Papers by Aobo Kong
RealTalk-CN: A Realistic Chinese Speech Task-Oriented Dialogue Benchmark with Cross-Modal Analysis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in speech large language models have enabled end-to-end spoken interactions, but their robustness in real-world applications remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn, multi-domain speech–text TOD dataset for Chinese users . it contains 5.4k dialogues with annotations for dialogue states, disfluency types, speaker characteristics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate speech large language models in real-world scenarios . the proposed model is based on 5.4k real human-to-human dialogues with annotations . |
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaming Zhou, Shiyao Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiabei He, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Cheng Liu, Aobo Kong, Yujie Guo, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Ke Wang, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Aobo Kong, Fei Huang, Jianbin Jiao, Junge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit policy optimization model that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
PromptRank: Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction Using Prompt (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods struggle with document and candidate length discrepancies or fail to fully utilize the pre-trained language model without further fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction approach that uses a pre-trained language model to rank candidates based on document embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing keyphrase extraction approach on six benchmarks. |
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Wentao Ma, Shiwan Zhao, Yongbin Li, Yuchuan Wu, Ke Wang, Xiaoqian Liu, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting (2024.naacl-long)
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Aobo Kong, Shiwan Zhao, Hao Chen, Qicheng Li, Yong Qin, Ruiqi Sun, Xin Zhou, Enzhi Wang, Xiaohang Dong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in natural language processing, driven by large language models such as GPT-3, PaLM, and Llama. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for role-play prompting and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard zero-shot prompting approach across 12 reasoning benchmarks. |