Papers by Bei Chen
Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Qiyuan Zhu, Jiacheng Wang, Bei Liu, Hao Gu, Ruijie Shen, Xiaofeng Hou, Sirui Han, Jiacheng Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research to improve CoT efficiency falls into three categories, each with distinct limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that addresses both dimensions of CoT reasoning by applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework achieves 11.3 efficiency gain without compromising accuracy. |
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines. |
Reducing cohort bias in natural language understanding systems with targeted self-training scheme (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | In deep learning models, it is hard to capture all the variations of the language that different users can use. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses four active learning strategies to identify important samples coming from new users and a self training phase where a teacher model is trained from the first phase to expand the training data with relevant cohort utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the bias related to new customers in a digital voice assistant system by using two phases: a fixing phase and a self training phase. |
Enhancing LLM Knowledge Learning through Generalization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Continued pre-training on paraphrased data has shown empirical promise for enhancing knowledge acquisition, but this approach is costly and unreliable as it relies on external models or manual effort for rewriting. |
| Approach: | They propose formatting-based data augmentation which diversifies documents conveying the same knowledge by altering document formats rather than their content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve generalization to diverse paraphrased contexts and enhance pre-training and instruction tuning. |
Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have made impressive progress in few-shot learning but still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme to improve reasoning ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves GSM8K reasoning rate by 17.9% to 58.1%. |
“What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, text-to-SQL parsers allow users to query databases by using natural language questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent interactive approach that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance with limited interaction turns by using simulation and human evaluation on two cross-domain datasets with five state-of-the-art parsers. |
Reasoning Like Program Executors (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Pi, Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Morteza Ziyadi, Zeqi Lin, Qiang Fu, Yan Gao, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing language models are inadequate in reasoning, according to studies . a new reasoning pre-training paradigm is based on pretraining language models with programs . |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning pre-training paradigm that empowers language models to harvest reasoning knowledge possessed by program executors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning pre-training paradigm can boost models' reasoning skills . it can be instantiated by different kinds of program executors and run on a single database . |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Unsupervised training data re-weighting for natural language understanding with local distribution approximation (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | a distribution mismatch between offline training and live data can cause biases . cyclic seasonality shifts, and changing pool of users can contribute to this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to mitigate offline training data sampling bias . they propose a local distribution approximation in the pre-trained embedding space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates the offline training data sampling bias in multiple NLU tasks without additional annotation. |
LEMON: Language-Based Environment Manipulation via Execution-Guided Pre-training (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to language-based environment manipulation are difficult to generalize across environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for language-based environment manipulation tasks that can deal with various environments using the same generative language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art results on four of the tasks and the execution-guided pre-training strategy brings remarkable improvements on all experimental tasks. |
ProBench: Judging Multimodal Foundation Models on Open-ended Multi-domain Expert Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Solving expert-level multimodal tasks requires strong user query understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and advanced reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark of open-ended user queries encapsulating professional expertise and advanced reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is publicly accessible at TBC. |
AdapterShare: Task Correlation Modeling with Adapter Differentiation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | AdapterShare is an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.90 points improvement on five dialogue understanding tasks and 2.33 points gain on NLU tasks. |
One Pair Suffices: Unlocking Universal Zero-Shot Translation via Cross-Architecture Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current paradigms for empowering Large Language Models with multilingual capabilities rely heavily on massive instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid cross-alignment approach that fuses a frozen NLLB encoder with a Qwen decoder via a closed-loop dual-adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms towerPlus-9B and Aya-101 on language-agnostic projection protocols. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
When Language Model Meets Private Library (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models have been pre-trained on large-scale code corpora and generate decent code snippets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can provide pre-trained language models with the ability to generate code using private libraries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate code using private libraries using off-the-shelf language models or pre-trained models on code corpus containing API information. |
Multi-task Learning for Paraphrase Generation With Keyword and Part-of-Speech Reconstruction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | PGKPR is a deep learning approach to generate paraphrases using key semantics of the source sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with keyword and part-of-speech reconstruction for paraphrase generation using deep learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms comparative models on two commonly-used datasets. |
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yanjun Zhao, Tianxin Wei, Jiaru Zou, Xuying Ning, Yuanchen Bei, Lingjie Chen, Simmi Rana, Wendy H. Yang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
Learning Algebraic Recombination for Compositional Generalization (2021.findings-acl)
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Chenyao Liu, Shengnan An, Zeqi Lin, Qian Liu, Bei Chen, Jian-Guang Lou, Lijie Wen, Nanning Zheng, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Neural sequence models exhibit limited compositional generalization ability in semantic parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural model to learn algebraic recombination for compositional generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two realistic and comprehensive compositional generalization benchmarks. |
Large Language Models Meet NL2Code: A Survey (2023.acl-long)
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Daoguang Zan, Bei Chen, Fengji Zhang, Dianjie Lu, Bingchao Wu, Bei Guan, Wang Yongji, Jian-Guang Lou
| Challenge: | generating code from a natural language description is a pressing and significant challenge in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to survey 27 existing large language models for NL2Code and compare them to humanEval benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with existing models on the HumanEval benchmark. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
You Impress Me: Dialogue Generation via Mutual Persona Perception (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing chit-chat systems tend to generate uninformative responses and lack coherent personality traits due to the diversity of speakers. |
| Approach: | They propose a transmitter-receiver framework which explicitly models understanding between interlocutors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a large public dataset, Persona-Chat, with a significant boost over the state-of-the-art frameworks. |
Skill-Based Few-Shot Selection for In-Context Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods based on pre-trained embeddings can be easily biased by surface features that are not important for the target task. |
| Approach: | They propose a skill-based few-shot selection method for in-context learning . it generates skill-specific descriptions for each test case and candidate example . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in five cross-domain semantic parsing datasets and six backbone models. |
Towards Self-Improving Error Diagnosis in Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing diagnostic approaches rely on expensive expert annotations and ”LLM-as-a-judge” paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for semantic failure attribution that identifies responsible agents and the originating error step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in step-level localization and validation. |
A Split-and-Recombine Approach for Follow-up Query Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Context-dependent semantic parsing has proved to be an important but challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform follow-up query analysis to restate context-dependent queries with contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by nearly 8% on the FollowUp dataset . the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset is also promising . |
Incomplete Utterance Rewriting as Semantic Segmentation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on the task of incomplete utterance rewriting as a machine translation task. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic segmentation task which incorporates edit operations into the problem and predicts a word-level edit matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing baselines on several datasets and is four times faster than the standard approach in inference. |
Leveraging Adjective-Noun Phrasing Knowledge for Comparison Relation Prediction in Text-to-SQL (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text-to-SQL do not explicitly introduce common knowledge to address comparison relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage adjective-noun phrasing knowledge mined from the web to predict comparison relations in text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the original and re-split Spider datasets on comparison relation prediction. |
Scaling Laws Across Model Architectures: A Comparative Analysis of Dense and MoE Models in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a study of large language models (LLMs) reveals the transferability and discrepancies of scaling laws between Dense and MoE models. |
| Approach: | They investigate the transferability and discrepancies of scaling laws between Dense Models and Mixture of Experts models. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the power-law scaling framework also applies to MoE Models . |
How Do In-Context Examples Affect Compositional Generalization? (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning paradigms that focus on large corpus are limiting compositional generalization performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a test suite to investigate in-context compositional generalization . they propose to use examples that are structurally similar to the test case . |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suite investigates in-context compositional generalization performance . it finds that the performance can be affected by the selection of in-const examples . |
RepoCoder: Repository-Level Code Completion Through Iterative Retrieval and Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Fengji Zhang, Bei Chen, Yue Zhang, Jacky Keung, Jin Liu, Daoguang Zan, Yi Mao, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | RepoCoder is a repository-level code completion framework that utilizes the useful information scattered in files. |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level code completion framework called RepoCoder . it integrates a similarity-based retriever and a pre-trained code language model . they propose 'repoBench' benchmark to validate the framework's effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the vanilla retrieval-augmented code completion approach in the real-world. |
Towards More Accurate Uncertainty Estimation In Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianfeng He, Xuchao Zhang, Shuo Lei, Zhiqian Chen, Fanglan Chen, Abdulaziz Alhamadani, Bei Xiao, ChangTien Lu
| Challenge: | Existing models of uncertainty score depend on winning score, which is the maximum probability in a semantic vector. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate accurate uncertainty score by improving the confidence of winning scores by reducing the effect of overconfidence of winning score and considering the impact of different categories simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the effect of overconfidence of winning score and considers impact of different categories of uncertainty simultaneously. |
Rethinking and Improving Multi-task Learning for End-to-end Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | auxiliary tasks are highly consistent with end-to-end speech translation (ST) but their effectiveness has not been thoroughly studied. |
| Approach: | They propose an improved multi-task learning approach for the ST task that bridges the modal gap by mitigating the difference in length and representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the MuST-C dataset with 20.8% of training time required by the current SOTA method. |
Aria-UI: Visual Grounding for GUI Instructions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Using a multimodal model, GUI agents can ground from language instructions to target elements . relying on HTML or AXTree inputs is a challenge for GUI agents . |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model specifically designed for GUI grounding that adopts a pure vision approach instead of auxiliary inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vision-only and AXTree-reliant models on offline and online agents. |
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Yuchun Fan, Bei Li, Peiguang Li, Yilin Wang, Yongyu Mu, Jian Yang, Xin Chen, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |
Efficient Performance Tracking: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Construction of Scientific Leaderboards (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing leaderboards are incomplete and some contain incorrect information. |
| Approach: | They propose a manually-curated Scientific Leaderboard dataset that overcomes these problems . they propose three experimental settings where TDM triples are fully defined, partially defined, or undefined . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system overcomes the shortcomings of existing leaderboard datasets . it can be used to evaluate and compare scientific methods, but it requires manual labor . |