Papers by Daniel Cheng
NarrowBERT: Accelerating Masked Language Model Pretraining and Inference (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large-scale language model pretraining is expensive as the models and pretraining corpora have become larger over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a modified transformer encoder that increases throughput for masked language model pretraining by more than 2x. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases throughput on IMDB and Amazon reviews classification and CoNLL NER tasks by 3.5x with minimal performance degradation. |
The Engage Corpus: A Social Media Dataset for Text-Based Recommender Systems (2022.lrec-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined the impact of recommendation algorithms on how users discover and join online groups, but there are few standardized datasets for generating such models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Reddit to build a dataset that can be used to build models of user engagement with online groups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the behavior of subreddits banned in June 2020 as part of Reddit's efforts to stop the dissemination of hate speech. |
On the Impact of Cross-Domain Data on German Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Amin Dada, Aokun Chen, Cheng Peng, Kaleb Smith, Ahmad Idrissi-Yaghir, Constantin Seibold, Jianning Li, Lars Heiliger, Christoph Friedrich, Daniel Truhn, Jan Egger, Jiang Bian, Jens Kleesiek, Yonghui Wu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, large language models have been trained on general web crawls or domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They present a German dataset and a dataset aimed at containing high-quality data to examine the importance of data diversity over quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained on quality data on multiple downstream tasks. |
TurnBack: A Geospatial Route Cognition Benchmark for Large Language Models through Reverse Route (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hongyi Luo, Qing Cheng, Daniel Matos, Hari Krishna Gadi, Yanfeng Zhang, Lu Liu, Yongliang Wang, Niclas Zeller, Daniel Cremers, Liqiu Meng
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models have limited evaluation of their geospatial cognition . a unified framework for evaluating geospcial cognition in LLMs remains absent . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the geospatial route cognition of Large Language Models . they propose 'pathbuilder' tool for converting natural language instructions into navigation routes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and metrics evaluate 9 state-of-the-art LLMs on route reversal task. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Massively Multilingual Continual Learning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Genta Winata, Lingjue Xie, Karthik Radhakrishnan, Shijie Wu, Xisen Jin, Pengxiang Cheng, Mayank Kulkarni, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro
| Challenge: | Existing methods to handle catastrophic forgetting fail to retain knowledge learnt in the past when sudden shifts occur in training data distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning rate scheduling method that preserves new information without strongly overwriting past knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves new information without overwriting past knowledge in a multilingual continuous learning framework. |
Unsupervised Contrast-Consistent Ranking with Language Models (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Language models contain ranking-based knowledge and are powerful solvers of in-context ranking tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model to elicit language models' ranking knowledge without supervision by using a pairwise, pointwise and listwise prompting method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is inspired by an unsupervised probing method called Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS). |
Will This Idea Spread Beyond Academia? Understanding Knowledge Transfer of Scientific Concepts across Text Corpora (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on knowledge transfer focuses on documents as unit of analysis and follow their transfer into practice for a specific scientific domain. |
| Approach: | They analyze scientific concepts from corpora and use them to predict knowledge transfer . they find that only a small proportion of these ideas will be used in inventions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the use of scientific concepts in clinical trials and inventions. |
CLAIMCHECK: How Grounded are LLM Critiques of Scientific Papers? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiefu Ou, William Gantt Walden, Kate Sanders, Zhengping Jiang, Kaiser Sun, Jeffrey Cheng, William Jurayj, Miriam Wanner, Shaobo Liang, Candice Morgan, Seunghoon Han, Weiqi Wang, Chandler May, Hannah Recknor, Daniel Khashabi, Benjamin Van Durme
| Challenge: | CLAIMCHECK is an annotated dataset of NeurIPS 2023 and 2024 submissions and reviews from OpenReview. |
| Approach: | They annotate NeurIPS 2023 and 2024 submissions and reviews for weaknesses and dispute them for fine-grained labels of validity, objectivity, and type of the identified weaknesses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is richly annotated by ML experts for weaknesses statements in the reviews and the claims that they dispute, as well as fine-grained labels of validity, objectivity, and type of the identified weaknesses. |
Improving Instruct Models for Free: A Study on Partial Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ozan Irsoy, Pengxiang Cheng, Jennifer L Chen, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro, Shiyue Zhang, Duccio Pappadopulo
| Challenge: | Instruct models are deemed superior and more usable but can be eroded by instruction tuning . a recent study shows that instruct models are better at following instructions than base models . |
| Approach: | They scale down the strength of instruction tuning to improve model performance . they show that reducing instruction tuning results in material improvement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a few-shot in-context learning benchmark . but it loses some degree of its in-training ability . |