Papers by Changyou Chen
Rethinking Sentiment Style Transfer (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text style transfer are unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based method to extract attribute content from sentences . they propose an efficient regularization to leverage attribute-dependent content as guiding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a YELP and IMDB dataset and it is able to detect errors in the human evaluation. |
TextLap: Customizing Language Models for Text-to-Layout Planning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Creating 2D graphical layouts from text alone is challenging in traditional settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to customize LLMs to allow users to generate professional looking layouts by simply inputting text instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks for document generation and graphical design benchmarks. |
Towards Faithful Neural Table-to-Text Generation with Content-Matching Constraints (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation ignore faithfulness between generated text and table . current methods ignore faithfulity, leading to generated information that goes beyond table content . |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based generation framework to enforce faithfulness between generated text and table . they propose metric to evaluate faithfulness and automatic metric for automatic generating . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in automatic evaluations and human evaluations. |
ALCAP: Alignment-Augmented Music Captioner (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditional approaches to music captioning ignore the intricate interplay between the two . however, a comprehensive understanding of music necessitates the integration of both these elements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn multimodal alignment between audio and lyrics through contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art on two music captioning datasets. |
A High-Quality Text-Rich Image Instruction Tuning Dataset via Hybrid Instruction Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large multimodal models struggle with text-rich images because of inadequate training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use annotations from human annotators to generate instruction data by a hybrid approach to generate text prompts for large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves multimodal alignment for text-rich images by using human annotations and tailored text prompts for large language models. |
Topic-Guided Variational Auto-Encoder for Text Generation (N19-1)
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Wenlin Wang, Zhe Gan, Hongteng Xu, Ruiyi Zhang, Guoyin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Changyou Chen, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms its competitors on both unconditional and conditional text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-guided variational auto-encoder model for text generation that specifies a Gaussian mixture model and a neural topic module to generate sentences under the topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing variational auto-encoders on unconditional and conditional text generation, and can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics. |
Integrating Semantics and Neighborhood Information with Graph-Driven Generative Models for Document Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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Zijing Ou, Qinliang Su, Jianxing Yu, Bang Liu, Jingwen Wang, Ruihui Zhao, Changyou Chen, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document hashing combine only one of semantics and neighborhood information, lacking a theoretical principle to guide the integration process. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode neighborhood information with a graph-induced Gaussian distribution and integrate it with generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained as efficiently as state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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Bang An, Jie Lyu, Zhenyi Wang, Chunyuan Li, Changwei Hu, Fei Tan, Ruiyi Zhang, Yifan Hu, Changyou Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
A Video Is Worth 4096 Tokens: Verbalize Videos To Understand Them In Zero Shot (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotated training datasets hinder development of supervised learning models for multimedia content . lack of annotating benchmarks hinders development of models with satisfactory performance . a recent study shows that large language models have zero-shot performance in multimedia understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose to verbalize long videos to generate their descriptions in natural language . they then perform video-understanding tasks on the generated story as opposed to the original video . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results than baselines for video understanding. |
Unveiling Inherent Visual Grounding in Multimodal LLMs for Text-Rich Images (2026.findings-acl)
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Shijie Zhou, Jihyung Kil, Ming Li, Jiuxiang Gu, Curtis Wigington, Rajiv Jain, Changyou Chen, Ruiyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language model (MLLM) approaches struggle to align query tokens with visual–text patches, heavily relying on lengthy OCR inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free approach that leverages the MLLM's inherent multi-head attention for multi-patch grounding. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on challenging document grounding benchmarks. |
Semantic Matching for Sequence-to-Sequence Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for sequence-to-sequence semantic matching do not match target sentences . Optimal partial transport (OPT) is a technique that partially matches semantically meaningful words between source and partial target sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic matching scheme based on the Optimal Partial Transport (OPT) to match semantically meaningful words between source and partial target sequences. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach improves over sequence-to-sequence models. |
Hardness-guided domain adaptation to recognise biomedical named entities under low-resource scenarios (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks require a large amount of training data and domains are often scarcely labeled. |
| Approach: | They propose a hardness-guided domain adaptation framework for bioNER tasks that leverages domain hardness information to improve the adaptability of the learnt model in low-resource scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art MetaNER model on biomedical datasets. |
Implicit Deep Latent Variable Models for Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational auto-encoders have been used for text generation but their representation power is limited due to two reasons. |
| Approach: | They advocate sample-based representations of variational distributions for natural language . they further develop an LVM to directly match the aggregated posterior to the prior . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be viewed as a natural extension of VAEs with a regularization of maximizing mutual information, mitigating the "posterior collapse" issue. |
Small Agents, Big Gains: Journey-Aware and Critic-Guided Simulation for Long-Horizon Shopping Dialogues (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce assistants must support inspiration, comparison, and tool-grounded fact-checking . lack of data-coverage and verification problem hampers efficient, deployable models . eaa: "training trajectories must cover diverse user workflows with high fidelity" |
| Approach: | They propose a system that synthesizes diverse, faithful, and policy-aligned shopping trajectories . a small model can significantly outperform same-size baselines and surpass a large-model baseline . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and surpasses large models with 8 higher inference throughput. |
Generative Semantic Hashing Enhanced via Boltzmann Machines (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generative semantic hashing assume a factorized posterior distribution, enforcing independence among the bits of hash codes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Boltzmann machine distribution as the variational posterior to introduce correlations among the bits of hash codes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve significant performance gains by combining two hash codes. |
Document Hashing with Mixture-Prior Generative Models (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative hashing methods only consider the use of simple priors, which limits them to further improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian and Bernoulli priors to generate hashing codes . they propose to cast a Gausssian latent representation into binary code . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing methods on a benchmark dataset using Gaussian and Bernoulli priors. |
Improving Adversarial Text Generation by Modeling the Distant Future (2020.acl-main)
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Ruiyi Zhang, Changyou Chen, Zhe Gan, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Guoyin Wang, Zheng Wen, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown excellent performance on text generation tasks by combining reinforcement learning (RL) and generative models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based imitation-learning approach to improve text generation performance by focusing on a long horizon. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a number of text-generation tasks and provides intermediate rewards for generator optimization. |
ReAugKD: Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Distillation For Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-short)
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Jianyi Zhang, Aashiq Muhamed, Aditya Anantharaman, Guoyin Wang, Changyou Chen, Kai Zhong, Qingjun Cui, Yi Xu, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Yiran Chen
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is an effective compression technique to derive a smaller student model from a larger teacher model by transferring the knowledge embedded in the teacher's network. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and loss function that preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples to enable the student to retrieve from the knowledge base effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the semantic similarities of teacher and student training examples to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE benchmark. |