Papers by Di Jin
Dual Adversarial Neural Transfer for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is an important step in most natural language processing (NLP) applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-adversarial neural transfer method for addressing low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) they propose 'Generalized Resource-Adversarial Discriminator' and 'accidental training' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) with two variants, i.e., DATNet-F and DATNET-P, and adversarial training is adopted to boost model generalization. |
Multi-source Meta Transfer for Low Resource Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MCQA datasets are small in size, which increases difficulty of model learning and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source meta transfer framework for low-resource multiple-choice question answering . they extend meta learning by incorporating multiple training sources to learn a generalized feature representation across domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is independent of backbone language models and can bridge the distribution gap between training sources and target. |
DialGuide: Aligning Dialogue Model Behavior with Developer Guidelines (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Prakhar Gupta, Yang Liu, Di Jin, Behnam Hedayatnia, Spandana Gella, Sijia Liu, Patrick Lange, Julia Hirschberg, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Dialogue models are able to generate fluent and interesting responses, but they can be difficult to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines, which provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective in three open-domain dialogue response generation tasks and is consistent with the developer's expectations and intent. |
Hierarchical Neural Networks for Sequential Sentence Classification in Medical Scientific Abstracts (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing sentences classification models often classify sentences in isolation without considering the context in which sentences appear. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical sequential labeling network to make use of contextual information within surrounding sentences to help classify the current sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 2%-3% on two benchmarking datasets for sequential sentence classification in medical scientific abstracts. |
Interaction-Aware Topic Model for Microblog Conversations through Network Embedding and User Attention (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models ignore that one discusses diverse topics when dynamically interacting with different people. |
| Approach: | They propose an Interaction-Aware Topic Model (IATM) for microblog conversations by integrating network embedding and user attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on three real-world microblog datasets. |
Hooks in the Headline: Learning to Generate Headlines with Controlled Styles (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current summarization systems only produce plain, factual headlines, far from the practical needs for exposure and memorableness of the articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate relevant headlines with three style options . they propose combining summarization and reconstruction tasks into a multitasking framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art summarization model by 9.68% . it can generate relevant, fluent headlines with humor, romance and clickbait . |
WorkForceAgent-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLM-based Web Agents via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents relying on supervised fine-tuning struggle with generalization and robustness due to insufficient reasoning capabilities when handling the inherently dynamic nature of web interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered web agent that trains using a rule-based reinforcement learning framework to enhance single-step reasoning and planning for business-oriented web navigation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline LLM-based agents on the WorkArena benchmark by 10.26–16.59%. |
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. |
On-policy Reinforcement Fine-tuning with Offline reward for Multi-step Embodied Planning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Embodied planning requires agents to make coherent multi-step decisions based on dynamic visual observations and verbal goals. |
| Approach: | They propose an On-policy Reinforcement fine-tuning framework with offline rewards for Embodied Task Planning that preserves generalization benefits of RFT while addressing costly interaction and sparse rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source and online-RL methods on EmbodiedBench, a recent benchmark for interactive embodied tasks. |
Inducer-tuning: Connecting Prefix-tuning and Adapter-tuning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prefix-tuning is an essential paradigm of parameter-efficient transfer learning . fine-tuned models require separate copies of model parameters for each task . |
| Approach: | They propose to understand and further develop prefix-tuning through the kernel lens . they propose a new variant of prefix tuning that shares the exact mechanism as prefix tun . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves prefix-tuning performance by training only a small portion of parameters. |
From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that robots display human-like characteristics in dialogues . this anthropomorphism raises concerns about the accuracy of AI and its capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropophilic responses in robots . they propose to combine these two types of responses to create a new category of bot responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves the original dialogues from existing corpora and enhances them with paired responses: self-anthropomorphic and non-self-anthropophilic for each original bot response. |
TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLP (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | TextAttack provides implementations of 16 adversarial attacks from the literature and supports a variety of models and datasets. |
| Approach: | They introduce a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarially training in NLP. |
| Outcome: | This paper introduces a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarially training in NLP. |
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. |
Chain-of-Specificity: Enhancing Task-Specific Constraint Adherence in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhancing large language models fail to emphasize specific constraints and unlock the underlying knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that emphasizes specific constraints and unlocks knowledge within LLMs by iteratively emphasising on specific constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in enhancing generated content, especially in terms of specificity. |
Improving Model Factuality with Fine-grained Critique-based Evaluator (2025.acl-long)
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Yiqing Xie, Wenxuan Zhou, Pradyot Prakash, Di Jin, Yuning Mao, Quintin Fettes, Arya Talebzadeh, Sinong Wang, Han Fang, Carolyn Rose, Daniel Fried, Hejia Zhang
| Challenge: | Factuality evaluation aims to detect factual errors produced by language models and guide the development of more factual models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages FenCE to improve the factuality of LM generators by constructing training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the factuality of LM generators by enhancing their training data. |
Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition using Neural Tensor Network with Interactive Attention and Sparse Learning (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implicit discourse relation recognition ignore bidirectional interactions between two arguments and sparsity of pair patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural Tensor network framework with interactive attention and sparse learning for implicit discourse relation recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective on PDTB and can be used in text summarization, conversation system and so on. |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Augmenting NLP models using Latent Feature Interpolations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods with a large number of parameters are prone to over-fitting and often fail to capture the underlying input distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation technique that uses embeddings and hidden layer representations to construct virtual examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in terms of accuracy and robustness to weight pruning. |
Empowering parameter-efficient transfer learning by recognizing the kernel structure in self-attention (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models are parameter efficient . fine- tuning the models requires multiple copies of the parameters, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose to use kernel-based adapters to tune only a few parameters while freezing the rest of the parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve or improve strong performance over a diverse set of natural language generation and understanding tasks. |
Using In-Context Learning to Improve Dialogue Safety (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Nicholas Meade, Spandana Gella, Devamanyu Hazarika, Prakhar Gupta, Di Jin, Siva Reddy, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Recent work has highlighted safety issues with large neural-based conversational models. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based approach for reducing bias and toxicity in chatbot responses . they retrieve demonstrations of safe responses to similar dialogue contexts to generate a response . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces bias and toxicity in three chatbot models . it can be used in compliment to existing dialogue safety approaches, such as RLHF. |
Sketching as a Tool for Understanding and Accelerating Self-attention for Long Sequences (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for long sequences are not efficient due to the quadratic space and time complexity of the self-attention modules. |
| Approach: | They propose to reduce the quadratic complexity to linear (modulo logarithmic factors) by low-dimensional projection and row selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform transformer-based models with smaller time/space footprint on the Long Range Arena benchmark. |
KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjiang Liu, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Xiaokang Jin, Yilin Wang, Qingyu Niu, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Yidan Liang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods compress content for gist browsing, but they break prerequisite logic in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. |
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. |
IMaT: Unsupervised Text Attribute Transfer via Iterative Matching and Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewrite sentences with certain attributes are difficult and often result in poor content-preservation and ungrammaticality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a sequence-to-sequence model to learn attribute transfer . existing approaches try to explicitly disentangle content and attribute information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms complex state-of-the-art systems by a large margin in sentiment modification and formality transfer tasks. |
HypMix: Hyperbolic Interpolative Data Augmentation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data augmentation involve performing mathematical operations over the raw input samples or their latent states representations, but these operations are performed in the Euclidean space, simplifying these representations and resulting in noisy interpolations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-, data-, and modality-agnostic interpolative data augmentation technique operating in the hyperbolic space that captures the complex geometry of input and hidden state hierarchies better than its contemporaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark and low resource datasets across speech, text, and vision modalities. |
DMix: Adaptive Distance-aware Interpolative Mixup (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Interpolation-based regularisation methods such as Mixup have shown to be effective for various tasks and modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive distance-aware interpolative Mixup that selects samples based on their diversity in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on sentence classification over existing methods on 8 benchmark datasets across English, Arabic, Turkish, and Hindi languages while achieving benchmark F1 scores in 3 times less number of iterations. |
Selective In-Context Data Augmentation for Intent Detection using Pointwise V-Information (2023.eacl-main)
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Yen-Ting Lin, Alexandros Papangelis, Seokhwan Kim, Sungjin Lee, Devamanyu Hazarika, Mahdi Namazifar, Di Jin, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Intent detection is a fundamental element in task-oriented dialogue systems, usually occurring within the Natural Language Understanding component. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context data augmentation approach that fine-tunes a pre-trained language model and synthesizes new datapoints that correspond to given intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces training data that achieves state-of-the-art on three challenging intent detection datasets and performs on par with the state- of-the art in full-shot settings. |
Enhancing Knowledge Selection for Grounded Dialogues via Document Semantic Graphs (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversation models treat knowledge selection as a sentence ranking problem where each sentence is handled individually, ignoring the internal semantic connection between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically convert background knowledge documents into document semantic graphs and perform knowledge selection over such graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the knowledge selection task and the response generation task on HollE and generalizes on unseen topics in WoW. |
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). |