Papers by Cheng Ding
On the Effectiveness of Adapter-based Tuning for Pretrained Language Model Adaptation (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruidan He, Linlin Liu, Hai Ye, Qingyu Tan, Bosheng Ding, Liying Cheng, Jiawei Low, Lidong Bing, Luo Si
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adapter-based tuning is more parameter-efficient than fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to add adapter modules to a pretrained language model and update the parameters of adapter module when learning on a downstream task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fine-tuning on low-resource and cross-lingual tasks and settings. |
Simple but Challenging: Natural Language Inference Models Fail on Simple Sentences (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Natural language inference (NLI) tasks are difficult to perform on large datasets . a small number of simple sentences can improve model performance, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactically simple sentences to test the inference ability of NLI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed set of simple sentences shows that the models fine-tuned on MNLI and SNLI perform poorly on Simple Pair. |
Multi-level Distillation of Semantic Knowledge for Pre-training Multilingual Language Model (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for improving multilingual models did not focus on learning the semantic structure of representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve multilingual language models by aligning parallel sentences . they propose token-, word-, sentence- and structure-level alignment objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on XNLI, PAWS-X, and XQuAD . it obtains comparable performance on low-resource languages, the authors show . |
MLaKE: Multilingual Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on knowledge editing focus on monolingual scenarios, neglecting the complexities presented by multilingual contexts and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the adaptability of multilingual knowledge editing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the adaptability of multilingual knowledge editing methods across five languages. |
OctoBench: Benchmarking Scaffold-Aware Instruction Following in Repository-Grounded Agentic Coding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Deming Ding, Shichun Liu, Enhui Yang, Jiahang Lin, Ziying Chen, Shihan Dou, Honglin Guo, Weiyu Cheng, Pengyu Zhao, Chengjun Xiao, Qunhong Zeng, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Qidi Xu, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | coding scaffolds that follow heterogeneous instructions remain under-examined in software engineering . coding models are capable software agents, but their ability to follow constraints remains under-explored . |
| Approach: | They introduce OctoBench, which benchmarks scaffold-aware instruction following in agentic coding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to accelerate the development of more scaffold-aware agents. |
VisPCO: Visual Token Pruning Configuration Optimization via Budget-Aware Pareto-Frontier Learning for Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual token pruning rely on predefined configurations without determining whether they achieve optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across pruning methods and VLM architectures. |
ToolCoder: A Systematic Code-Empowered Tool Learning Framework for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hanxing Ding, Shuchang Tao, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool learning rely on hand-crafted prompts and natural language reasoning, making multi-step planning difficult and lacking precise error diagnosis and reflection mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates tool learning as a code generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance in task completion accuracy and execution reliability compared to existing approaches. |
Tree-Structured Topic Modeling with Nonparametric Neural Variational Inference (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for topic modeling learn topics with a flat structure . however, such methods have data scalability issues . |
| Approach: | They propose to use nonparametric neural variational inference to extract a tree-structured topic model with reasonable structure, low redundancy, and adaptable widths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts a tree-structured topic hierarchy with reasonable structure, low redundancy, and adaptable widths. |
TamEdit: Trajectory-Aware Meta-Learning for Specificity-Preserving Continual Knowledge Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual knowledge editing focus on single edits or preventing knowledge forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning method that preserves specificity for continual knowledge editing by capturing relationships between different single edits within the trajectory. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TamEdit outperforms baselines in continual editing while preserving general capabilities. |
PBI-Attack: Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for Toxicity Maximization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ruoxi Cheng, Yizhong Ding, Shuirong Cao, Ranjie Duan, Xiaoshuang Jia, Shaowei Yuan, Simeng Qin, Zhiqiang Wang, Xiaojun Jia
| Challenge: | Existing methods to jailbreak Large Vision Language Models do not consider interaction between images and text. |
| Approach: | They propose a prior-guided bimodal interactive black-box jailbreak attack for toxicity maximization that exploits the interaction of images and text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art jailbreak methods in black box scenarios and in closed-source LVLMs. |
Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yusheng Su, Chi-Min Chan, Jiali Cheng, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Shengding Hu, Zonghan Yang, Ning Ding, Xingzhi Sun, Guotong Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can drive large pre-trained language models by training only minimal parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient tuning method that is compatible with a tunable module and uses a random number generator to optimize fewer table parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with a tunable module and tested on 11 NLP tasks. |
GR1: Reinforcement-Enhanced LLM for Geoscience Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yule Xie, Jiaxin Ding, Cheng Deng, Shiqing Gao, Junran Zhang, Sibo Zhang, Zeyuan Wang, Ke Wu, Xin Ding, Luoyi Fu, Meng Jin, Xinbing Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated RL's substantial capacity to enhance multi-step reasoning beyond what supervised instruction tuning achieves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts multimodal questions into descriptive text . they propose RL-enhanced geoscience reasoning that can be fine-tuned to a text-only level . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and accuracy on multimodal questions while preserving answerability and difficulty. |
TrajGuard: Streaming Hidden-state Trajectory Detection for Decoding-time Jailbreak Defense (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak defense paradigms rely on static detection of prompts, outputs, or internal states . hidden states in critical layers during decoding carry stronger and more stable risk signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-time defense framework that aggregates hidden-state trajectories via a sliding window to quantify risk in real time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average defense rate of 95% in 12 jailbreak attacks and open-source LLMs. |
AgentGC: Evolutionary Learning-based Lossless Compression for Genomics Data with LLM-driven Multiple Agent (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Sun Hui, Ding Yanfeng, Huidong Ma, Chang Xu, Keyan Jin, Lizheng Zu, Cheng Zhong, Xiaoguang Liu, Gang Wang, Wentong Cai
| Challenge: | Lossless compression has made significant advancements in Genomics Data storage, sharing and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent-based GD Compressor with 3 layers with a multi-agent named Leader and Worker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods with low-level modeling and limited adaptability and user-unfriendly interface. |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
VisuoThink: Empowering LVLM Reasoning with Multimodal Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large vision-language models fail to capture interleaved nature of human visual-verbal reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates visuospatial and linguistic domains to facilitate multimodal slow thinking by enabling progressive visual-textual reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that VisuoThink significantly improves reasoning capabilities even without fine-tuning. |
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Bingxiang He, Ning Ding, Cheng Qian, Jia Deng, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Haiwen Hong, Huan-ang Gao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Huimin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks. |
Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Pengzhou Cheng, Haowen Hu, Zheng Wu, Zongru Wu, Tianjie Ju, Daizong Ding, Zhuosheng Zhang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | MLLM-powered GUI agents expose multiple interaction-level triggers, causing backdoor attacks . backdoor injection maximizes feature difference across sample classes, improving flexibility . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks using MLLMs . they construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and stealthy for red-teaming backdoor attacks. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
Large-Scale Corpus Construction and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Ancient Chinese Poetry: New Method and Data Insights (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Ancient Chinese poetry presents unique challenges for Large Language Models due to data scarcity and limited ability of general LLMs when dealing with ACP. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework to improve LLMs' performance . they use 1.1 million ancient poems and 990K related texts to address hallucination issues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of LLMs in ancient Chinese poetry domain from 49.2% to 89.0%. |
UltraIF: Advancing Instruction Following from the Wild (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a lack of transparency has resulted in a gap between research community and leading companies . large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in following complex instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build large language models that can follow complex instructions with open-source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can synergize complex instructions and filter responses with evaluation questions. |
MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-aspect controllable text generation require expensive iteration / searching within the discrete text space during the decoding stage, resulting in a degradation of text quality due to the domain discrepancies between different aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that estimates compact latent space for multiple aspects and performs efficient Sampling with a fast sampler to eliminate domain discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on attribute relevance and textual quality while maintaining a high inference speed. |
Sample-Efficient Human Evaluation of Large Language Models via Maximum Discrepancy Competition (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kehua Feng, Keyan Ding, Tan Hongzhi, Kede Ma, Zhihua Wang, Shuangquan Guo, Cheng Yuzhou, Ge Sun, Guozhou Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluation of large language models are inefficient and inefficient due to inaccuracy of standard metrics in human perception of text quality and inefficiency in sampling informative test examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient human evaluation method for large language models based on the principle of MAximum Discrepancy (MAD) competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the “golden” ranking of LLMs with a minimum set of input instructions, which in turn reveal their relative strengths and weaknesses. |
ATAP: Automatic Template-Augmented Commonsense Knowledge Graph Completion via Pre-Trained Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Commosense knowledge graphs (CKGC) are powerful representations of real-world commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses automatically generated prompt templates combined with pre-trained language models to improve CKGC performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the long-tail problem and improves CKGC performance on a large dataset. |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides more nuanced evaluations of alignment capabilities for large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they use a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability and a “alignment score” to assess the robustness and stability of models across diverse prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 13 tasks across three categories and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
A Multi-Task Incremental Learning Framework with Category Name Embedding for Aspect-Category Sentiment Analysis (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular natural language processing task in academia and industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use category name encoding network to weaken catastrophic forgetting problem . they set both encoder and decoder shared among all categories to weaker the catastrophic forgetting problem a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two (T)ACSA benchmark datasets. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
MCS-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Chinese Classical Studies (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have advanced visual and language understanding, but their potential in Chinese Classical Studies (CCS) remains underexplored due to the lack of specialized benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a multimodal benchmark specifically designed for Chinese Classical Studies across multiple subdomains to bridge this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans seven core subdomains with a total of 45 meticulously designed tasks. |
AutoUE: Automated Generation of 3D Games in Unreal Engine via Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative models have motivated studies on automated game generation from natural language descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent system, AutoUE, which coordinates multiple agents to end-to-end generate 3D games, covering model retrieval, scene generation, gameplay and interaction code synthesis, and automated game testing for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system covers model retrieval, scene generation, gameplay and interaction code synthesis, and automated game testing for evaluation. |
Scaling Laws for Fact Memorization of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Fact knowledge memorization is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate factual and reliable responses. |
| Approach: | They analyze scaling laws for LLM’s fact knowledge and LLMs’ behaviors of memorizing different types of facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize on unseen facts and its scaling law is similar to general pre-training. |
Aggregation of Reasoning: A Hierarchical Framework for Enhancing Answer Selection in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhangyue Yin, Qiushi Sun, Qipeng Guo, Zhiyuan Zeng, Xiaonan Li, Tianxiang Sun, Cheng Chang, Qinyuan Cheng, Ding Wang, Xiaofeng Mou, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought prompting have facilitated significant breakthroughs for Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reasoning aggregation framework to address this problem . they propose dynamic sampling to adjust the number of reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble methods on complex reasoning tasks. |