Papers by Cheng Tan
Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems have attracted significant attention for their potential to act as medical assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that emulates clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates appropriate responses that relies on abductive and deductive diagnostic reasoning analyses and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
On the Effectiveness of Adapter-based Tuning for Pretrained Language Model Adaptation (2021.acl-long)
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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. |
ULMR: Unlearning Large Language Models via Negative Response and Model Parameter Average (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest from the research community due to their broad applicability in many language-oriented tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which uses pre-training datasets to rewrite instructions and generate negative responses to preserve the performance of the original LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can erase the pre-training data while maintaining the performance of the original model. |
Bit-Flip Error Resilience in LLMs: A Comprehensive Analysis and Defense Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuhang Chen, Zhen Tan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Huaizhi Qu, Xinyu Zhao, Qi Lin, Yu Cheng, Andrew Kwong, Zhichao Cao, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Bit-flip errors (BFEs) are hardware faults where individual bits in memory or processing units are unintentionally flipped. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defense strategy to mitigate bit-flip errors (BFEs) they propose bfe protection and a self-correction mechanism to minimize performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategy minimizes performance degradation while significantly improving robustness against BFEs. |
The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite near-perfect results, effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose QAEdit and WILD to better reflect real-world use of model editing . they propose a benchmark aligned with widely used question answering datasets and a task-agnostic evaluation framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed QAEdit benchmark and WILD evaluation framework show that current models perform worse than previously reported. |
PRDetect: Perturbation-Robust LLM-generated Text Detection Based on Syntax Tree (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for detecting LLM-generated text have shown impressive performance, but in real-world scenarios, users often introduce perturbations to the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects syntactic trees that are minimally affected by perturbations and exhibit distinct differences between human-written and LLM-generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it is significantly better against perturbations on the HC3 and GPT-3.5-mixed datasets and also has the shortest time expenditure. |
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Liangjie Huang, Alimohammad Beigi, Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Yuxuan Jiang, Canyu Chen, Tianhao Wu, Kai Shu, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) inspire the "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm . traditional methods of assessment and evaluation fail in dynamic and open-ended scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm where LLMs are leveraged to perform scoring, ranking, or selection for machine learning evaluation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based judgment and evaluation paradigms are based on large language models and are compared to the current model-driven evaluation paradigm. |
OmniFlatten: An End-to-end GPT Model for Seamless Voice Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Qinglin Zhang, Luyao Cheng, Chong Deng, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Siqi Zheng, Jiaqing Liu, Hai Yu, Chao-Hong Tan, Zhihao Du, ShiLiang Zhang
| Challenge: | Full-duplex spoken dialogue systems allow simultaneous bidirectional communication . low latency and natural interactions in full-duplice systems remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage post-training scheme that adapts a text large language model into a speech-text dialogue LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model human conversation behaviors with low latency and natural interactions with low delay. |
Multi-View Reasoning: Consistent Contrastive Learning for Math Word Problem (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex semantics and diverse equations are limited by a fixed view. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning approach that decouples human reasoning into two independent but consistent views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on complex problems on multiple languages. |
PsyMem: Fine-grained Psychological Alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs (2026.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing models rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in human-likeness and character fidelity. |
Linking Knowledge to Care: Knowledge Graph-Augmented Medical Follow-Up Question Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) fail to identify information gaps across diverse symptoms. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-augmented LLM with active in-context learning to generate relevant and important follow-up questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 5% - 8% on relevant benchmarks. |
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families. |
Blinded by Generated Contexts: How Language Models Merge Generated and Retrieved Contexts When Knowledge Conflicts? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with auxiliary information have significantly revolutionized their efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic framework to identify whether LLMs’ responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies whether LLMs’ responses are attributed to either generated or retrieved contexts. |
Learning Global Controller in Latent Space for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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Zeqi Tan, Yongliang Shen, Xiaoxia Cheng, Chang Zong, Wenqi Zhang, Jian Shao, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but their training costs are exorbitant. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for exploring optimal solutions within latent space by using latent units to extract input representations from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on a range of natural language processing tasks. |
Query-based Instance Discrimination Network for Relational Triple Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to extract relational triples from open domain texts suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples . they use query embeddings and token embeddables to extract all types of triples in one step . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used benchmarks. |
Sample-Efficient Human Evaluation of Large Language Models via Maximum Discrepancy Competition (2025.acl-long)
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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. |
Chain-of-Thought Compression Should Not Be Blind: V-Skip for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Dual-Path Anchoring (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate this via token compression fail due to its autoregressive nature . linguistically redundant tokens are erroneously pruned, leading to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reformulates token pruning as a Visual-Anchored Information Bottleneck (VA-IB) optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2-VL and Llama-3.2 families show that the proposed model achieves a speedup with negligible accuracy loss. |
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. |
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. |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping Document Understanding via Multi-modal Logic-aware Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Document Understanding is a foundational AI capability with broad applications . Large Vision-Language Models (LLMs) can't handle multi-page document comprehension . a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi- page document understanding is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi-page document understanding . MoLoRAG uses semantic and logical relevance to deliver more accurate retrieval . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on four DocQA datasets and demonstrates 9.68% accuracy improvement over existing methods. |
Localization of Fake News Detection via Multitask Transfer Learning (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting fake news require large labeled datasets and expert-curated corpora, which low-resource languages may not have. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset for fake news detection in Filipino using curated corpora and transfer learning techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve 91% accuracy on a fake news dataset, reducing error by 14% compared to established baselines. |
Beyond Itinerary Planning—A Real-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn and Tool-Using Travel Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM performance on travel planning have shown that existing settings are limited due to limited domain coverage, insufficient modeling of users’ implicit preferences in multi-turn conversations, and a lack of evaluation of agents’ capability boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' planning and tool-use abilities in real-world settings by collecting user queries, user preferences, and tools from real scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates agents' capabilities in real-world settings and shows that even advanced models exhibit imbalanced performance across different capabilities. |
Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhen Tan, Dawei Li, Song Wang, Alimohammad Beigi, Bohan Jiang, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Mansooreh Karami, Jundong Li, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing surveys focus on LLMs' specific utility for data annotation and synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate annotations from raw data . they also propose to review learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to improve the efficacy of machine learning models by generating and labeling raw data with relevant information. |
Contrastive Demonstration Tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach to prompt tuning that is free of demonstration sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be pluggable, extensible, and efficient on 16 datasets. |
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)
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Hexiang Tan, Wanli Yang, Junwei Zhang, Xin Chen, Rui Tang, Du Su, Jingang Wang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Fei Sun, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines. |
Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Zhang, Zhenglin Cheng, Yuanyu He, Mengna Wang, Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan, Guiyang Hou, Mingqian He, Yanna Ma, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios. |