Papers by Bryan Wang
Text-to-Distribution Prediction with Quantile Tokens and Neighbor Context (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yilun Zhu, Yuan Zhuang, Nikhita Vedula, Dushyanta Dhyani, Shaoyuan Xu, Mohsen Bayati, Bryan Wang, Shervin Malmasi
| Challenge: | Existing methods for text regression lack local grounding and rely on shared representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a distributional regression model with quantile tokens that insert dedicated quantiles into the input sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on the inside Airbnb and StackSample datasets. |
GraphCache: Message Passing as Caching for Sentence-Level Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work only encodes entity types and textual context within individual instances, which limits the performance of sentence-level relation extraction (RE). |
| Approach: | They propose a module that aggregates the features from sentences to learn global representations of properties and augments local features within individual sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can learn global representations of properties from sentences and augment local features within individual sentences. |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Primacy Effect of ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing machine learning models may lead to poor performance in discriminative natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ChatGPT to query large amounts of human-written text to find the answer to a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has a high chance to select labels at earlier positions as the answer. |
Dangling-Aware Entity Alignment with Mixed High-Order Proximities (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Juncheng Liu, Zequn Sun, Bryan Hooi, Yiwei Wang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Xiaokui Xiao, Muhao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dangling-aware entity alignment are underexplored but important problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses high-order proximities to detect dangling entities and align matchable entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects dangling entities and aligns matchable entities better than existing methods. |
Should We Rely on Entity Mentions for Relation Extraction? Debiasing Relation Extraction with Counterfactual Analysis (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Wang, Muhao Chen, Wenxuan Zhou, Yujun Cai, Yuxuan Liang, Dayiheng Liu, Baosong Yang, Juncheng Liu, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on entity information for sentence-level relation extraction (RE) but this can leak superficial and spurious clues of relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entity mentions to extract relations from textual context . they use a causal graph to model dependencies between variables in RE models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields significant gains on both effectiveness and generalization for RE. |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning . they propose augmentation, evaluation frameworks to measure contextual forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |
Vulnerability of LLMs to Vertically Aligned Text Manipulations (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that vertical text input significantly degrades the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) in text classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of vertical text input on the performance of LLMs . they find that chain of thought reasoning does not help LLM recognize vertical input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly mislead models, posing a risk of bypassing detection in real-world scenarios involving harmful or sensitive information. |
WorldCuisines: A Massive-Scale Benchmark for Multilingual and Multicultural Visual Question Answering on Global Cuisines (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Genta Indra Winata, Frederikus Hudi, Patrick Amadeus Irawan, David Anugraha, Rifki Afina Putri, Wang Yutong, Adam Nohejl, Ubaidillah Ariq Prathama, Nedjma Ousidhoum, Afifa Amriani, Anar Rzayev, Anirban Das, Ashmari Pramodya, Aulia Adila, Bryan Wilie, Candy Olivia Mawalim, Cheng Ching Lam, Daud Abolade, Emmanuele Chersoni, Enrico Santus, Fariz Ikhwantri, Garry Kuwanto, Hanyang Zhao, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Holy Lovenia, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Jan Wira Gotama Putra, Junho Myung, Lucky Susanto, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Marina Zhukova, Michael Anugraha, Muhammad Farid Adilazuarda, Natasha Christabelle Santosa, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Raj Dabre, Rio Alexander Audino, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Stephanie Yulia Salim, Yi Zhou, Yinxuan Gui, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, En-Shiun Annie Lee, Shogo Okada, Ayu Purwarianti, Alham Fikri Aji, Taro Watanabe, Derry Tanti Wijaya, Alice Oh, Chong-Wah Ngo
| Challenge: | Vision Language Models struggle with cultural-specific knowledge, especially in languages other than English and in underrepresented cultural contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual question answering (VQA) dataset with text-image pairs across 30 languages and dialects and a training dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better with correct location context, but struggles with adversarial contexts and predicting specific regional cuisines and languages. |
Safety in Large Reasoning Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Wang, Yue Liu, Baolong Bi, Duzhen Zhang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Yingwei Ma, Yufei He, Shengju Yu, Xinfeng Li, Junfeng Fang, Jiaheng Zhang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have a high level of advanced reasoning capabilities, but they are vulnerable and vulnerable. |
| Approach: | This paper presents the first comprehensive survey of Large Reasoning Models . it explores the new safety risks, attacks, and defense strategies specific to LRMs based on reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed study examines the safety and security risks of large reasoning models. |
Data, Data Everywhere: A Guide for Pretraining Dataset Construction (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jupinder Parmar, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Joseph Jennings, Bo Liu, Aastha Jhunjhunwala, Zhilin Wang, Mostofa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | Recent language models have impressive capabilities on a number of evaluation areas. |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic analysis of pretraining set construction to identify which methods yield the greatest gains in model accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to refine and improve a pretraining set. |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Automating Steering for Safe Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have unlocked powerful cross-modal reasoning abilities, but also raised new safety concerns, especially when faced with adversarial multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular and adaptive inference-time intervention technology, AutoSteer, that integrates a safety awareness score, an adaptive safety prober, and a lightweight Refusal Head to modulate generation when safety risks are detected. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaVA-OV and Chameleon show that AutoSteer significantly reduces the Attack Success Rate (ASR) for textual, visual, and cross-modal threats while maintaining general abilities. |
Tricking Retrievers with Influential Tokens: An Efficient Black-Box Corpus Poisoning Attack (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for crafting adversarial passages are slow and computationally expensive, requiring either access to retriever’s gradients or large computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages two key characteristics of retrievers: insensitivity to token order and bias towards influential tokens to generate effective adversarial passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior efficiency and scalability compared to existing methods while maintaining comparable or better attack success rates across multiple datasets. |
How to Make Large Language Models Generate 100% Valid Molecules? (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can learn to perform a wide range of tasks, but generating valid molecules using representations like SMILES is challenging in few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a language framework that converts invalid SMILES to SELFIES and LLMs as post-hoc correctors to ensure that the molecules generated by LLM are 100% valid. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs worse with SELFIES than with SMILES and improves on other metrics. |
Con-ReCall: Detecting Pre-training Data in LLMs via Contrastive Decoding (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods analyze training data with member and non-member contexts, overlooking potential insights from both member and not-member. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages asymmetric distributional shifts induced by member and non-member contexts through contrastive decoding to enhance membership inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art on the WikiMIA benchmark and is robust against various text manipulation techniques. |
Beyond ’Aha!’: Toward Systematic Meta-Abilities Alignment in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) can incidentally elicit advanced reasoning behaviors such as self-correction, backtracking, and verification. |
| Approach: | They explicitly align large reasoning models with three meta-abilities: deduction, induction, and abduction, using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model aligns models with deduction, induction, and abduction meta-abilities using automatically generated, self-verifiable tasks. |
LongRecipe: Recipe for Efficient Long Context Generalization in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyuan Hu, Yuliang Liu, Jinman Zhao, Suyuchen Wang, WangYan WangYan, Wei Shen, Qing Gu, Anh Tuan Luu, See-Kiong Ng, Zhiwei Jiang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Large language models face significant challenges in handling long-context tasks because of their limited effective context window size during pretraining, which restricts their ability to generalize over extended sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a training strategy for extending the context window of LLMs including impactful token analysis, position index transformation, and training optimization strategies. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three types of LLMs show that LongRecipe can utilize long sequences while requiring only 30% of the target context window size. |
From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Long-context capabilities are essential for document and video understanding, in-contact learning, and inference-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient training recipe for building ultra-long context LLMs from aligned instruct model, pushing the boundaries of context lengths from 128K to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the context window while maintaining short context capabilities while maintaining the performance of the existing model. |
Making Every Step Effective: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical KV Equalization (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | HKVE selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers, ensuring that every optimization step positively contributes to the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers and selectively takes them into account when calculating the attack success rate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by achieving success rates of 75.08% on MiniGPT4, 85.84% on LLaVA and 81.00% on Qwen-VL. |
Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that retrieval-augmented LMs can improve text generation quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reproduces RETRO parameters while retrieving a text corpus . they find RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with less repetition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard retrieval-augmented GPT and retrieval augmented GTP on text generation and accuracy tasks. |
Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to debias word embeddings from human-generated corpora inherit strong gender bias . prior work has suggested removing gender component from pre-trained word embeds or compressing gender information into a few dimensions of the embeddable space . |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that purifies word embeddings against inferred gender subspaces . they propose to preserve distributional semantics of pre-trained word embeds while reducing gender bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique preserves distributional semantics of pre-trained word embeddings while reducing gender bias to a larger degree than prior approaches. |
KG-FLIP: Knowledge-guided Fashion-domain Language-Image Pre-training for E-commerce (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Various visionlanguage pre-training (VLP) models learn cross-modal alignment from large-scale well-aligned image-text datasets without leveraging external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-guided fashion-domain language-image pre-training framework that learns fine-grained representations in e-commerce domain and utilizes external knowledge to improve the pre-train efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on Amazon and Fashion-Gen datasets by large margins. |
FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyu Chen, Wenhu Chen, Charese Smiley, Sameena Shah, Iana Borova, Dylan Langdon, Reema Moussa, Matt Beane, Ting-Hao Huang, Bryan Routledge, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Popular, large, pre-trained models fall far short of expert humans in acquiring finance knowledge and in complex multi-step numerical reasoning on that knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset with Question-Answering pairs over financial reports written by financial experts to facilitate analytical progress. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the first of its kind and is available on github. |
Localizing Moments in Video with Temporal Language (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a novel model for localizing moments in a longer video using natural language queries is challenging . moment localization is similar to other language and vision tasks, but it offers an interesting opportunity to model temporal dependencies and reasoning in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that explicitly reasons about different temporal segments in a video . their dataset includes a dataset with real videos and template sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model explicitly reasons about different temporal segments in a video . it shows that temporal context is important for localizing phrases which include temporal language . |
DRS: Deep Question Reformulation With Structured Output (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models like GPT-3 and Instruct-GPT lack the ability to reformulate unanswerable questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot method that combines the strengths of LLMs with a DFS-based algorithm to iteratively explore potential entity combinations and constrain outputs using predefined entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all baselines, including the GPT-3.5 model, on the unanswerable question reformulation task. |
Q-Tuning: Queue-based Prompt Tuning for Lifelong Few-shot Language Learning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual prompt tuning are limited by the ever-growing parameter scale of modern language models (e.g., GPT-4 that may have 1.76 trillion parameters). |
| Approach: | They propose a method for continual prompt tuning that enables the lifelong learning of a pre-trained language model by adding a task-specific prompt to a queue of older tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods substantially on continual prompt tuning benchmarks. |
A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent works require a model to learn from trace examples of a task via supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that iteratively learns from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on easy tasks with more efficient reasoning and self-reflection. |
FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based or agent-based methods are prone to generating erroneous or hallucinated outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage knowledge graphs as external knowledge sources to improve the factuality of LLM responses by anchoring answers to verifiable reasoning steps retrieved from KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves factuality and interpretability across benchmarks and reduces computational costs. |
Rewarding the Rare: Uniqueness-Aware RL for Creative Problem Solving in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyuan Hu, Yucheng Wang, Yufei He, Jiaying Wu, Yilun Zhao, See-Kiong Ng, Cynthia Breazeal, Anh Tuan Luu, Hae Won Park, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is a paradigm for post-training large language models, but it suffers from exploration collapse . a new study finds that RL fails to reward correct solutions that exhibit rare high-level strategies . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards correct solutions that exhibit rare high-level strategies by clustering rollouts according to their high- level solution strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves pass@k across large sampling budgets and increases area under the pass@K curve (AUC@K) without sacrificing pass@1. |