Papers by Dan He
CORD: Bridging the Audio–Text Reasoning Gap via Weighted On-policy Cross-modal Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hu Jing, Danxiang Zhu, Xianlong Luo, Dan Zhang, Shuwei He, Yishu Lei, Shikun Feng, Hai-Tao Zheng, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) exhibit a degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities . empirical results show that CORD significantly bridges the audio–text performance gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs online cross-modal self-distillation to bridge the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models . it employs on-policy reverse KL divergence with importance-aware weighting . |
All Languages Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Language Bias in Multilingual RAG (2026.acl-long)
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Dan Wang, Guozhao Mo, Yafei Shi, Cheng Zhang, Bo Zheng, Boxi Cao, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing mRAG systems suffer from a language bias during reranking, systematically favoring English and the query’s native language. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-agnostic utility-driven reranker alignment technique to mitigate language bias during re-ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates language bias and consistently improves mRAG performance across languages. |
Sharp Nearby, Fuzzy Far Away: How Neural Language Models Use Context (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shed light on the information encoded by long-term memory networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a neural caching model to model the role of context in an LSTM LM . they analyze the increase in perplexity when prior context words are shuffled, replaced, or dropped . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly sensitive to the order of words within the most recent sentence, but ignores word order in the long-range context, suggesting the distant past is modeled only as a rough semantic field or topic. |
QANom: Question-Answer driven SRL for Nominalizations (2020.coling-main)
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Ayal Klein, Jonathan Mamou, Valentina Pyatkin, Daniela Stepanov, Hangfeng He, Dan Roth, Luke Zettlemoyer, Ido Dagan
| Challenge: | Traditionally, SRL annotations focus on verbal predicates, but other types of predicate are frequent in natural language. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic scheme for capturing predicate-argument relations for nominalizations, termed QANom, using crowdsourcing and QA-driven annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme outperforms existing annotations and is useful for downstream tasks. |
QuASE: Question-Answer Driven Sentence Encoding (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Question-answering (QA) data often encodes essential information in many facets . a growing interest of QA has led to many large-scale QA datasets available to the community . |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answer driven sentence encoding framework to learn representations from QA data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns representations from QA data, using BERT or other state-of-the-art contextual language models. |
Understanding Spatial Relations through Multiple Modalities (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on common sense reasoning and understanding of spatial relations is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a spatial model that uses both textual and visual information to predict spatial relations between two entities in an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves prediction accuracy and coverage and deals with unseen subjects, objects and relations. |
A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) focus on reducing discrepancy between tokens and tokens, but transfer of valuable label information is often not considered or ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that borrows entity information from the source domain to enhance NER in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the state-of-the-art model on several datasets. |
P-React: Synthesizing Topic-Adaptive Reactions of Personality Traits via Mixture of Specialized LoRA Experts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on personalized large language models focus on modeling explicit character profiles, while ignoring the underlying personality traits that truly shape behaviors and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized large language model (LLM) that captures implicit Big Five personality traits and integrates a Personality Specialization Loss to capture individual trait expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Big Five personality traits and integrates a Personality Specialization Loss (PSL) to capture individual trait expressions. |
Generative Pre-trained Speech Language Model with Efficient Hierarchical Transformer (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer that quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a transformer architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing speech language models in word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
Partial Or Complete, That’s The Question (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotation schemes aim at acquiring completely annotated structures, but partial annotations can be costly and hinder learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to find out that learning from partial structures can sometimes outperform learning from complete ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in three different structured learning tasks. |
MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free (2026.findings-acl)
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Yishu Lei, Shuwei He, Hu Jing, Dan Zhang, Xianlong Luo, Danxiang Zhu, Shikun Feng, Rui Liu, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) limited to textual input modality . acoustic information is intrinsically heterogeneous, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture to decouple acoustic information by routing audio tokens to specialized experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing models on audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks while retaining shared experts for global context. |
Measuring Inductive Biases of In-Context Learning with Underspecified Demonstrations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning is an important paradigm for adapting large language models to new tasks . but the generalization behavior of ICL remains poorly understood . |
| Approach: | They characterize the feature biases of large language models by constructing underspecified demonstrations . they find that LLMs exhibit clear feature bias, and they evaluate interventions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model prefers the "default" task features over distractor features more often than the base model. |
Neural Unsupervised Reconstruction of Protolanguage Word Forms (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reconstructing ancient word forms use expectation-maximization . past work has used this method to predict simple phonological changes . |
| Approach: | They extend expectation-maximization to predict phonological changes between ancient word forms and their cognates in modern languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces edit distance from the target word forms compared to previous methods. |
SocREval: Large Language Models with the Socratic Method for Reference-free Reasoning Evaluation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-free reasoning evaluation metrics rely on human-annotated reasoning chains as references, but require fine-tuning with human-derived chains before evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use GPT-4 to automatically evaluate reasoning chain quality by leveraging the Socratic method. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach significantly improves existing reference-free reasoning evaluation metrics. |
Gradient-based Gradual Pruning for Language-Specific Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual neural machine translation suffers from performance degradation in high-resource languages compared to bilingual counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-based gradual pruning technique for multilingual neural machine translation that allows for partial parameter sharing across language pairs to alleviate interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields a notable performance gain on IWSLT and WMT datasets. |
A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang, Qin Chen, Jie Zhou, Liang He, Biqing Qi, Linyang Li, Qipeng Guo, Xiaoming Shi, Wei Zhang
| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of inductive reasoning for large language models . they categorize methods into three main areas: post-training enhancement, test-time exploration, and data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves inductive reasoning in large language models. |
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Xu, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Pengcheng He, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale datasets for query-focused summarization hinders model development . lack of data limits the ability of QFS models to train robust neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation using a pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks. |
Foreseeing the Benefits of Incidental Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Real-world applications often require improved models by leveraging a range of cheap incidental supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified PAC-Bayesian motivated informativeness measure that characterizes the uncertainty reduction provided by incidental supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure quantifies the value added by incidental supervision signals to sequence tagging tasks. |
Understanding Game-Playing Agents with Natural Language Annotations (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | a new dataset contains 10K human-annotated Go games. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language annotations to predict game terms from Go models . they use linear probing to predict domain-specific terms from the model's intermediate state representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict domain-specific terms from human-annotated Go games . the proposed model is based on a dataset containing 10K human-rannotated games based in the game . |