Papers by Chao Liang
In-context Contrastive Learning for Event Causality Identification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent prompt learning-based approaches have shown promising improvements on the ECI task . however, they are subject to the delicate design of multiple prompts and positive correlations between the main task and derivate tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an event causality identification model that uses contrastive learning to enhance both positive and negative demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the event-related causality identification task . it uses contrastive learning to enhance both positive and negative demonstrations . |
Enhancing Dialogue Summarization with Topic-Aware Global- and Local- Level Centrality (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-aware global-local centrality model to help select the salient context from all sub-topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three public dialogue summarization datasets: CSDS, MC, and SAMSUM. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Parameter Importance is Not Static: Evolving Parameter Isolation for Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Zekai Lin, Chao Xue, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Bob Simons, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to fine-tuning of large language models suffer from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interference and forgetting while releasing outdated parameters to recover plasticity. |
Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Systematic Study of Incomplete Learning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Chao Xue, Yao Wang, Mengqiao Liu, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Chenyao Lu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng, Flora D. Salim
| Challenge: | Incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous in large language models . authors identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies within SFT data, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic-first framework that maps incomplete learning to causes . they identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maps incomplete learning to causes using observable training and inference signals. |
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)
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Xiaofeng Qi, Chao Li, Zhongping Liang, Jigang Liu, Cheng Zhang, Yuanxin Wei, Lin Yuan, Guang Yang, Lanxiao Huang, Min Li
| Challenge: | In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis. |
Universally Empowering Zeroth-Order Optimization via Adaptive Layer-wise Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models are slow and lack of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Zeroth-Order optimization framework that uses forward passes to fine-tune Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.7 to 3.0 wall-clock acceleration on LLaMA and OPT models. |
Traffic-R1: Reinforced LLMs Bring Human-Like Reasoning to Traffic Signal Control Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Rapid urbanization and surging vehicle ownership intensify congestion . rapid urbanization drives crash rates, slow emergency response, and burden transit-poor communities . |
| Approach: | They introduce a 3B-parameter foundation model with human-like reasoning for Traffic signal control (TSC) they use reinforcement learning and network communication to convert LLM into a traffic-control model that operates like a human traffic agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and training-intensive RL controllers on a simulated traffic environment and reduces queue lengths by more than 5%. |
Reason Only When Needed: Efficient Generative Reward Modeling via Model-Internal Uncertainty (2026.findings-acl)
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Chao Xue, Yao Wang, Mengqiao Liu, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Chenyao Lu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng, Flora D. Salim
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating reward models rely on voting-based mechanisms to evaluate CoT outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient generative reward modeling framework grounded in model-internal uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces inference cost while improving answer accuracy. |
TransGEC: Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Translationese (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that data augmentation improves accuracy over strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translationese as input for GEC data augmentation to overcome stylistic discrepancies . they propose to obtain human-translated texts with a more similar style to non-native texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves correction accuracy over strong baselines on four GEC benchmarks. |
Towards Modeling Role-Aware Centrality for Dialogue Summarization (2022.aacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dialogue summarization consider roles separately where interactions among different roles are not fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel role-aware centrality model to capture role interactions by involving role prompts to control what kind of summary to generate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two public benchmark datasets, CSDS and MC. |
WebAgent-R1: Training Web Agents via End-to-End Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhepei Wei, Wenlin Yao, Yao Liu, Weizhi Zhang, Qin Lu, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Puyang Xu, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, Hyokun Yun, Lihong Li
| Challenge: | Existing work on reinforcement learning has focused on single-turn tasks such as solving math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns directly from online interactions by asynchronously generating diverse trajectories, guided by binary rewards depending on task success. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the WebArena-Lite benchmark show that the framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and strong proprietary models. |
On the Copying Behaviors of Pre-Training for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that initializing NMT models with pre-trained language models (LM) can speed up the model training and boost the model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to control copying behaviors in NMT models by initializing them with pre-trained language models (LM) they propose to use a metric called copy ratio to control the copying behavior in decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation performance by controlling copying behaviors for pre-training based models. |
DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Rongzhi Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Liang Qiu, Haoming Jiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Qingru Zhang, Hyokun Yun, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are noisy and varying in importance of preference samples. |
| Approach: | a new method enhances reward modeling by learning to dynamically weigh preference data. |
| Outcome: | a new method improves the performance of large language models with human preferences . it initializes data importance and iteratively refines them to maximize validation performance. |
On the Complementarity between Pre-Training and Back-Translation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that PT and BT are nicely complementary to each other. |
| Approach: | They introduce two probing tasks for PT and BT respectively and investigate their complementarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods establish state-of-the-art on the WMT16 English-Romanian and English-Russian benchmarks. |
Self-Generated Critiques Boost Reward Modeling for Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Yue Yu, Zhengxing Chen, Aston Zhang, Liang Tan, Chenguang Zhu, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Yundi Qian, Xuewei Wang, Suchin Gururangan, Chao Zhang, Melanie Kambadur, Dhruv Mahajan, Rui Hou
| Challenge: | Existing reward models produce scalar scores and struggle to incorporate critiques in a natural language format. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that predicts critiques and rewards using self-generated critiques without extra supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reward modeling accuracy by 3.7%-7.3% compared to standard reward models and LLM judges. |
Learning from the Irrecoverable: Error-Localized Policy Optimization for Tool-Integrated LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) enables LLM agents to solve tasks through planning, tool use, and iterative revision, but outcome-only reinforcement learning suffers from sparse, delayed rewards and weak step-level credit assignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-integrated reasoning approach that localizes the first irrecoverable step and leverages it for fine-grained credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong Agentic RL benchmarks in math, science QA, and code execution with additional gains in Pass@K and Major@K scaling, rollout ranking quality, and tool-call efficiency. |
GraphAgent: Agentic Graph Language Assistant (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Real-world data combines structured and unstructured formats, capturing explicit relationships and implicit semantic interdependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose GraphAgent, an automated agent pipeline addressing both explicit and implicit graph-enhanced semantic dependencies for predictive and generative tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on diverse datasets validate GraphAgent’s effectiveness in graph-related predictive and text generative tasks. |
METNet: A Mutual Enhanced Transformation Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning complex sentences with multiple aspects are ill-equipped to learn complex sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual enhanced transformation network for the ABSA task . it improves representation learning of the aspect with contextual semantic features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves representation learning of the aspect with contextual semantic features, giving the aspect more abundant information. |
3AM: An Ambiguity-Aware Multi-Modal Machine Translation Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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Xinyu Ma, Xuebo Liu, Derek F. Wong, Jun Rao, Bei Li, Liang Ding, Lidia S. Chao, Dacheng Tao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that visual information in existing MMT datasets is insufficient, causing models to disregard it and overestimate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 3AM to create an ambiguity-aware multimodal machine translation dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes more ambiguity and a greater variety of captions and images than other MMT datasets. |
PEDNet: A Persona Enhanced Dual Alternating Learning Network for Conversational Response Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing persona-based dialogue models generate personalized responses using predefined persona information, but they lack personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a persona-based dual Alternating Learning Network that generates personalized responses using predefined persona information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more personalized responses than baseline methods. |
SPEAK: Spiking Neurons as an Entropy-Aware Tokenizer for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tokenizers fail to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness across NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a tokenizer that integrates spiking neurons to explicitly leverage historical tokenization results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer leverages historical tokenization results, but does not selectively leverage history based on contextual relevance. |
Self-Training with Differentiable Teacher (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for self-training are interpreted as teacher-student frameworks, where the teacher generates pseudo-labels and the student makes predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a differentiable self-training method that treats teacher-student as a Stackelberg game where a leader is always in a more advantageous position than a follower. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on semi- and weakly-supervised learning tasks on semi and weak supervised tasks. |
TEPrompt: Task Enlightenment Prompt Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt learning models for IDRR use multiple-prompt decisions from three different yet much similar connective prediction templates. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse three related tasks to fuse the learned features of auxiliary tasks to create a prompt learning model that can be used to boost the main task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the ConnPrompt in the training phase and in the testing phase. |
What Would Happen Next? Predicting Consequences from An Event Causality Graph (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing script event prediction task forcasts the subsequent event based on an event script chain, but the evolution of historical events is more complicated in real world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Causality Graph Event Prediction task that forecasts consequential event based on an Event Causity Graph (ECG). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the advanced competitors for the CGEP task. |
Any Information Is Just Worth One Single Screenshot: Unifying Search With Visualized Information Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal retrieval models are lacking in visual representations of multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a visualized information retrieval paradigm where multimodal information is represented by a unified visual format called Screenshots for various retrieval applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a large dataset of screenshots from diverse sources . it is compared with existing models and lays a solid foundation for the new model . |