Papers by Cheng Ji
VoxpopuliTTS: a large-scale multilingual TTS corpus for zero-shot speech generation (2025.coling-main)
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Wenrui Liu, Jionghao Bai, Xize Cheng, Jialong Zuo, Ziyue Jiang, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Xiaoda Yang, Qian Yang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual TTS datasets are limited in speech generation fields due to lack of quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data across 3 languages . they filter out low-quality text-text pairs and concatenate short transcripts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset comprises 30,000 hours of high-quality speech data, across 3 languages with multiple speakers and styles, suitable for various speech tasks such as TTS and ASR. |
VScript: Controllable Script Generation with Visual Presentation (2022.aacl-demo)
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Ziwei Ji, Yan Xu, I-Tsun Cheng, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Rita Frieske, Etsuko Ishii, Min Zeng, Andrea Madotto, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Using a script generation system, scriptwriters can customize their scripts using video retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable pipeline that generates complete scripts, including dialogues and scene descriptions, and presents visually using video retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines on both automatic and human evaluations, especially in genre control. |
SafeSwitch: Steering Unsafe LLM Behavior via Internal Activation Signals (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to fully leverage their internal cognitive processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that regulates unsafe outputs by utilizing the prober-based internal state monitor that actively detects harmful intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs by approximately 80% while maintaining strong utility. |
CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Jieming Zhu, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Wenrui Liu, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Cross-modal retrieval tasks are used to retrieve data from one modality or another based on a query from another modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative cross-modal retrieval framework based on coarse-to-fine semantic modeling . they propose combining K-Means and RQ-VAE to discretize multimodal data into token sequences that support autoregressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves excellent performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval tasks. |
Aligning LLMs with Individual Preferences via Interaction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs alignment focus on generalizing their behavior to generalized values such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. |
| Approach: | They train large language models to "interact to align" to implicitly infer user preferences . they use a multi-turn preference dataset to generate a personalized alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables dynamic, personalized alignment via interaction with a multi-turn preference dataset. |
Veri-R1: Toward Precise and Faithful Claim Verification via Online Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to online claim verification rely on prompt engineering or pre-designed reasoning workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose an online reinforcement learning framework that enables an LLM to interact with a search engine and receive reward signals that explicitly shape its planning, retrieval, and reasoning behaviors. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that Veri-R1 improves joint accuracy by 30% and doubles evidence score, often surpassing larger-scale model counterparts. |
PEARL: Self-Evolving Assistant for Time Management with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Scheduling logistics associated with meetings can amount to hours each week . a lack of automation can cause a lot of errors and can be costly . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution that automates calendar conflict management . they propose 'pearl' that augments the language agent with an external preference memory . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for long-horizon calendar conflict resolution shows that existing agents perform poorly with high error rates. |
Decoding by Contrasting Knowledge: Enhancing Large Language Model Confidence on Edited Facts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context knowledge editing (ICE) is currently the most effective method for knowledge editing, but it is constrained by the black-box modeling of LLMs and lacks interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decode new knowledge by comparing logits with unedited knowledge to improve the accuracy of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLaMA3-8B-instruct on MQuAKE by up to 219%. |
Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets. |
The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding (2020.acl-demos)
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Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu Ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | MT-DNN is an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it allows researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models . |
| Approach: | They present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks . MT supports multi-task knowledge distillation, which can substantially compress a deep neural model without significant performance drop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly compress a large model without significant performance drop. |
CMoralEval: A Moral Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Linhao Yu, Yongqi Leng, Yufei Huang, Shang Wu, Haixin Liu, Xinmeng Ji, Jiahui Zhao, Jinwang Song, Tingting Cui, Xiaoqing Cheng, Liutao Liutao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress achieved by large language models in both natural language understanding and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a large benchmark CMoralEval for moral evaluation of Chinese LLMs . they use a Chinese TV program discussing Chinese moral norms and Chinese moral anomies based on various sources . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is characterized by diversity and authenticity. |
Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reweighting data mixtures rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on intuition or empirical results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based framework that learns to re-weight domains by reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target fields and domain spaces without retraining. |
Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph Transformer Framework for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) is a critical task that aims to identify equivalent entity pairs across multi-modal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel MMEA transformer that hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance alignment task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed transformer hierarchically introduces neighbor features, multi-modal attributes, and entity types to enhance the alignment task. |
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Breaking the Noise Barrier: LLM-Guided Semantic Filtering and Enhancement for Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal entity alignment (MMEA) aims to identify equivalent entities between two multimodal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMguided MMEA framework that prioritizes noise reduction before fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework prioritizes noise reduction before fusion and improves semantics on the noisy FB YG dataset. |
AudioVSR: Enhancing Video Speech Recognition with Audio Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoda Yang, Xize Cheng, Jiaqi Duan, Hongshun Qiu, Minjie Hong, Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Zhiqing Hong, Zhimeng Zhang, Tao Jin
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown poor performance with non-Indo-European languages . previous work primarily utilizes video information to build VSR models . |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model for data inflation that integrates synthetic data with authentic visual data to enhance the VSR model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the audio-visual alignment problem in audio-video tasks. |
Incremental Summarization for Customer Support via Progressive Note-Taking and Agent Feedback (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Using a mixtral-87B model, we reduce the time it takes to generate concise notes during conversations, and reduce the amount of time spent on manual review. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that combines a Mixtral-87B model for continuous note generation with a DeBERTa-based classifier to filter trivial content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieved a 3% reduction in case handling time compared to bulk summarization, and high agent satisfaction ratings from surveys. |
VisPCO: Visual Token Pruning Configuration Optimization via Budget-Aware Pareto-Frontier Learning for Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Dual-Gated Fusion with Prefix-Tuning for Multi-Modal Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-modal relation extraction lack useful visual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-modal relation extraction framework to capture deeper correlations of text, entity pair, and image/objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the deeper correlations of text, entity pair, and image/objects, and extracts useful information. |
EscapeBench: Towards Advancing Creative Intelligence of Language Model Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing language model agents excel in planning and reasoning, but lack creativity in unfamiliar environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark suite of room escape game environments to challenge agents with creative reasoning, unconventional tool use and iterative problem-solving to uncover implicit goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform with 40% fewer steps and hints and performs robustly across difficulty levels. |
SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation (2025.findings-acl)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Avirup Sil, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Gokhan Tur, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models (LLMs) lack self-awareness to balance reasoning and tool use, increasing computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enhances an agent’s self-awareness to optimize task handling and reduce tool overuse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces tool use by 24% while improving performance by over 37%. |
TT-SI: Self-Improving LLM Agents with Test-Time Training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for language model fine-tuning are expensive and inefficient . existing methods rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time self-improvement algorithm that generates a sample that model struggles with . they also explore Test-Time Distillation, which leverages 'stronger supervisors' |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across benchmarks. |
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Zehan Wang, Ke Lei, Chen Zhu, Jiawei Huang, Sashuai Zhou, Luping Liu, Xize Cheng, Shengpeng Ji, Zhenhui Ye, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning. |
Current Agents Fail to Leverage World Model as Tool for Foresight (2026.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Emre Can Acikgoz, Bingxuan Li, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Bingxiang He, Qinyu Luo, Gokhan Tur, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Generative world models could be used to enhance agents' cognition . agents are expected to operate in settings where tasks unfold over long horizons and involve intricate chains of interdependent decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models as external simulators to enhance cognition . they find that agents rarely invoke simulation and misuse predicted rollouts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could be used to predict future states rather than short-horizon reasoning . the model could also be used for real-world planning and robotics . |
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
| Challenge: | Rhetorical strategies are important to persuasive communication, but their analysis relies on human annotation, which is costly, inconsistent and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate and label debate data . they fine-tune transformer-based classifiers on this dataset and validate it against human data a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high performance and strong generalization across topical domains. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
MultiAgentBench : Evaluating the Collaboration and Competition of LLM agents (2025.acl-long)
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Kunlun Zhu, Hongyi Du, Zhaochen Hong, Xiaocheng Yang, Shuyi Guo, Zhe Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Cheng Qian, Robert Tang, Heng Ji, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities as autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks focus on single-agent tasks or are confined to narrow domains, failing to capture the dynamics of multi-agent coordination and competition. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based multi-agent systems across diverse, interactive scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures task completion and quality of collaboration and competition using novel, milestone-based key performance indicators. |
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjing Li, Yue Feng, Yuchen Guo, Jincai Huang, Wei Ji, Qi Bi, Yongri Piao, Miao Zhang, Xiaoqi Zhao, Qiang Chen, Shihao Zou, Huchuan Lu, Li Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering. |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability. |
DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current language models lack the structured deliberation needed for high-stakes tasks such as healthcare and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-making framework that guides models to reason over structured representations of actions, attributes, and constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 30% accuracy gains over strong prompting baselines and enhances alignment in outcomes. |
Minimize Exposure Bias of Seq2Seq Models in Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan, Heng Ji, Daojian Zeng, Fei Cheng, Daisuke Kawahara, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation triplets from plain text introduce exposure bias . prior work has focused on pipeline methods that ignore intrinsic interactions between subtasks and propagate classification errors through the tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reduces the decoding length to three within a triplet and removes the order among triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overfits to both datasets while showing better generalization. |
RoBGuard: Enhancing LLMs to Assess Risk of Bias in Clinical Trial Documents (2025.coling-main)
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Changkai Ji, Bowen Zhao, Zhuoyao Wang, Yingwen Wang, Yuejie Zhang, Ying Cheng, Rui Feng, Xiaobo Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to assess the risk of bias in RCTs focus on manually crafted prompts and a restricted set of simple questions, limiting their accuracy and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing Large Language Models to assess the risk of bias in RCTs by reformulation, document parsing and multi-expert collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the RoB-Item and RoB domains. |
ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Cheng Qian, Hongyi Du, Hongru Wang, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Avirup Sil, ChengXiang Zhai, Kathleen McKeown, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models fail to reflect real-world complexity . existing benchmarks often fail to capture real-life problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features real-world-inspired, open-ended problems from competitions . they propose 'ModelingBench' that supports multiple valid solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and produces well-grounded, creative solutions. |
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)
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Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Jialong Zuo, Minghui Fang, Ziyue Jiang, Hai Huang, Zehan Wang, Xize Cheng, Siqi Zheng, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions. |
HalluLens: LLM Hallucination Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Yejin Bang, Ziwei Ji, Alan Schelten, Anthony Hartshorn, Tara Fowler, Cheng Zhang, Nicola Cancedda, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate responses that deviate from user input or training data, a phenomenon known as "hallucination" . |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination benchmark HalluLens that includes both extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation tasks to distinguish between extrindic and intrinsic hallucines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles LLM hallucination from "factuality" and distinguishes between extrinsic and intrinsic hallucines to promote consistency and facilitate research. |
Keep it Consistent: Topic-Aware Storytelling from an Image Stream via Iterative Multi-agent Communication (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual storytelling construct text description independently for each image and roughly concatenate them as a story, which leads to the problem of generating semantically incoherent content. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic description task to detect the global semantic context of an image stream and a story is then constructed with the guidance of the topic description. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate stories with higher quality compared to state-of-the-art methods on a VIST dataset. |
GAST: Gradient-aligned Sparse Tuning of Large Language Models with Data-layer Selection (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on layer-selective and data-selectory fine-tuning, but ignore the fact that different data points contribute varying degrees to distinct model layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs selective fine-tuning at both data and layer dimensions as integral components of a unified optimization strategy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms baseline methods in terms of performance and performance. |
Bacteria Biotope Relation Extraction via Lexical Chains and Dependency Graphs (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we describe our approach for the Bacteria Biotopes relation extraction subtask in the BioNLP Shared Task 2019 . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for dependency graph construction based on lexical chains . they then propose 'neuro network' model which uses short-term memories and syntax information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves the best F1 (66.3%) in the official evaluation participated by 7 teams. |
Uncertainty Quantification for In-Context Learning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Chen Ling, Xujiang Zhao, Xuchao Zhang, Wei Cheng, Yanchi Liu, Yiyou Sun, Mika Oishi, Takao Osaki, Katsushi Matsuda, Jie Ji, Guangji Bai, Liang Zhao, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
ODL-TempLLM: Ontology-Guided and Description Logic-Reasoned Temporal Reasoning with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal reasoning is crucial for large language models to understand event concurrency and complex temporal interactions in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-guided and description logic–constrained temporal reasoning paradigm that shifts focus from internal inference to the explicit modeling of temporal structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.07–31.83 F1 points and 1.00–30.73 EM points, exhibiting strong generalization and highlighting the potential of explicit temporal reasoning. |
Copyright Detective: A Forensic System to Evidence LLMs Flickering Copyright Leakage Risks (2026.acl-demo)
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Guangwei Zhang, Jianing Zhu, Cheng Qian, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Rada Mihalcea, Zhaozhuo Xu, Jingrui He, Jiaqi W. Ma, Chaowei Xiao, Bo Li, Ahmed Abbasi, Dongwon Lee, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | **Copyright Detective** is the first interactive forensic system for detecting, analyzing, and visualizing potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that detects copyright infringements and visualizes them . they use content recall testing, paraphrase-level similarity analysis and persuasive jailbreak probing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects, analyzes, and visualizes potential copyright risks in LLM outputs. |
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuji Zhang, Sha Li, Cheng Qian, Jiateng Liu, Pengfei Yu, Chi Han, Yi R. Fung, Kathleen McKeown, ChengXiang Zhai, Manling Li, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%). |
Calibrating Verbal Uncertainty as a Linear Feature to Reduce Hallucinations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziwei Ji, Lei Yu, Yeskendir Koishekenov, Yejin Bang, Anthony Hartshorn, Alan Schelten, Cheng Zhang, Pascale Fung, Nicola Cancedda
| Challenge: | LLMs often use assertive language when making false claims, resulting in harm and loss of trust. |
| Approach: | They find that a mismatch between semantic and verbal uncertainty is a better predictor of hallucinations than semantic uncertainty alone. |
| Outcome: | a new study shows that mismatch between semantic and verbal uncertainty is better predictor of hallucinations than semantic uncertainty alone. |
Capturing Latent Modal Association For Multimodal Entity Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal entity alignment overlook the quality of input modality embeddings during modality interaction, amplifying noise propagation while suppressing discriminative feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for capturing latent modal association for multimodal entity alignment using a self-attention mechanism to enhance salient information while attenuating noise within individual modality embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an absolute 3.1% higher Hits@1 score than the sota method. |
Rescorla-Wagner Steering of LLMs for Undesired Behaviors over Disproportionate Inappropriate Context (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | Incorporating external context can enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). however, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Poisoned Context Testbed to pair queries with real-world contexts . they propose 'rw-Steering' to internalize inappropriate signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses undesirable behavior curve. |
Toward Annotator Group Bias in Crowdsourcing (2022.acl-long)
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Haochen Liu, Joseph Thekinen, Sinem Mollaoglu, Da Tang, Ji Yang, Youlong Cheng, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Annotator group bias is a common problem in crowdsourcing, but is often overlooked . |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic framework to capture annotator group bias using an extended Expectation Maximization algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model annotator group bias over competitive datasets and demonstrate that it is effective over multiple datasets. |
CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of thought, and tool-using baselines on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks. |