Papers by Can Huang
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Yujing Wang, Jian Miao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fei Xu, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models only produce pedantic responses, which lacks emotion and attraction compared with the responses with polite style, positive and negative sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates and content templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on evaluation metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Why Vision Language Models Struggle with Visual Arithmetic? Towards Enhanced Chart and Geometry Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Vision Language Models struggle with visual arithmetic, seemingly simple tasks like object counting or length comparison, which are essential for relevant complex tasks like chart understanding and geometric reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel post-training strategy inspired by Piaget’s theory of cognitive development that trains VLMs to recognize invariant properties under visual transformations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning methods while requiring 60% less training data. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
RecInDial: A Unified Framework for Conversational Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods to recommend items are shallowly integrated into the model training and have poor chit-chat ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates recommendation into the dialog generation by introducing a vocabulary pointer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a benchmark dataset. |
Adversarial Yet Cooperative: Multi-Perspective Reasoning in Retrieved-Augmented Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large reasoning models with retrieval-augmented generation to improve reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Bolun Yao, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baseline methods on two datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus compared with baseline methods. |
Neural Response Generation with Meta-words (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that meta-words can be used to generate open domain dialogues . human-machine conversation is a fundamental problem in NLP . |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-tracking memory network that formalizes meta-word expression as a target in response generation and manages the generation process with a state memory panel and a controller. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art generation models in response relevance, response diversity, and accuracy. |
A Bounding Box is Worth One Token - Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model for Document Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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Jinghui Lu, Haiyang Yu, Yanjie Wang, Yongjie Ye, Jingqun Tang, Ziwei Yang, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Hao Feng, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating spatial layouts with text have limitations . existing methods produce overly long text sequences or lack autoregressive traits of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They introduce Interleaving Layout and Text in a Large Language Model (LayTextLLM) they use OCR-derived text and spatial layouts to integrate with LLMs for document understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows an increase in performance in KIE and VQA tasks. |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings. |
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild? (2025.emnlp-main)
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An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Lei Liao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document understanding in the wild are based on scanned or digital documents . however, these benchmarks fail to capture the challenges posed by documents in the real world . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and is compared with digital or scanned documents. |
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yaming Yang, Huang Hu, Fei Xu, Jessica Zhang, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multimodal dialogue models but neglect generation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialogue response generation task which requires multimodal dialogs containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses. |
PromDA: Prompt-based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLU Tasks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to build labeled training data from domain-specific data are expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a Prompt-based Data Augmentation model which only trains small-scale Soft Promptes in frozen Pre-trained Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several baseline models on four benchmarks and is complementary with unlabeled in-domain data. |
GCIG: GraphRAG-based Cross-document Instruction Generation for Boosting LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models struggle in knowledge-intensive domains and complex reasoning tasks due to their limited coverage of single-document knowledge and repetitive content. |
| Approach: | They propose a GraphRAG-based cross-document instruction generation framework that generates diverse questions through task-aware prompts and context-sensitive retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on knowledge-intensive and multi-hop question-answering tasks. |
TegTok: Augmenting Text Generation via Task-specific and Open-world Knowledge (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Generating natural and informative texts has been a long-standing problem in NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose to augment TExt Generation via Task-specific and Open-world Knowledge in a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn what and how to generate on two text generation tasks. |
Playing 20 Question Game with Policy-Based Reinforcement Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | The 20 Questions (Q20) game encourages deductive reasoning and creativity. |
| Approach: | They propose a policy-based Reinforcement Learning method which learns optimal question selection . the method is robust to noisy answers and uses a reward network to estimate the more informative reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms an entropy-based engineering system and has competitive performance in noisy-free simulation environment. |
Advancing Sequential Numerical Prediction in Autoregressive Models (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models are the de facto choice for sequence generation tasks, but standard approaches treat digits as independent tokens and apply cross-entropy loss, overlooking the coherent structure of numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to entropy loss by extending the Earth Mover’s Distance to preserve ordinal relationships between numerical values and sequence-level to penalize the overall discrepancy between predicted and actual sequences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that NTIL improves numerical prediction and integrates effectively with LLMs/MLLMs. |
Maria: A Visual Experience Powered Conversational Agent (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on grounding conversational agents on text-only corpora, but they lack the perception ability to our physical world. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground conversational agents on images retrieved from large-scale image indexes . they propose to use visual knowledge to generate informative responses based on the extracted knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art methods on automatic metrics and human evaluation. |
WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Code Large Language Models can address a wide range of code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate widespread and versatile instruction data from open source code datasets and use it to train code-related models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in generalization ability across code-related tasks. |
CATS: A Pragmatic Chinese Answer-to-Sequence Dataset with Large Scale and High Quality (2023.acl-long)
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Liang Li, Ruiying Geng, Chengyang Fang, Bing Li, Can Ma, Rongyu Cao, Binhua Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Current datasets bias in the English language while leaving other languages underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset with high quality and large scale . they propose encoding space for two hybrid knowledge resources to convert this task to a graph-totext problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in generating textual descriptions for the Chinese answer-to-sequence dataset. |
Learning Neural Templates for Recommender Dialogue System (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Jian Miao, Yingying He, Yining Chen, Xiubo Geng, Fan Liang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural models have shown promising progress on this task, but key challenges remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can decouple dialogue generation from item recommendation . they use a response template generator and item selector to generate a responses template . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ReDial. |
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)
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Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Jinfa Huang, Peng Jin, Can Zhang, Ruyang Liu, Long Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Li Yuan, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods. |
Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Feng, Shu Wei, Xiang Fei, Wei Shi, Yingdong Han, Lei Liao, Jinghui Lu, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Chunhui Lin, Jingqun Tang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Current document image parsing solutions rely on specialized models or generate content autoregressively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal document image parsing model that integrates specialized models with autogeneous content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings while ensuring superior efficiency. |