Papers by Di Sun
Union-of-Experts: Neurons in Mixture-of-Experts are Secretly Routers (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing" by pre-designating a fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons" they pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters and show they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with 3B parameters and provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models. |
Label Effects: Shared Heuristic Reliance in Trust Assessment by Humans and LLM-as-a-Judge (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators . et al., 2024: strong labels can foster trust but also undermine it . |
| Approach: | They show that LLMs' source labels bias trust judgments by humans . they use eye-tracking data to analyze LLM internal states during judgment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is biased by disclosed source labels, the authors show . eye-tracking data show humans rely heavily on source labels for judgments . |
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
ConKI: Contrastive Knowledge Injection for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yakun Yu, Mingjun Zhao, Shi-ang Qi, Feiran Sun, Baoxun Wang, Weidong Guo, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Yang, Di Niu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis focus on general knowledge, which is inadequate to identify specific sentiments across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on three popular benchmarks on multimodal sentiment analysis metrics. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-following in instruction-follower scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, which includes multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance textual entity prediction neglect the need for external knowledge or encounter high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and heuristically generates auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability. |
VisAidMath: Benchmarking Visual-Aided Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Multi-modal Models lack a robust visual processing capability that is often masked by evaluation metrics that prioritize final-answer accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-layer evaluation framework that scrutinizes the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the generation of valid visual aids and the soundness of subsequent reasoning steps on state-of-the-art models. |
Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies attributed verbosity to biased labels, but new research shows that DPO can be effective in mitigating verboses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a method to reduce the amount of verbosity in LLMs by using a downsampling approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes the problem of verbosity by reducing the length reliance of the proposed algorithm. |
FIPO: Free-form Instruction-oriented Prompt Optimization with Preference Dataset and Modular Fine-tuning Schema (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | naive prompts can enhance the task performance of large language models, but they are resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that refines naive prompts according to task outputs from in-box testing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a large-scale dataset and performed fairly across multiple models. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
VP-MEL: Visual Prompts Guided Multimodal Entity Linking (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal entity linking rely on mention words as retrieval cues, which limits their ability to effectively utilize information from both images and text. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual prompt-guided multimodal entity linking task for a text-image pair . they propose VPWiki to facilitate this task and a framework to capture latent information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on a VPWiki dataset. |
RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels. |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Yu, Qian-Wen Zhang, Lingfeng Qiao, Di Yin, Fang Li, Jie Wang, Chen Zeng Xi, Suncong Zheng, Xiaolong Liang, Xing Sun
| Challenge: | Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
The Security Threat of Compressed Projectors in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mainstream VLPs have significant security implications, but their security implications have not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | a study evaluates the security of visual language projectors by comparing them to uncompressed projector. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation reveals significant differences in security profiles between compressed and uncompressed projectors. |
Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiahao Zhu, Daizong Liu, Pan Zhou, Xing Di, Yu Cheng, Song Yang, Wenzheng Xu, Zichuan Xu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun, Zeyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal sentence grounding ignore two crucial issues . 1) Boundary-bias: the video downsampling process may lose these two frames . 2) Reasoning-biases: such incorrect new boundary frames lead to the reasoning bias . |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames . they use a reasoning strategy to learn the inter-relationship among these frames a . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of a new siamese sampling network on three challenging datasets. |
LLMs as Bridges: Reformulating Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) lack a strong correlation between image-text pairs and is ungroundable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates GMNER into a joint MNER-VE-VG task by leveraging large language models as a connecting bridge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the existing GMNER dataset and achieves absolute leads of 10.65%, 6.21%, and 8.83% in all three subtasks. |
Ted-Tok: Maintaining an Evolving Vocabulary for Lifelong Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Decoding at the Speed of Thought: Harnessing Parallel Decoding of Lexical Units for LLMs (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Chenxi Sun, Hongzhi Zhang, Zijia Lin, Jingyuan Zhang, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Bin Chen, Chengru Song, Di Zhang, Kun Gai, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated exceptional capability in natural language understanding and generation, but their generation speed is limited by the inherently sequential nature of their decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that accelerates decoding process without sacrificing quality . they propose lexical unit decoding, which can be integrated with other methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces decoding time while maintaining quality while maintaining output quality. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
How Numerical Precision Affects Arithmetical Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Guhao Feng, Kai Yang, Yuntian Gu, Xinyue Ai, Shengjie Luo, Jiacheng Sun, Di He, Zhenguo Li, Liwei Wang
| Challenge: | Despite the success of transformer-based large language models, understanding and enhancing their mathematical capabilities remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use numerical precision as a key factor that influences LLMs' effectiveness in arithmetical tasks to determine their effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better in arithmetic tasks than transformer-based models with standard numerical precision. |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |