Papers by An Yan
Removing Prompt-template Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has shown promise for enhancing pre-trained large language models to generate responses that align with human preferences and societal values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to estimate prompt-template bias term during reward modeling and use it to calibrate reward scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be flexibly combined with existing algorithms of removing length bias, leading to a further improvement in the aspect of enhancing the quality of generated responses. |
Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation: Benchmarking LLMs as Semantic Encoders (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled their use as semantic encoders for recommendation, but their roles and behaviors in this setting are still not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models as semantic encoders in recommendation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that ranking of 11 leading LLMs is low compared to MTEB, highlighting the unique challenges of semantic encoding in recommendation. |
L2C: Describing Visual Differences Needs Semantic Understanding of Individuals (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for captioning images without understanding individual's semantics are not effective . a new task, visual comparison, has drawn increasing attention in the field of language and vision . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-to-compare model which learns to understand semantic structures of two images and compares them while learning to describe each one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline and human evaluation on the Birds-to-Words dataset. |
DNA: Denoised Neighborhood Aggregation for Fine-grained Category Discovery (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn compact cluster representations from coarsely labeled data are noisy and degrade the quality of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encodes semantic structures of data into the embedding space . they retrieve k-nearest neighbors of a query as positive keys to capture similarities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can retrieve more accurate neighbors and outperform state-of-the-art models by a large margin. |
MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical datasets require high quality domain-specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides granular potential usage and supports a wide range of tasks. |
AgentOCR: Reimagining Agent History via Optical Self-Compression (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems trained with reinforcement learning over multi-turn interaction, but practical deployment is bottlenecked by rapidly growing textual histories that inflate token and memory costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that represents the accumulated observation-action history as a compact rendered image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves over 95% of text-based agent performance while significantly reducing token consumption (>50%), yielding consistent token and memory efficiency. |
ImaginE: An Imagination-Based Automatic Evaluation Metric for Natural Language Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for natural language generation rely on token-level or embedding-level comparisons with text references. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text-to-image generator to generate an image as the embodied imagination for the text snippet and compute the imagination similarity using contextual embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves existing evaluation metrics’ correlations with human similarity judgments in both reference-based and reference-free scenarios. |
Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Radiology report generation aims at generating descriptive text from radiology images automatically. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised contrastive loss method that generates descriptive text from radiology images automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous work on correctness and text generation metrics for two public benchmarks. |
Visualize Before You Write: Imagination-Guided Open-Ended Text Generation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for text-to-image synthesis can visualize machine imaginations for a given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses machine-generated images to guide language models in open-ended text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective on open-ended text generation tasks while showing minor degeneration. |
Generalized Category Discovery with Large Language Models in the Loop (2024.findings-acl)
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Wenbin An, Wenkai Shi, Feng Tian, Haonan Lin, QianYing Wang, Yaqiang Wu, Mingxiang Cai, Luyan Wang, Yan Chen, Haiping Zhu, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a crucial task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories from a set of unlabeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces Large Language Models into the training loop to generate category names without human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on three benchmark datasets and generates accurate category names for the discovered clusters. |
Multimodal Text Style Transfer for Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation (2021.eacl-main)
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Wanrong Zhu, Xin Wang, Tsu-Jui Fu, An Yan, Pradyumna Narayana, Kazoo Sone, Sugato Basu, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Outdoor vision-and-language navigation (VLN) tasks require visual grounding to generate correct actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal text style transfer learning approach to mitigate data scarcity in outdoor vision-and-language navigation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models on the outdoor vision-and-language navigation task, improving task completion rate by 8.7% relative to the baseline models. |
PANDA: Preference Adaptation for Enhancing Domain-Specific Abilities of LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated considerable capabilities across various tasks . however, they often fall short of the performance achieved by domain-specific state-of-the-art models . |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free method to augment domain-specific abilities of Large language models . they leverage insights from the response preference of expert models to augment LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the expert model on 4 ScienceWorld tasks. |