Papers by Cong Jiang
Reasoning in a Combinatorial and Constrained World: Benchmarking LLMs on Natural-Language Combinatorial Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | NLCO evaluates large language models for combinatorial optimization (CO) . existing evaluations emphasize relatively simple reasoning competencies . |
| Approach: | They propose a combinatorial optimization benchmark that evaluates large language models on CO reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle combinatorial optimization without writing code or calling external solvers. |
Aggregating Multiple Heuristic Signals as Supervision for Unsupervised Automated Essay Scoring (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Automated Essay Scoring (AES) aims to evaluate the quality score of input essays without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to evaluate the quality of input essays . they use multiple heuristic quality signals as pseudo-groundtruths to train a neural AES model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight prompts of ASPA dataset compared with previous unsupervised methods . |
Emotion Transfer with Enhanced Prototype for Unseen Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on emotion recognition in conversation does not reach a consensus on classification theories . despite this, there is no clear consensus on how to recognize previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype-based emotion transfer framework that can be used in real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows promise but still faces key challenges in the field of emotion recognition in conversation. |
Automating Legal Interpretation with LLMs: Retrieval, Generation, and Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a novel framework for automated legal interpretation is proposed to alleviate the burden on legal experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated legal interpretation that uses large language models to extract concept-related information and interpret legal concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates the need for legal experts to interpret legal concepts . it uses large language models to extract concept-related information and interpret legal concept interpretations . |
Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) relying on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional embeddables, resulting in degradation of quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of prompt-based methods on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets. |
StyleTTS-ZS: Efficient High-Quality Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Distilled Time-Varying Style Diffusion (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) models have led to improvements in speaker prosody and voices modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient zero-shot TTS model that leverages distilled time-varying style diffusion to capture diverse speaker identities and prosodies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models in both naturalness and similarity while reducing inference speed by 90%. |
CLARity: Reasoning Consistency Alone Can Teach Reinforced Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to supervise the reasoning process are prohibitively expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-effective reinforcement learning framework that enhances reasoning quality using a small, general-purpose LLM only. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CLARity improves reasoning quality by 16.5% over standard outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) human evaluations confirm substantial gains in factual correctness and reasoning coherence, leading to more trustworthy model outputs. |
ChatMusician: Understanding and Generating Music Intrinsically with LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Ruibin Yuan, Hanfeng Lin, Yi Wang, Zeyue Tian, Shangda Wu, Tianhao Shen, Ge Zhang, Yuhang Wu, Cong Liu, Ziya Zhou, Liumeng Xue, Ziyang Ma, Qin Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Yizhi Li, Yinghao Ma, Yiming Liang, Xiaowei Chi, Ruibo Liu, Zili Wang, Chenghua Lin, Qifeng Liu, Tao Jiang, Wenhao Huang, Wenhu Chen, Jie Fu, Emmanouil Benetos, Gus Xia, Roger Dannenberg, Wei Xue, Shiyin Kang, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Despite LLMs' impressive capabilities in musical knowledge, music reasoning remains an unsolved task. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source large language model (LLM) that integrates intrinsic musical abilities into LLaMA2 and GPT-3.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand and generate music with a pure text tokenizer without external multi-modal neural structures or tokenizers. |
UrbanLLM: Autonomous Urban Activity Planning and Management with Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | UrbanLLM is a fine-tuned large language model designed to tackle diverse urban problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuned large language model to tackle diverse urban problems . UrbanLLM decomposes urban-related queries into manageable sub-tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in urban planning and management tasks. |
Do Charge Prediction Models Learn Legal Theory? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for charge prediction are sensitive, selective, and presumption of innocence . a recent study has shown that deep learning models can predict the charges accurately, but their reliability and interpretability are still underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose that trustworthy charge prediction models should take legal theories into consideration . they propose three principles for trustworthy models to follow in this task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates whether existing models learn legal theories . it shows that models meet selective and presumption of innocence principles . |
Adaptive Gating in Mixture-of-Experts based Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models employ a fixed gating network where each token is computed by the same number of experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible training strategy that allows tokens to be processed by a variable number of experts based on expert probability distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces training time and inference quality while maintaining sparsity while maintaining inference accuracy. |
Contrastive Prompting Enhances Sentence Embeddings in LLMs through Inference-Time Steering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on prompt engineering to encode the full semantics of a sentence into the embedding of the last token. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that introduces an extra auxiliary prompt to elicit better sentence embedding . they propose to use the hidden state of the token as the sentence embedded in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can improve performance of existing prompt-based methods on STS tasks and downstream classification tasks. |
VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for conditional image generation are opaque and lack explainability . evaluators of these metrics have limited ability to evaluate image synthesis tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Instruction-guided Explainable metric for evaluating conditional image models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a high Spearman correlation with human evaluations, but is weaker than GPT-4o and GPT-v in evaluating synthetic images. |
AEA: Adaptive Expert Allocation Improves Sentence Embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts LLM (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts models allocate a fixed number of experts uniformly across all layers and tokens, ignoring inter-layer and inter-token heterogeneity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Expert Allocation framework that performs layer-wise and token-wise expert allocation to enhance embedding quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding quality across multiple MoE models. |
Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Pre-trained Language Models to downstream tasks are limited by their inference APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prompting decoding framework that query PLMs with multiple prompts . they propose to query Plms with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting. |