Papers by Aiwei Liu
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). |
CHEF: A Pilot Chinese Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact-Checking (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | CHEF dataset provides evidence retrieval over non-English claims . e-fact-checking is a time-consuming task, which can take journalists several hours or days. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset of 10K real-world claims that is based on annotated evidence retrieved from the Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides evidence retrieval as a latent variable and can be used to train and reason over non-English claims. |
TABGEN-ICL: Residual-Aware In-Context Example Selection for Tabular Data Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular data generation require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a new in-context learning framework to prompt a fixed LLM with in-constitut examples to enhance the in-text learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms random selection strategies on five real-world tabular datasets and reduces error rate by 42.2% on fidelity metric. |
GDA: Generative Data Augmentation Techniques for Relation Extraction Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting. |
Character-level White-Box Adversarial Attacks against Transformers via Attachable Subwords Substitution (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to attack transformer models are not effective at character level, but they are a natural attack scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-level adversarial attack method against transformer models . they use a gradient-based method to find the most vulnerable words in a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on sentence-level and token-level tasks. |
WaterSeeker: Pioneering Efficient Detection of Watermarked Segments in Large Documents (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only brief segments within longer documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect watermarked segments in large documents using an anomaly extraction method and a local traversal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. |
Entity-to-Text based Data Augmentation for various Named Entity Recognition Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing augmentation techniques manipulate words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit generative models that ignore preserving entities in the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Entity-to-Text based data augmentation technique called EnTDA to add, delete, replace or swap entities in the original text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique generates semantically coherent and entity preserving texts on thirteen NER tasks and two settings. |
Many-Shot Scaling of In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning methods that use self-generated annotations do not scale to many-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework analogous to semi-supervised learning that uses self-generated annotations instead of ground truth labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ground truth ICL under zero-shot, few-shot and many-shot settings. |
An Entropy-based Text Watermarking Detection Method (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking algorithms for large language models (LLMs) are effective in identifying machine-generated texts, but they are not effective in low-entropy scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-based text watermarking detection method that takes into account the influence of token entropy to better reflect the degree of watermark detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is training-free and fully automated. |
Exploring Response Uncertainty in MLLMs: An Empirical Evaluation under Misleading Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunkai Dang, Mengxi Gao, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Yanggan Gu, Jungang Li, Jingyu Wang, Peijie Jiang, Aiwei Liu, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused mainly on visual–textual misalignment, leaving largely unexplored the MLLMs’ ability to preserve an original correct answer when confronted with misleading information. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage evaluation pipeline to quantify the response uncertainty phenomenon by eliciting each model’s original response on unperturbed inputs and injecting explicit (false-answer hints) and implicit (contextual contradictions) misleading instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overturns a correct answer in 65% of cases after receiving a single deceptive cue. |
d-TreeRPO: Towards More Reliable Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods suffer from reliability bottlenecks due to reward sparsity and intractable computations . d-TreeRPO provides fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable reinforcement learning framework for diffusion large language models that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and achieves significant improvements across reasoning benchmarks. |
Direct Large Language Model Alignment Through Self-Rewarding Contrastive Prompt Distillation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate preference data without human annotations are difficult . et al., 2022b) is effective for aligning large language models with human expectations . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the response preference using output probabilities under contrastive prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could surpass the RLHF method without human-annotated preference data. |
On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing DocRE models which perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. |
Can LLM Watermarks Robustly Prevent Unauthorized Knowledge Distillation? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking is radioactive and enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of watermark removal attacks that allow student models to perform untraceable knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks eliminate inherited watermarks while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead. |
Beyond Transcription: Unified Audio Schema for Perception-Aware AudioLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Yuhan Song, Aiwei Liu, Chuhan Wu, Sijun Zhang, Wei Jia, Yuan Liu, Houfeng Wang, Zhou Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent Audio Large Language Models (AudioLLMs) excel at reasoning tasks, but struggle at elementary auditory perception. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes audio information into three explicit components in a unified JSON format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts fine-grained perception by 10.9% on MMSU over state-of-the-art models while preserving robust reasoning capabilities. |
Entropy-Based Decoding for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Despite their success, retrieval-augmented LLMs still face the distractibility issue, where the generated responses are negatively influenced by noise from both external and intrinsic knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a entropy-based document-parallel ensemble decoding method that prioritizes low-entropies from retrieved documents and incorporates a contrastive decoding mechanism that contrasts the obtained low- and high-entropic ensemble distributions with the high-end internal knowledge across layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on open-domain question answering datasets and shows that it is highly efficient. |
RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify semantic relations between entities are time-consuming and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) they propose RAPL, which judiciously leverages relation descriptions and real NOTA instances as guidance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 2.61% F1 . it generates task-specific NOTA prototypes and refines relation prototypes . |
MarkLLM: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM Watermarking (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Leyi Pan, Aiwei Liu, Zhiwei He, Zitian Gao, Xuandong Zhao, Yijian Lu, Binglin Zhou, Shuliang Liu, Xuming Hu, Lijie Wen, Irwin King, Philip Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) embed imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in outputs to identify LLM-generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an open-source toolkit for LLM watermarking that embeds imperceptible yet algorithmically detectable signals in model outputs to identify LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | MarkLLM provides a unified framework for implementing LLM watermarking algorithms, while providing user-friendly interfaces to ensure ease of access. |
A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuliang Liu, Hongyi Liu, Aiwei Liu, Duan Bingchen, Zheng Qi, Yibo Yan, He Geng, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detection of misinformation generated by large language models fail to mitigate societal risks . authors propose a paradigm shift from passive detection to anticipatory mitigation strategies . existing defenses remain reactionary in an era demanding proactive defense, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a three-pillar approach to prevent misinformation by fortifying integrity of training data and inference reliability by embedding self-corrective mechanisms during reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing methods in misinformation prevention by 63% . it demonstrates that existing methods exhibit false negative rates against misinformation . |
AMR-based Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used dependency trees to extract relation between aspects and contexts, but there is a potential mismatch between the dependency tree and sentiment classification as a semantic task. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace the syntactic dependency tree with a semantic structure to capture the relation between an aspect and a context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves ABSA on four public datasets with 1.13% improvement over baselines. |
Refiner: Restructure Retrieved Content Efficiently to Advance Question-Answering Capabilities (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited by their parametric knowledge, leading to hallucinations in knowledge-extensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end extract-and-restructure paradigm that leverages a single decoder-only LLM to adaptively extract query-relevant contents verbatim along with the necessary context. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that a trained Refiner outperforms state-of-the-art RAG and compressing approaches in multiple tasks. |
ChatCite: LLM Agent with Human Workflow Guidance for Comparative Literature Summary (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Literature review is an indispensable step in the research process, but literature summary is challenging and time consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent with human workflow guidance for comparative literature summary . they use a human workflow to extract key elements from relevant literature and generate summaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the CoT model in several dimensions. |
Can Watermarks Survive Translation? On the Cross-lingual Consistency of Text Watermark for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking technologies lack consistency when texts are translated into different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual watermark removal attack to bypass watermarking by first obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can remove watermarks without performance loss by obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual natural language inference lack annotated parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer for XNLI that uses a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings. |
SADA: Bridging In-Context Learning and Fine-Tuning via State-Aligned Distillation Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based in-context learning and parameter fine-tuning are dominant paradigms for incorporating external information into large language models, but they incur high inference costs or require expensive retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert prompts into temporary adapter weights to bridge this gap by converting prompts to temporary adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on long-context language modeling and downstream NLU and summarization benchmarks while significantly reducing memory footprint and latency. |
Exploring the Compositional Generalization in Context Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle on the text-to-SQL benchmarks, but we propose a method to improve their generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve the combinatorial generalization of Text-to-SQL models by aligning previous SQL statements with the input utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization ability of Text-to-SQL models. |