Papers by Derek Chen
Mixture of Soft Prompts for Controllable Data Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent text when the target output follows natural language patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses large language models to generate fluent text from a limited ontology rather than direct prediction by using soft prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces diverse and natural text while preserving label semantics. |
Attention Mechanism with Energy-Friendly Operations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that attention mechanism can be improved from the energy consumption aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace multiplications with either selective operations or additions to reduce energy consumption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99% and 66% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. |
Anchor-based Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) require massive GPU memory due to their size and parameter count. |
| Approach: | They propose to use anchor-based self-attention network and anchor-basic inference strategy to compress sequence information into an anchor token, reducing the keys/values cache and enhancing inference efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the key/value cache and improves inference efficiency by 99% while maintaining similar accuracy levels. |
Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives? (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yufei Tian, Tenghao Huang, Miri Liu, Derek Jiang, Alexander Spangher, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | a recent HCI study has pointed to gaps in machine storytelling ability at the global level . authors show that LLMs have less suspense and less tension than human stories . |
| Approach: | They propose a computational framework to analyze narratives through three discourse-level aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes narratives through three discourse-level aspects . it shows that LLMs fall short of human abilities in discourse understanding . |
Social IQa: Commonsense Reasoning about Social Interactions (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Social IQa contains 38,000 multiple choice questions for probing emotional and social intelligence in a variety of everyday situations. |
| Approach: | They propose a crowdsourcing framework that collects commonsense questions along with correct and incorrect answers about social interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates stylistic artifacts in incorrect answers by asking workers to provide the right answer to a different but related question. |
Scaling is Not All You Need: Clinical-Oriented Reinforcement Learning Makes Parameter-Efficient Clinical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are increasingly used in medicine, but expert-level clinical reasoning remains a high-complexity, high-stakes frontier. |
| Approach: | They propose to train clinical reasoning models using a Reasoning-Oriented Data Strategy based on topological synthesis and CoT cold-start. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing models and outperformed the strongest open-source alternatives up to 671B in MedXpertQA. |
UniTE: Unified Translation Evaluation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods for evaluation of translation quality are focused on one task, ignoring commonalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework engaged with abilities to handle all three evaluation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can universally surpass state-of-the-art or winner methods across tasks. |
Stabilized In-Context Learning with Pre-trained Language Models for Few Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods with large pre-trained language models have shown impressive unaided performance across many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning scheme to stabilize the ability of the model to perform well under various prompts and introduce a saliency model to limit dialogue text length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on large pre-trained language models with labeled in-context exemplars and can be used to generate more exemplar queries. |
Towards Demonstration-Aware Large Language Models for Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models for machine translation often face difficulties in leveraging demonstrations to further improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that integrates demonstration-aware training and inference strategies within the framework of tuning-based LTMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates demonstration-aware training and inference strategies within tuning-based LTMs. |
Action-Based Conversations Dataset: A Corpus for Building More In-Depth Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing goal-oriented dialogue datasets focus on identifying slots and values, but in reality, customer service agents follow multi-step procedures derived from explicit company policies. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fully-labeled dataset to study customer service dialogue systems in real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models but still lacks 50.8% absolute accuracy to reach human-level performance on the dataset. |
GOLD: Improving Out-of-Scope Detection in Dialogues using Data Augmentation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior methods for detecting out-of-scope (OOS) utterances in text are limited and require a limited amount of data to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal technique that augments existing data to train better OOS detectors operating in low-data regimes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on key metrics across three benchmarks and achieves relative gains of 52.4%, 48.9% and 50.3%. |
ViStruct: Visual Structural Knowledge Extraction via Curriculum Guided Code-Vision Representation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art vision-language models have limited performance in structural knowledge extraction, such as relations between objects. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the inherent structure of programming language to depict visual structural information in a well-organized structured format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves visual structural knowledge extraction on visual structure prediction tasks. |
An Empirical Survey of Data Augmentation for Limited Data Learning in NLP (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing data efficiency in limited labeled data are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data augmentation methods to increase the efficiency of limited data learning in NLP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on topics/news classification, inference tasks, paraphrasing tasks, and single-sentence tasks. |
Decoupling Strategy and Generation in Negotiation Dialogues (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on negotiation trains neural models, but their end-to-end nature makes it hard to control their strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular approach that decouples strategy and generation by coarse dialogue acts . they test their approach on a recently proposed DEALORNODEAL game . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can decouple strategy and generation without degeneracy. |
Symbolic Planning and Code Generation for Grounded Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel at processing and generating text and code, but lack a grounded task-oriented dialogue system that can handle grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular and interpretable grounded dialogue system that integrates a reader and planner to convert partner utterances into executable code and a symbolic planner to determine the next appropriate response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the existing state-of-the-art on a one-common dialogue task and improves task success in human evaluations from 56% to 69% in the most challenging setting. |