Papers by Bo Xue

15 papers
Syntax-guided Localized Self-attention by Constituency Syntactic Distance (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have shown that Transformers is implicitly learning syntactic information from data, albeit is highly dependent on the quality and scale of the training data.
Approach: They propose a syntax-guided localized self-attention model that allows directly incorporating grammar structures from an external constituency parser.
Outcome: The proposed model improves translation performance on a variety of datasets, from small to large datasets and with different source languages.
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid .
Approach: They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol.
DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in video-text retrieval models have limited training data annotations.
Approach: They propose a Video-Text Retrieval Paradigm with Relevance-based Augmentation which enhances video and text data using large foundation models to learn more generalized features.
Outcome: The proposed method improves video-text retrieval performance over existing methods.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Approach: They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base.
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies show that RLVR training is slow and results plateau as policy entropy collapses . low-probability regularization (Lp-Reg) reduces the number of low-quality exploratory tokens induced by RL training .
Approach: They propose a method to reduce RLVR over-penalization by eliminating low-probability exploratory tokens . they propose 'Low-provability Regularization' to reduce the gradual elimination of low-quality exploratory entropy tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method eliminates low-probability exploratory tokens and prevents suppression of potentially valuable low-property candidates.
SparkRA: A Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Service System Based on Spark Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks.
Approach: They propose a scientific literature LLM and a knowledge service system based on it . they collect scientific literature and then pre-train it using autoregressive training .
Outcome: The proposed system provides literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing functions.
Exploring and Verbalizing Academic Ideas by Concept Co-occurrence (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a new framework for academic idea inspiration is being developed for academic research assistants . number of academic publications is increasing exponentially, making it difficult for an independent researcher to understand these papers thoroughly.
Approach: They propose a framework based on concept co-occurrence for academic idea inspiration . they construct evolving concept graphs according to the co-existence relationship of concepts from 20 disciplines or topics .
Outcome: The proposed system can be used to explore connections between academic concepts and verbalize the new ideas.
RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have been proved vulnerable to adversarial texts.
Approach: They propose to fuse Chinese phonetic and glyph features into pre-trained models by using a more comprehensive adversarial graph.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in significant ways on a wide range of tasks while remaining accurate on benign texts.
RTCFake: Speech Deepfake Detection in Real-Time Communication (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing detection studies focus on offline simulations and struggle to cope with complex distortions introduced during RTC transmission.
Approach: They propose a large-scale speech deepfake dataset tailored for RTC scenarios . the dataset is constructed by transmitting speech through multiple social media and conferencing platforms .
Outcome: The proposed dataset is constructed by transmitting speech through multiple mainstream social media and conferencing platforms, enabling precise pairing between offline and online speech.
Quantifying Compositionality of Classic and State-of-the-Art Embeddings (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Static word embeddings make strong claims about compositionality, but the SOTA generative models go too far in the other direction.
Approach: a new study evaluates the compositionality of word embeddings by canonical correlation analysis . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages across data modalities .
Outcome: a new evaluation of compositional models shows that they exploit access meanings when justified . strong compositional signals are observed in later training stages and in deeper layers of the transformer-based model before a decline at the top layer.
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (D19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems.
Approach: They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries .
Outcome: The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains.
How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection? (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring AI safety . large language models (LLMs) are becoming more prevalent due to their scale, pre-training objectives, and paradigms used for inference.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to investigate out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in machine learning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms other OOD detectors in zero-grad and fine-tuning scenarios.
Dynamic Evil Score-Guided Decoding: An Efficient Decoding Framework For Red-Team Model (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing red-teaming methods require expensive fine-tuning, especially for large LLMs.
Approach: They propose a red-teaming method that uses an ‘evil score’ to evaluate the potential of tokens to contribute to harmful outputs during decoding.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an ASR of 92.83% on the Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct model, compared to 83.48% with adversarial fine-tuning while using less computational resources.
Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a small number of gallery data points are frequently retrieved, resulting in a decline in retrieval performance.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages both gallery and query data to address hubness . they propose dual inverted softmax and dual dynamic inverted hardmax methods to normalize similarity .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the occurrence of hubs during inference while improving similarity between non-hubs and queries.
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Parallel thinking is a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models . however, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging .
Approach: They propose a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations