Papers by Bo Shen
OOP: Object-Oriented Programming Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | None Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as a key tool for automated programming. |
| Approach: | They compare performance of None Large language models with language understanding models on functional programming and object-oriented programming benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The models perform relatively well on functional programming (FP) and object-oriented programming (OOP) benchmarks, while exhibiting poor performance on OOP benchmarks. |
Zero-shot Sharpness-Aware Quantization for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot quantization methods are based on overfitting problem in adversarial learning process, leading to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot sharpness-aware quantization framework for the quantization of various PLMs by optimizing a minimax problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve significant performance gains on discriminative and generative PLMs. |
Revisiting Knowledge Distillation for Autoregressive Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models (LMs) are expensive and memory intensive, preventing the development of industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive teaching approach to improve the KD of autoregressive language models by distilling knowledge into a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve consistent and significant performance gains across all model types and sizes. |
Too Good to be Bad: On the Failure of LLMs to Role-Play Villains (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihao Yi, Qingxuan Jiang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Qu Yang, Mengru Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ying Shen, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly tasked with creative generation, but their ability to portray non-prosocial, antagonistic personas remains largely unexamined. |
| Approach: | They propose a moral alignment benchmark to test the safety of large language models . they find that models struggle with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to accurately portray morally ambiguous or villainous characters . the model fails most with traits directly antithetical to safety principles . |
Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with novelty and Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Reward Model (RM) and a principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge to enhance creative output over baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly enhances creative output over baselines, but the principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge yields superior generation quality. |
Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-integrated reasoning approach that localizes the first irrecoverable step and leverages it for fine-grained credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong Agentic RL benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency. |
Probing the Plasticity and Correlation of LLM Value Systems: LLM Value Rankings are Not Stable (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have similar value rankings but little is known about how susceptible they are to external influence and how different values are correlated with each other. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 6 different value transformation prompting methods to examine the plasticity of LLM value systems by comparing them with 8 LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are effective on 8 LLMs and 3 families. |
Eliminating Sentiment Bias for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification with Unsupervised Opinion Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based anti-bias aspect representation learning framework that eliminates the sentiment bias in the aspect embedding by adversarial learning against aspects’ prior sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, with the capability of unsupervised opinion extraction. |
SAE-SSV: Supervised Steering in Sparse Representation Spaces for Reliable Control of Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but controlling their behavior remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised steering approach that operates in sparse, interpretable representation spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves higher success rates with minimal degradation in generation quality compared to existing methods. |
Improving Sharpness-Aware Minimization with Fisher Mask for Better Generalization on Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pretrained language models suffer from poor generalization . however, they add a perturbation to each model parameter equally, which is sub-optimal . |
| Approach: | They propose a sharpness-aware minimization optimization procedure that introduces a Fisher mask to improve the efficiency of SAM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla sharpness-aware minimization method on GLUE and SuperGLUE benchmarks. |
CodeV: Issue Resolving with Visual Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Linhao Zhang, Daoguang Zan, Quanshun Yang, Zhirong Huang, Dong Chen, Bo Shen, Tianyu Liu, Yongshun Gong, Huang Pengjie, Xudong Lu, Guangtai Liang, Lizhen Cui, Qianxiang Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded to more complex repository-level tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a first approach to leveraging visual data to enhance the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) they demonstrate the effectiveness of CodeV and provide valuable insights into leveraging visualization to resolve GitHub issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the issue-resolving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by using visual data. |
Whether LLMs Know If They Know: Identifying Knowledge Boundaries via Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active retrieval (AR) rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify knowledge boundaries in active retrieval by retrieving historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training. |
Denoising Concept Vectors with Sparse Autoencoders for Improved Language Model Steering (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for steering concept vectors suffer from noisy features in diverse datasets that undermine steering robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse Autoencoder-Denoised Concept Vector (SDCV) which selectively keeps the most discriminative SAE latents while reconstructing hidden representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves steering success rates by 4-16% across six challenging concepts while maintaining topic relevance. |
CodeM: Less Data Yields More Versatility via Ability Matrix (2024.findings-acl)
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Daoguang Zan, Ailun Yu, Wei Liu, Bo Shen, Shaoxin Lin, Yongshun Gong, Yafen Yao, Yan Liu, Bei Guan, Weihua Luo, Yongji Wang, Qianxiang Wang, Lizhen Cui
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to train code large language models have been booming recently . however, this will incur significant costs in constructing data and training model considering the countless downstream scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a data construction strategy which decouples code LLMs’ abilities into two dimensions and constructs a lightweight training corpus that only covers a subset of target scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can train a multilingual multitasking model using less data and training data. |