Papers by Dawei Yang
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. |
Fine-grained Contrastive Learning for Definition Generation (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained transformer-based definition generation models lack effective representation learning to contain full semantic components of the given word, leading to under-specific definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method that encourages the model to capture more detailed semantic representations from the definition sequence encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could generate more specific definitions compared with state-of-the-art models. |
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. |
DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Li, Shu Yang, Zhen Tan, Jae Baik, Sukwon Yun, Joseph Lee, Aaron Chacko, Bojian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Ying Ding, Huan Liu, Li Shen, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs. |
Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Script-based Character Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Scripts are written text for plays, movies, or broadcasts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level contrastive learning framework to capture characters’ global information in a fine-grained manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three character understanding sub-tasks by a considerable margin. |
Knowledge Diffusion for Neural Dialogue Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end neural dialogue generation does not employ knowledge to guide the generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural knowledge diffusion model to introduce knowledge into dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a real-world dataset. |
Sparse Teachers Can Be Dense with Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for transferring knowledge from a teacher of large scale to a student of smaller scale are limiting in overall knowledgeableness. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse teacher trick to remove over-parameterized teachers that produce student-unfriendly knowledge and thus limit overall knowledgeableness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trick removes the parameters that result in student-unfriendliness and leads to compelling performance in comparison with baselines. |
Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning fails . they propose 'data-based' training that trains LLMs from scratch . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables models to generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training. |
Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aligned Large Language Models exhibit remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse to fine framework to fine-tune aligned Large Language Models to achieve a balance between speciality and versatility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales. |
Task-agnostic Distillation of Encoder-Decoder Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing distillation methods that focus on encoder-only LMs fail to handle the distillation of encoder decoder LM. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finetunes pretrained language models (LMs) they propose 'MiniEnD' that allows for task-agnostic distillation of LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed distillation method is generally effective and competitive compared to other alternatives. |
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says . |
| Approach: | They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures . |
Minimal Distillation Schedule for Extreme Language Model Compression (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for teacher assistant-based distillation require multiple trials to find the optimal teacher assistant. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows scheduling of an optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . they show that student performance is positively correlated with the scale-performance tradeoff . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can select the optimal teacher assistant in just one trial . it can be used to compare performance of student and teacher assistants on GLUE benchmarks. |
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pretrained language models require a tremendous amount of inference compute to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress pretrained language models to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm to fill the capacity gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with competitive baselines. |
The Butterfly Effect of Model Editing: Few Edits Can Trigger Large Language Models Collapse (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Even a single edit can trigger model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use perplexity as a surrogate metric to determine whether an edited model's performance is affected by a single edit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that even a single edit can cause model collapse, manifesting as significant performance degradation in various benchmark tasks. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
BWLA: Breaking the Barrier of W1AX Post-Training Quantization for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have driven major progress in NLP, but memory and compute requirements hinder practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that preserves high accuracy while achieving 1-bit weight quantization . the orthogonal-kronecker transformation learns an orthogonale mapping via EM minimization - a new approach to quantization is proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1-bit weight quantization with low activations with low-bit activations. |
Diverse and Informative Dialogue Generation with Context-Specific Commonsense Knowledge Awareness (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Generative dialogue systems tend to produce generic and boring responses, causing boring conversations . a novel commonsense knowledge-aware dialogue generation model is proposed to solve this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve and introduce knowledge facts from knowledge graphs to reduce boring conversations . they use a Felicitous Fact mechanism to help the model focus on context-relevant knowledge facts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approach in most experiments. |
Exploring Pre-trained Language Models for Event Extraction and Generation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event data are laborious to create and limited in size. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction model to overcome the roles overlap problem by separating the argument prediction in terms of roles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on the ACE2005 dataset and improves on the previous methods. |
LongEmbed: Extending Embedding Models for Long Context Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing embedding models support only 512 input tokens, hindering their application in scenarios requiring long inputs. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the performance of existing embedding models by using a new benchmark and a training-free context window extension strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the input window of existing models by several folds. |
Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks to generate question-answer pairs from visual images are under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse or consistent QAPs on two benchmarks. |
More is Better: Enhancing Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Multi-Source Heterogeneous Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods use a single-source homogeneous knowledge base with limited knowledge coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source heterogeneous knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation model that leverages multiple knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing knowledge-enhanced models on a Chinese dataset and shows that it can leverage multiple heterogeneous knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage. |
GSQ-Tuning: Group-Shared Exponents Integer in Fully Quantized Training for LLMs On-Device Fine-tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) fine-tuning techniques require large Floating Point(FP) computation and are impractical for resource-constrained edge devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for on-device LLM fine-tuning that eliminates the need for floating-point operations in both inference and training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces memory and compute costs while reducing memory usage. |
The Fall of ROME: Understanding the Collapse of LLMs in Model Editing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that model editing methods can cause large language models to collapse with just a single edit. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses prefixed keys and adds prefixes during testing to prevent model collapse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method prevents model collapse while maintaining effectiveness, the authors show . Rank-One Model Editing (ROME) has been found to cause model collapse with just a single edit . |