Papers by Carl Yang
Beyond Chunks and Graphs: Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Triplet-Driven Thinking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is critical for reducing hallucinations and incorporating external knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages an LLM to decompose questions into searchable triplets with placeholders. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that T2RAG outperforms state-of-the-art multi-round and Graph RAG methods while reducing retrieval costs by up to 45%. |
Beyond Memorization: A Rigorous Evaluation Framework for Medical Knowledge Editing (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods show promising results on general-domain benchmarks, but their effectiveness in the medical domain remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate medical knowledge editing using model-generated rationales as editing targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves editing efficacy and generalization in medical models without full retraining. |
MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved generation and reasoning capabilities compared to traditional BERT-sized models due to massive number of parameters and extensive pre-training on vast textual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of large language models . they propose to fine-tune only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter improves performance on four biomedical tasks without requiring computational resources or sharing data with third parties. |
BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ran Xu, Wenqi Shi, Yue Yu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yanqiao Zhu, May Dongmei Wang, Joyce Ho, Chao Zhang, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedically tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedic data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedically corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets confirm the performance of the retrieval model on various biomedically demanding tasks. |
PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute in- formation extractor. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (29.9% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Shi, Ran Xu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Jieyu Zhang, Hang Wu, Yuanda Zhu, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | EHRAgent enables clinicians to interact with EHRs using natural language . reliance on rule-based conversion systems often necessitates additional training or effort from data engineers. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model agent that generates and executes code in natural language to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate on three real-world EHR datasets. |
Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | GUI agents powered by vision-language models struggle with real-world tasks due to their complex nature and limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight vision-language model that leverages web tutorials at inferencetime to synthesize GUI agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline GUI agents and surpasses other inference baselines by 2.6% to 13.3% across two model sizes. |
SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction only implicitly learn to model relevant contexts and entity types while being trained for RE. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly teach the model to capture relevant contexts and entity types by supervising and augmenting intermediate steps (SAIS) for RE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the runner-up method on three benchmarks by 5.04% . textual contexts and entity types are the major information sources that lead to the success of previous approaches. |
MuG: A Multimodal Classification Benchmark on Game Data with Tabular, Textual, and Visual Fields (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal classification systems use tabular, textual, and visual data to provide efficient and scalable services. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal classification benchmark MuG with eight datasets . they analyze label balance ratios, percentages of missing features, distributions of data within each modality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is available on https://github.com/lujiaying/MUG-Bench . it includes eight datasets that allow researchers to evaluate and improve their models . |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
Explainable Text Classification with LLMs: Enhancing Performance through Dialectical Prompting and Explanation-Guided Training (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation methods that generate keywords may be less effective due to missing critical contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method to generate explanations for possible labels using LLMs and a dialectical prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves accuracy and explanation quality over state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets from diverse domains. |
Piecing It All Together: Verifying Multi-Hop Multimodal Claims (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing claim verification datasets often do not require systems to perform complex reasoning or effectively interpret multimodal evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires models to reason over multiple pieces of evidence . they construct a large-scale dataset comprising 15k multi-hop claims paired with multimodal evidence - generated and refined using large language models with additional input from human feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on human performance benchmarks and human reasoning hops. |
Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Ran Xu, Hejie Cui, Yue Yu, Xuan Kan, Wenqi Shi, Yuchen Zhuang, May Dongmei Wang, Wei Jin, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Clinical natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield that requires the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of unstructured clinical text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which infuses knowledge into clinical text generation with LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across 8 clinical NLP tasks and 18 datasets by 7.7%-8.7% on average. |
RAM-EHR: Retrieval Augmentation Meets Clinical Predictions on Electronic Health Records (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for EHRs rely on knowledge from a single source and do not capture the semantic information for medical codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval AugMentation pipeline to augment clinical prediction on EHRs . they use multiple knowledge sources to convert them into text and use consistency regularization to capture complementary information from patient visits and summarized knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two EHR datasets show that RAM-EHR improves clinical prediction tasks. |
Efficient Federated Learning on Knowledge Graphs via Privacy-preserving Relation Embedding Aggregation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that share entity embeddings of knowledge graphs (KGs) would incur a severe privacy leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a new attack method that aims to recover the original embedding information based on the known entity embeddables of FedE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to infer whether a specific relation exists in a private client. |
OpenRubrics: Towards Scalable Synthetic Rubric Generation for Reward Modeling and LLM Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture multifaceted nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a rubric-based reward model that uses a large collection of prompt, rubric pairs to generate a scalar score or preference label for each response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4% across multiple benchmarks. |
RAG in the Wild: On the (In)effectiveness of LLMs with Mixture-of-Knowledge Retrieval Augmentation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. |
| Approach: | They evaluate RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. |