Papers by Ang Chen
Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Despite the advances in large language models, they still face difficulties with multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought to improve model accuracy by 5% over standard supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy by 5% over standard fine-tuning with a few codes modified. |
DialoGPS: Dialogue Path Sampling in Continuous Semantic Space for Data Augmentation in Multi-Turn Conversations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments open-domain dialogue generation from a many-to-many perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can augment open-domain dialogue generation tasks with automatic and human evaluation. |
SQUiD: Synthesizing Relational Databases from Unstructured Text (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Relational databases are central to modern data management, but most data exists in unstructured forms like text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes the task into four stages, each with specialized techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across diverse datasets. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compensates an attention trough with an attention peak by a process to enhance the model's awareness to various contextual positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a 7B model on the largest tool-use benchmark, comparable to that of GPT-4. |
Learning Flexible Large Multimodal Models with Arbitrary Modality Combinations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have potential for cross-modal understanding . but extending MLLM to handle diverse modalities introduces two challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage compression mechanism to reduce the number of modality tokens per modality and condense it into a single, compact token sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Flex-M3 outperforms its counterpart trained on only full-modality data. |
An Analysis and Mitigation of the Reversal Curse (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research observes a phenomenon in large language models called the "reversal curse" when dealing with two entities, LLMs excel in handling sequences in the form of "aRb" but when asked "who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" the LLM exhibits considerable confusion and fails to provide a as the answer . |
| Approach: | They conduct the first-ever study of how the reversal curse happens in large language models . they find that LLMs excel in handling sequences in the form of "aRb" but struggle to provide a satisfactory answer when asked "who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that the reversal curse can stem from specific training objectives . the study also shows that a reverse query can be difficult to understand . |
HoPE: A Novel Positional Encoding Without Long-Term Decay for Enhanced Context Awareness and Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing positional encodings exhibit long-term decay, based on an entrenched and long-standing opinion that tokens farther away from the current position carry less relevant information. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-frequency rotary position encoding (HoPE) that replaces specific components in RoPE with position-independent ones, retaining only high- frequency signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits greater robustness to the out-of-distribution behavior in attention patterns during extrapolation. |
Embracing Imperfection: Simulating Students with Diverse Cognitive Levels Using LLM-based Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in education, enabling researchers to simulate students' learning patterns and learning patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for student simulation that takes into account student cognitive diversity and realism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism. |
Bag of Tricks for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts: A Benchmark Across Reasoning, Efficiency, and Safety (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated aspects of MoE, with conflicting conclusions . a lack of consensus on optimal design choices is limiting to specific aspects of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate two popular MoE backbones across four dimensions of design choices . they find token-level routing and z-loss regularization improve reasoning performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates two popular MoE backbones on over eight metrics. |
More is not always better? Enhancing Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Differentiated and Reweighting Objectives (2025.acl-long)
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Xiaoqing Zhang, Ang Lv, Yuhan Liu, Flood Sung, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Shuo Shang, Xiuying Chen, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at few-shot in-context learning but performance plateaus as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel optimization method that optimizes the negative log-likelihood objective and reweights the model to achieve many-shot performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance improvements across a large-scale dataset. |
Batch-ICL: Effective, Efficient, and Order-Agnostic In-Context Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a meta-optimization process that affects performance . we develop a batch-based inference algorithm that is order-agnostic to ICL examples . |
| Approach: | They develop an order-agnostic inference algorithm that aggregates ICL examples in batches . they find it outperforms most permutations of ICL, and it even exceeds the best order . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard ICL examples while reducing computational resources. |