Papers by Cheng Lei
Say What You Mean! Large Language Models Speak Too Positively about Negative Commonsense Knowledge (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been studied for their ability to store and utilize positive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a constrained keywords-to-sentence generation task and a Boolean question answering task to probe large language models on negative commonsense knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks show that LLMs fail to generate valid sentences grounded in negative commonsense knowledge, yet they can correctly answer yes-or-no questions. |
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihang Wang, Xu Huang, Bowen Tian, Yueyang Su, Lei Yu, Huaming Liao, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing context by removing redundant tokens are inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses information bottleneck theory to compress context . they propose to remove redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art . |
Lost in Decomposition: Analyzing and Mitigating the Limitations of Long Context Methods via Context Dependency (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing workflow-based long context methods do not perform well on specific datasets . performance degradation is associated with the indiscriminate application of long context models . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free adaptive routing strategy to improve long context large language models' robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be generalized to all types of datasets, but performance degradation is a concern. |
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. |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie, Matrixmxlin Matrixmxlin, Liang Chen, Chenyun Yu, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | In-context learning of large-language models has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing . however, the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow paradigm method to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of large-language models through decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three datasets and improves the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. |
Matching Distributions between Model and Data: Cross-domain Knowledge Distillation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods require to learn to adapt the target model by exploiting the source data and sharing the network architecture across domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows to transfer the knowledge of source domain to the unlabeled target domain without using source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches distributions between a trained source model and a set of target data and achieves superior performance on cross-domain text classification. |
Distilling Large Embeddings via Hyperspherical Householder Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantizing large embeddings rely on Euclidean quantization, which is poorly aligned with the angular geometry induced by contrastive embeddment training. |
| Approach: | They propose a geometry-aware distillation method that compresses large embeddings into short discrete representations via iterative Householder transformations on the unit hypersphere. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces decoding cost and maintains strong semantic retrieval accuracy. |
Language Tags Matter for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multilingual machine translation have ignored the importance of LTs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language tag (LT) strategies to indicate translation directions in MNMT to enhance consistency and alleviate off-target issues in zero-shot directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could translate between unsupervised languages and achieve a +8 BLEU score difference over other LT strategies in translation tasks. |
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyun Du, Chen Qian, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Rennai Qiu, Yufan Dang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework can generate better software quality compared to state-of-the-art frameworks. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
Detoxification for LLM: From Dataset Itself (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models focus on post-training stage or inference time, while few tackle the source of toxicity, namely, the dataset itself. |
| Approach: | They propose to localize and rewrite toxic spans in raw corpora with SoCD, which guides an LLM to localized and preserving semantics while preserving toxicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces TP from 0.42 to 0.18 and Expected Maximum Toxicity (EMT) from 0.43 to 0.20 on three LLMs. |
DCP: Dual-Cue Pruning for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods for large vision language models use visual tokens to prune . existing methods fail to balance efficiency and semantic alignment due to large number of visual token. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal pruning framework that considers textual semantics and visual self-attention to combine them to achieve efficient inference acceleration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework can retain only 25% of the visual tokens, with a minimal performance degradation of only 0.063% on LLaVA-1.5-13B. |
Compensate Quantization Errors: Make Weights Hierarchical to Compensate Each Other (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Emergent Large Language Models (LLMs) use extraordinary performance and powerful deduction capacity to discern from traditional language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses weights to compensate quantization error and learnable singular value incremental (LSI) LSI is a technique that helps weights compensate each other conditioned on activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in diverse quantization settings, no matter in weight-only, weight-activation or extremely low bit scenarios. |
Threshold Filtering Packing for Supervised Fine-Tuning: Training Related Samples within Packs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Randomly concatenating data points can lead to cross-contamination due to the significant difference in their subject matter. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly concatenates data of varying lengths until reaching the designed maximum length to optimize context length and reduce padding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on GSM8K and HumanEval, and also improves fairness and accuracy by 15%. |
Logic-Thinker: Teaching Large Language Models to Think more Logically. (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate long chains of thought (LongCoT) LongCoT still faces challenges such as redundancy and logical incoherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic reasoning framework that generates chains of thought . they propose Logic-Thinker, which transforms symbolic solvers into chains of thoughts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models fine-tuned with ThinkerCoT on logic reasoning tasks. |
Qsnail: A Questionnaire Dataset for Sequential Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Questionnaires are a professional research methodology used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of human opinions, preferences, and behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a questionnaire-based dataset that consists of 13,168 human-written questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 13,168 human-written questionnaires gathered from online platforms. |
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. |
Intent-Driven Semantic ID Generation for Grounded Conversational News Recommendation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | a new approach to news recommendation grounds each suggestion in a rapidly evolving article corpus while addressing implicit user intents that lack explicit retrievable keywords. |
| Approach: | They propose an intent-driven Semantic ID generation paradigm to address these challenges . they map diverse intents to hierarchical SID prefixes and then fuzzy-match them to current news pool . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 0% hallucination and 12.4% L1 match on a mainstream Chinese news platform. |
Geometric Signatures of Compositionality Across a Language Model’s Lifetime (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | linguistic compositionality allows atoms to locally combine to create global meaning . a rich array of meanings at the level of a phrase may be explained by simple rules of composition. |
| Approach: | They propose to relate the degree of compositionality in a dataset to the intrinsic dimension of its representations under an LM, a measure of feature complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a geometric view of the compositionality of a dataset and the intrinsic dimension of its representations under an LM. |
Text2Sql: Pure Fine-Tuning and Pure Knowledge Distillation (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Text2Sql is a task that translates natural language questions and database schemas into SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They employ pure fine-tuning strategy to reduce redundancy by using only 53% of the baseline prompt length to fine- tune the model. |
| Outcome: | The model outperforms the baseline model by 8.2% and 8.6% in Test-suite accuracy (TS) and exact-set-match accuracy (EM) under the most refined Spider dev set of prompts, the model achieves 73.5% and 75.4%, respectively, approaching state-of-the-art (SOTA) levels. |
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Shuzheng Si, Zhu Liu, Yingli Shen, Zhitong Wang, Cunliang Kong, Wenhao Li, Yufei Huang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack the ability to integrate structural information into LLMs and output predictions deterministically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which encodes structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of KG Completion datasets on KGs by integrating structural information with LLMs. |
Language Model Based Text-to-Audio Generation: Anti-Causally Aligned Collaborative Residual Transformers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models excel in text-to-audio generation, but lag behind diffusion models by a non-trivial margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple isolated transformers with causal conditioning and anti-causal alignment via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LM-based and diffusion-based systems in audio synthesis. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
EICO: Improving Few-Shot Text Classification via Explicit and Implicit Consistency Regularization (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot text classification are limited by labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use consistency regularization to improve few-shot text classification by generating pseudo-labels from weakly-augmented and strongly-augmented views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance with 16 labeled examples with prompt and verbalizer. |
OneGen: Efficient One-Pass Unified Generation and Retrieval for LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jintian Zhang, Cheng Peng, Mengshu Sun, Xiang Chen, Lei Liang, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jun Zhou, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced the generative capabilities for various NLP tasks, but they still suffer from hallucinations due to their exclusive reliance on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval tokens generated autoregressively into a single LLM to handle both tasks simultaneously in a unified forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the traditionally separate training approaches for generation and retrieval by incorporating retrieval tokens generated autoregressively. |
Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation (2024.acl-long)
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Songju Lei, Xize Cheng, Mengjiao Lyu, Jianqiao Hu, Jintao Tan, Runlin Liu, Lingyu Xiong, Tao Jin, Xiandong Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal speech synthesis is a key challenge due to the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets and freezes the video modality extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9% with single-modality audio. |
CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jiale Cheng, Shengyuan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading. |
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. |
AutoUE: Automated Generation of 3D Games in Unreal Engine via Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Towards Robust Pruning: An Adaptive Knowledge-Retention Pruning Strategy for Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pruning strategies struggle to enhance robustness against adversarial attacks when continually increasing model sparsity and require a retraining process. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning strategy that replicates embedding space and feature space of dense language models and aims to conserve more pre-trained knowledge during the pruning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy replicates embedding space and feature space of dense language models, aiming to conserve more pre-trained knowledge during the pruning process. |
Learning Kernel-Smoothed Machine Translation with Retrieved Examples (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update deployed models are prone to overfit . however, non-parametric methods are liable to over-fit the retrieved examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to learn Kernel-Smoothed Translation with Example Retrieval (KSTER) this approach allows users to adapt models to emerging cases without retraining . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 1.1 to 1.5 BLEU scores over existing methods without retraining . the proposed model is released on https://github.com/jiangqn/KSTER. |
LEGENT: Open Platform for Embodied Agents (2024.acl-demos)
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Zhili Cheng, Zhitong Wang, Jinyi Hu, Shengding Hu, An Liu, Yuge Tu, Pengkai Li, Lei Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing integrations of large language models and large multimodal models are limited . Existing platforms for developing embodied agents are limited and limited based on open-source software. |
| Approach: | They propose an open platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks with its model training on LEGENT data. |