Document-level relation extraction (DocRE)aims to determine which relations hold between a given entity pair within a document.As a multi-label classification task, the most commonly adopted paradigm introduces a learnable threshold to distinguish positive and negative classes for an entity pair.Under this paradigm, existing losses decouple the optimization into independent positive and negative losses, which interact solely with a shared threshold.This leads to two inherent limitations: (i) threshold instability caused by conflicting gradient updates from the decoupled losses; and (ii) optimization bias exacerbated by the severe imbalance between limited positive samples and abundant negative samples inherent in DocRE, which makes the model more likely to predict that no relation exists.To address these issues, we propose the Adaptive-Threshold Global Loss (ATGL).Unlike prior work, ATGL integrates positive, negative, and threshold optimization into a unified logit space and explicitly enforces ranking constraints on their contributions to the objective.Furthermore, ATGL incorporates an imbalance-aware optimization mechanism, thereby effectively addressing the severe class imbalance in DocRE.Our ATGL serves as a general optimization objective that can be readily applied to different DocRE models.Experiments on four datasets show that ATGL outperforms other DocRE losses and achieves state-of-the-art results, while consistently improving the performance of existing DocRE models.

Cross-document Relation Extraction (CodRE) requires reasoning over scattered evidence to identify relations between target entities across multiple documents. Existing methods indiscriminately fuse target entities and the intermediate bridge entities that link them into a unified representation. This leads to intermediate evidence that often aligns with only one side of the entity pair, resulting in one-sided relation transfer contextual bias and incomplete reasoning chains. Moreover, these methods typically employ a global threshold to determine relation existence for all entity pairs, limiting the model’s reasoning performance.To address these issues, we propose DEBAR (Dual-stream Entity Bias Reduction), a framework designed to explicitly decouple and preserve bidirectional bridge evidence, combined with a novel dynamic loss optimization objective. Specifically, DEBAR employs a bridge-aware input construction strategy and a dual-stream graph reasoning network to separately encode head and tail contexts, preventing semantic interference while capturing global dependencies through iterative message passing. Furthermore, we introduce a curriculum-aware ranking optimization objective that progressively tightens classification constraints to stabilize training and enforce discriminative decision boundaries. Experiments on the CodRE benchmarks show that DEBAR achieves state-of-the-art performance while effectively mitigating cross-document contextual bias. Moreover, extensive experiments on our proposed loss across backbones confirm its generalization, suggesting it as a reliable replacement for existing CodRE losses. Code is available at https://github.com/newyuyou/DEBAR.

The goal of document-level relation extraction (DocRE) is to identify relations between entities from multiple sentences. As a multi-label classification task, a common approach is to determine whether there are relations for an entity pair by selecting a multi-label classification threshold, with scores of relations above the threshold predicted as positive and the rest as negative. However, we find that predicting multiple relations for entity pairs causes the decrease of predicted scores in positive classes. This could lead to many positive classes being incorrectly predicted as negative. Additionally, our analysis suggests that fitting the distribution of predicted relations to the prior distribution of relations can help improve prediction performance. However, previous studies have not explored or leveraged the prior distribution of relations. To address these issues and findings, we for the first time propose the idea of incorporating the relational prior distribution into the loss calculation in DocRE tasks. We innovatively propose an Adaptive Relational Prior Distribution Loss (ARPDL), which can adaptively adjust relation prediction scores based on the relational prior distribution. Our designed relational prior distribution component can also be integrated as an adapter into other threshold-based losses to improve prediction performance. Experimental results demonstrate that ARPDL consistently improves the performance of existing DocRE models, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Furthermore, integrating our relational prior distribution adapter into other losses significantly enhances their performance in DocRE tasks, validating the effectiveness and generality of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/xhm-code/ARPDL.

Fu Zhang, Xinlong Jin, Jingwei Cheng, Hongsen Yu, Huangming Xu. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.