LLMs typically linearize 2D tables into 1D sequences to fit their autoregressive architecture, which weakens row-column adjacency and other layout cues. In contrast, purely visual encoders can capture spatial cues, yet often struggle to preserve exact cell text. Our analysis reveals that these two modalities provide highly distinct information to LLMs and exhibit strong complementarity. However, direct concatenation and other fusion methods yield limited gains and frequently introduce cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose DiVA-Former, a lightweight architecture designed to effectively integrate vision and text information. DiVA-Former leverages visual tokens as dynamic queries to distill long textual sequences into digest vectors, thereby effectively exploiting complementary vision-text information. Evaluated across 13 table benchmarks, DiVA-Former improves upon the pure-text baseline by 23.9% and achieves consistent gains over existing baselines using visual inputs, textual inputs, or a combination of both. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Applied-Machine-Learning-Lab/EMNLP26_DiVA

Modern writing assistance applications are always equipped with a Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) model to correct errors in user-entered sentences. Different scenarios have varying requirements for correction behavior, e.g., performing more precise corrections (high precision) or providing more candidates for users (high recall). However, previous works adjust such trade-off only for sequence labeling approaches. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective counterpart – Align-and-Predict Decoding (APD) for the most popular sequence-to-sequence models to offer more flexibility for the precision-recall trade-off. During inference, APD aligns the already generated sequence with input and adjusts scores of the following tokens. Experiments in both English and Chinese GEC benchmarks show that our approach not only adapts a single model to precision-oriented and recall-oriented inference, but also maximizes its potential to achieve state-of-the-art results. Our code is available at https://github.com/AutoTemp/Align-and-Predict.

Hierarchical text classification is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy. Existing methods encode text and label hierarchy separately and mix their representations for classification, where the hierarchy remains unchanged for all input text. Instead of modeling them separately, in this work, we propose Hierarchy-guided Contrastive Learning (HGCLR) to directly embed the hierarchy into a text encoder. During training, HGCLR constructs positive samples for input text under the guidance of the label hierarchy. By pulling together the input text and its positive sample, the text encoder can learn to generate the hierarchy-aware text representation independently. Therefore, after training, the HGCLR enhanced text encoder can dispense with the redundant hierarchy. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of HGCLR.