Papers by Di Huang
Know-MRI: A Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter for Large Language Models (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiaxiang Liu, Boxuan Xing, Chenhao Yuan, ChenxiangZhang ChenxiangZhang, Di Wu, Xiusheng Huang, Haida Yu, Chuhan Lang, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods only support tasks with specific inputs, limiting their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an extensible module that matches different input data with interpretation methods and consolidates the interpreting outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can match different input data with interpretation methods and consolidate the interpreting outputs. |
Entity-aware Image Caption Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning approaches generate generic descriptions of visual content and ignore background information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task which generates informative image captions using images and hashtags as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms unimodal baselines significantly with evaluation metrics on a dataset from Flickr. |
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhexin Zhang, Yida Lu, Jingyuan Ma, Di Zhang, Rui Li, Pei Ke, Hao Sun, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. |
QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Li Ding, Shuo Wang, Xuyuan Zhu, Xiong Peng, Di Huang, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair are based on correctness alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy by generating buggy programs and re-edits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves repair precision by 31.4% under fix1@1, a metric that considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing. |
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating concepts from different perspectives lack a unified formalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations’ settings and apply it to other types of explanations or tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experimental analysis was carried out to determine the evaluation measures for explanation evaluation measures. |
Private Language Models via Truncated Laplacian Mechanism (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for word embedding are prone to privacy leakage, resulting in weaker relaxations of DP that are inferior to the canonical DP in terms of privacy strength. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for private word embedding that uses a non-trivial extension of the truncated Laplacian mechanism and propose to test its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has lower variance compared to the previous methods. |
Asynchronous Deep Interaction Network for Natural Language Inference (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods have framed the reasoning problem as a semantic matching task. |
| Approach: | They propose an asynchronous deep interaction network (ADIN) to deconstruct the reasoning process and implement asynchron and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on three popular benchmarks: SNLI, MultiNLI, and SciTail. |
MMDEND: Dendrite-Inspired Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Neuron for Sequence Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Kexin Wang, Yuhong Chou, Di Shang, Shijie Mei, Jiahong Zhang, Yanbin Huang, Man Yao, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
| Challenge: | Vanilla spiking neurons are simplified from complex biological neurons with dendrites, soma, and synapses into single somatic compartments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch, multi-compartment parallel spiking dendritic neuron with a proportion-adjustable multi-branched structure that enables long-term temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better long-sequence modeling capability with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Revisiting Entropy Regularization: Adaptive Coefficient Unlocks Its Potential for LLM Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning ability is a defining capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), but RLVR training suffers from policy entropy collapse, hindering exploration and limiting reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically balances exploration and exploitation via three components: difficulty-aware coefficient allocation, initial-anchored target entropy, and dynamic global coefficient adjustment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Speculating LLMs’ Chinese Training Data Pollution from Their Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Liu Yan, Tianwei Zhang, Ke Xu, Qi Li, Minlie Huang, Hewu Li, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Experiments on GPT and other 23 LLMs indicate that tokens widely exist while GPT’s vocabulary behaves the worst: more than 23% long Chinese tokens (i.e., a token with more than two Chinese characters) are either porn or online gambling. |
| Approach: | They propose to locate Polluted Chinese (PoC) tokens in LLMs and build a PoC token detector to label them in vocabularies by considering each token’s semantics and related contents from the search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method predicts that the ratio of “*” related webpages in GPT-4o's training data is around 0.5%. |
CQG: A Simple and Effective Controlled Generation Framework for Multi-hop Question Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current models can not ensure the complexity of generated questions, so they may generate shallow questions that can be answered without multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled framework to generate multi-hop questions that contain key entities in multi- hop reasoning chains and a novel Transformer-based decoder to guarantee that key entities appear in the questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model 25% on HotpotQA. |
Transferring from Formal Newswire Domain with Hypernet for Twitter POS Tagging (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing POS tagging methods for Twitter use labeled newswire text . however, Twitter users tend to mimic formal media expressions and develop linguistically informal styles. |
| Approach: | They propose to use newswire text to learn POS tagging for Twitter while twitter users are developing linguistically informal styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods on three different datasets. |
The Art of SOCRATIC QUESTIONING: Recursive Thinking with Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting relies on the initial decisions, causing errors in early steps to accumulate and impact the final answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-and-conquer style algorithm that leverages large language models to raise and answer sub-questions until collecting enough information to tackle the original one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is more robust to errors and errors than CoT prompting and Tree-of-Thought prompting methods. |
Understanding the Dark Side of LLMs’ Intrinsic Self-Correction (2025.acl-long)
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Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Yiming Li, Tianwei Zhang, Minlie Huang, Ke Xu, Hewu Li, Liu Yan, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction fails without oracle labels as feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use one simple task and three complex tasks with state-of-the-art LLMs like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek to interpret LLM's intrinsic self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reveal the dark side of LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction for different tasks, especially for those failure cases. |
Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models contain smaller matching subnetworks that are not robust to adversarial examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to find robust tickets hidden in pre-trained language models by learning binary weight masks and an adversarial loss objective to guide the search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
Improving Translation Quality Estimation with Bias Mitigation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art translation Quality Estimation models are biased, relying on monolingual features while ignoring the bilingual semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate the bias of translation quality estimation models by contrastive learning between clean and noisy sentence pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the estimation performance while mitigating the bias. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
LiCoMemory: Lightweight and Cognitive Agentic Memory for Efficient Long-Term Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhengjun Huang, Zhoujin Tian, Qintian Guo, Fangyuan Zhang, Yingli Zhou, Di Jiang, Zeying Xie, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are constrained by limited context windows and lack of persistent memory . recent efforts address these limitations via external memory architectures . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end agentic memory framework for real-time updating and retrieval that integrates hierarchical and temporal indexing layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms established benchmarks in temporal reasoning, multi-session consistency, and retrieval efficiency. |
Breaking the Stage Barrier: A Novel Single-Stage Approach to Long Context Extension for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Haoran Lian, Junmin Chen, Wei Huang, Yizhe Xiong, Wenping Hu, Guiguang Ding, Hui Chen, Jianwei Niu, Zijia Lin, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large language models struggle with handling long token sequences due to limited training context size. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-stage continual pretraining method to equip LLMs with long context modeling capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on 4 language modeling benchmarks. |
Towards Stable and Effective Reinforcement Learning for Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) training with Mixture-of-Experts policies remains fragile and prone to reward collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose a router shift-based policy optimization method that computes a per-token router-shift ratio conditioned on the previously activated experts and applies stop-gradient and a lower-bound floor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance and greater stability than previous methods. |
Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao, Trevor Ashby, Ying Shen, Di Jin, Yu Cheng, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities as general visual assistants, but there are two challenges to their performance: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning; (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework that fine tunes VLMs firstly and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. |
Ted-Tok: Maintaining an Evolving Vocabulary for Lifelong Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a static tokenizer fragments newly emerging lexical items as language evolves . as language grows, a dynamic tokenizer reduces compression efficiency and performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal Drift Tokenizer that maintains an evolving vocabulary that adapts to emerging linguistic patterns over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizer maintains an evolving vocabulary that adapts to emerging linguistic patterns over time. |
Autonomous Workflow for Multimodal Fine-Grained Training Assistants Towards Mixed Reality (2024.findings-acl)
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Jiahuan Pei, Irene Viola, Haochen Huang, Junxiao Wang, Moonisa Ahsan, Fanghua Ye, Jiang Yiming, Yao Sai, Di Wang, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Pablo Cesar
| Challenge: | a fine-grained, comprehensive understanding of multimodal environments remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated workflow for integrating AI agents into extended reality (XR) they propose a cerebral language agent that integrates LLM with memory, planning, and interaction with XR tools and a vision-language agent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow integrates AI agents seamlessly into extended reality (XR) applications for fine-grained training. |
LLaMA-Berry: Pairwise Optimization for Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning via O1-like Monte Carlo Tree Search (2025.naacl-long)
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Di Zhang, Jianbo Wu, Jingdi Lei, Tong Che, Jiatong Li, Tong Xie, Xiaoshui Huang, Shufei Zhang, Marco Pavone, Yuqiang Li, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou
| Challenge: | LLaMA-Berry is an advanced mathematical reasoning framework to enhance the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Refine framework to optimize reasoning paths and a pairwise reward model to evaluate different paths globally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes inefficiencies and limitations of step-wise and greedy search algorithms, enabling more efficient exploration of solution spaces. |
New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Shiyao Cui, QingLin Zhang, Di Wang, Yida Lu, Zhexin Zhang, Jinhua Gao, Jinglin Yang, Min He, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Neologisms can foster new linguistic consensus by stabilizing shared meanings and usage in common communicative norms. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms . they propose 'SeTox' framework that integrates real-time web context for naeologim detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large-scale models in detecting neologism toxicity. |
INT: Establishing Information Transfer for Multilingual Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2025.findings-acl)
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Di Wu, Liting Jiang, Bohui Mao, Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Zhongjiang He, Ruiyu Fang, Shuangyong Song, Hao Huang, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies struggle to achieve performance comparable to that on high-resource languages due to inherent linguistic diversity of multilingual SLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual information transfer network to solve these challenges . they propose to reformulate SF as a span prediction problem and introduce a slot-matching attention mechanism to achieve slot alignment across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the MASSIVE and MASSIV-UG datasets in overall accuracy across all languages. |
Tasty Burgers, Soggy Fries: Probing Aspect Robustness in Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ABSA test sets cannot be used to distinguish the sentiment of the target aspect from the non-target aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective approach to enrich ABSA test sets by disentangle the confounding sentiments of non-target aspects from the target aspect’s sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish the sentiment of the non-target aspects from the target aspect’s sentiment by using the Aspect Robustness Test Set (ARTS). |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuchong Sun, Che Liu, Kun Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Ruihua Song, Xin Zhao, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. |
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziyuan Nan, Qi Yi, Di Huang, Yutong Wu, Guanhua Huang, Xue Gong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Chenchen Zhang, Zenan Xu, Xing Hu, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Parallel thinking is a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models . however, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets. |