware Language Modeling for Goal-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Goal-oriented dialogue systems face a trade-off between fluent language generation and task-specific control. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to fine-tune language models in a goal-aware way . they evaluate a flight-booking method with a context-assisted language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method on a flight-booking task by 7% in terms of task success. |
Posterior Calibrated Training on Sentence Classification Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for posterior calibration have been used to correct poorly calibrated posterior probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a posterior calibration procedure that optimizes posterior probability distributions while minimizing calibration errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure reduces calibration error and improves performance on both objectives. |
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Multilingual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: Performance, Consistency, and Faithfulness Across Languages (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in multilingual settings, but the behavior of thinking traces, i.e., the intermediate steps that lead to the final answer, remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure language compliance, answer accuracy, and answer consistency when LRMs are explicitly instructed or prompt-hacked to think in a target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in English and other high-resource languages while relying on traces to varying degrees. |
On Utilizing Constituent Language Resources to Improve Downstream Tasks in Hinglish (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Intuitively, Hindi and English corpora should aid improve task performance on code-switched Hindi-English. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning framework that utilizes the labelled resources of the downstream tasks in the constituent languages to improve task performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance on downstream tasks on code-switched Hindi-English. |
OSC: Cognitive Orchestration through Dynamic Knowledge Alignment in Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has advanced agent selection and result aggregation, efficient linguistic interactions for deep collaboration among expert agents remain a critical bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware adaptive collaboration framework to enhance cognitive synergy in multi-agent systems with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves synergy between agents and language models by enabling agents to dynamically perceive their collaborators’ cognitive states. |
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)
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Lvxue Li, Jiaqi Chen, Xinyu Lu, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets. |
Neural Mask Generator: Learning to Generate Adaptive Word Maskings for Language Model Adaptation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train language models on diverse text corpora have brought up performance improvements on several natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically generate domain- and task-adaptive maskings of a given text for self-supervised pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms rule-based masking strategies on question answering and text classification datasets on which it outperformed rule-driven masking techniques. |
Increasing Probability Mass on Answer Choices Does Not Always Improve Accuracy (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (LMs) are used to discriminate on multiple-choice tasks that place probability mass on vocabulary tokens that aren’t among the given answer choices. |
| Approach: | They propose a mathematical formalism for SFC which allows us to quantify and bound its impact for the first time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the impact of SFC in the majority of instances. |
Voting or Consensus? Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Debate (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Increasing the number of agents improves performance, while more discussion rounds before voting reduces it. |
| Approach: | They propose two new methods to improve multi-agent debates by increasing agent diversity and reducing discussion rounds before voting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve task performance by up to 3.3% with AAD and up to 7.4% with CI. |
MMBoundary: Advancing MLLM Knowledge Boundary Awareness through Reasoning Step Confidence Calibration (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods calibrate model confidence on entire response, which leads to incorrect answers with high confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that advances the knowledge boundary awareness of multimodal large language models through reasoning step confidence calibration. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods across domains and metrics. |
AutoGraph-R1: End-to-End Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.acl-long)
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Hong Ting Tsang, Jiaxin Bai, Haoyu Huang, Qiao Xiao, Tianshi Zheng, Baixuan Xu, Shujie Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Currently, knowledge graphs are decoupled from their downstream application, resulting in suboptimal graph structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to directly optimize KG construction for task performance using Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance across multiple QA benchmarks and consistently achieves significant performance gains over task-agnostic baseline graphs. |
Beneficial Reasoning Behaviors in Agentic Search and Effective Training Methods to Obtain Them (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic search requires large language models to perform multi-step searches to solve complex information needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training approach that equips agentic search models with reasoning behaviors before reinforcement learning (RL) they compare successful and failed trajectories and propose supervised fine-tuning and standard RL . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms direct RL by 37.2% on three web benchmarks and 6.2% on seven multi-hop QA benchmarks. |
SEE: Strategic Exploration and Exploitation for Cohesive In-Context Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing approaches separate the optimization of prompt instructions and in-context learning examples, leading to incohesive, suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines both prompt instructions and in-context learning examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods on 35 benchmark tasks. |
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Xiang Gao, Yuguang Yao, Qi Zhang, Kaiwen Dong, Avinash Baidya, Ruocheng Guo, Hilaf Hasson, Kamalika Das
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic approach to adapt large language models to task-specific tools . they propose reusable rules that are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning. |
Personalized Language Models via Privacy-Preserving Evolutionary Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for personalization in language models lack explicit mechanisms for privacy preservation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Privacy-Preserving Model Merging via Evolutionary Algorithms to optimize utility while minimizing privacy risks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on the LaMP benchmark and achieves 45% improvement in task performance. |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
Generalizing Trust: Weak-to-Strong Trustworthiness in Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted weak-to-strong generalization, where a strong model trained only on a weak model’s labels surpasses the weak model in task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose two fundamental fine-tuning strategies that leverage trustworthiness regularization during the fine-uning of the weak model and the weak-to-strong transfer to improve trustworthy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that they can generalize robustness, fairness, and privacy better when trained on weak models than models trained on strong models. |