Papers by Dong Yan
CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Jieming Zhu, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Wenrui Liu, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Cross-modal retrieval tasks are used to retrieve data from one modality or another based on a query from another modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative cross-modal retrieval framework based on coarse-to-fine semantic modeling . they propose combining K-Means and RQ-VAE to discretize multimodal data into token sequences that support autoregressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves excellent performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval tasks. |
SILC-EFSA: Self-aware In-context Learning Correction for Entity-level Financial Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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Senbin Zhu, ChenYuan He, Hongde Liu, Pengcheng Dong, Hanjie Zhao, Yuchen Yan, Yuxiang Jia, Hongying Zan, Min Peng
| Challenge: | Currently, most sentiment analysis corpora use sequence-level annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach to financial entity-level sentiment analysis called Self-aware In-context Learning Correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the largest English and Chinese financial entity-level sentiment analysis datasets to date. |
Multiplex Word Embeddings for Selectional Preference Acquisition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings are limited in their ability to represent fixed vectors . instead, they incorporate relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables - a limitation that is addressed by a multiplex model . |
| Approach: | They propose a word embedding model which incorporates relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily extended according to various relations among words. |
MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binxu Li, Tiankai Yan, Yuanting Pan, Jie Luo, Ruiyang Ji, Jiayuan Ding, Zhe Xu, Shilong Liu, Haoyu Dong, Zihao Lin, Yixin Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal medical agent that picks the most suitable medical tools based on user inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs better than open-source models and the closed-source model, GPT-4o. |
Topology Matters: Measuring Memory Leakage in Multi-Agent LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent LLMs are rapidly moving from prototype to real-world use . network topology is a first-order security parameter in multi-aggent systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for comparing topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates topology-conditioned memory leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. |
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)
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Jun Zhan, Junqi Dai, Jiasheng Ye, Yunhua Zhou, Dong Zhang, Zhigeng Liu, Xin Zhang, Ruibin Yuan, Ge Zhang, Linyang Li, Hang Yan, Jie Fu, Tao Gui, Tianxiang Sun, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms. |
DeepGuard: Secure Code Generation via Multi-Layer Semantic Aggregation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can replicate insecure patterns from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages distributed security-relevant cues by aggregating representations from multiple upper layers via an attention-based module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework improves the secure-and-correct generation rate by 11.9% over baselines. |
“I’ve Decided to Leak”: Probing Internals Behind Prompt Leakage Intents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianshuo Dong, Yutong Zhang, Liu Yan, Zhenyu Zhong, Tao Wei, Ke Xu, Minlie Huang, Chao Zhang, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit prompt leakage vulnerabilities, raising intellectual property and confidentiality concerns. |
| Approach: | They use probing techniques to capture LLMs’ intent-related internal representations and show that they internalize prompt leakage intents in their hidden states before generating tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probes achieve 90%+ AUROC across all tested models, even when applied to new system prompts and attacks. |
Large Language Models as Zero-shot Dialogue State Tracker through Function Calling (2024.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Zhiyu Chen, Mike Ross, Patrick Huber, Seungwhan Moon, Zhaojiang Lin, Xin Dong, Adithya Sagar, Xifeng Yan, Paul Crook
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prevalent in conversational systems due to their advanced understanding and generative capabilities in general contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for solving dialogue state tracking (DST) with large language models through function calling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot DST, allowing adaptation to diverse domains without extensive data collection or model tuning. |
Covariance Matrix-Driven Image Channel Allocation for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on designing efficient multimodal fusion frameworks to bridge the semantic gap between images and texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a covariance matrix-driven image channel allocation method that expands the number of original channel maps and assigns importance scores to the expanded channel maps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three public multimodal fake news detection benchmark datasets. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
What If Consensus Lies? Selective-Complementary Reinforcement Learning at Test Time (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing TTRL methods rely on positive pseudo-labeling strategies to enhance reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time reinforcement learning framework that mitigates label noise amplification by deriving pseudo-rewards from majority voting consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates label noise amplification by implementing selective positive pseudo-labeling and entropy-gated negative p-labeled pruning. |
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models. |
Representation Interventions Enable Lifelong Knowledge Memory Control in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xuyuan Liu, Shengyu Chen, Xinshuai Dong, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Haoyu Wang, Yujun Yan, Haifeng Chen, Zhengzhang Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce outdated or inaccurate content. Updating their knowledge efficiently and accurately without costly retraining is a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model’s representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. |
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binghai Wang, Rui Zheng, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Wei Shen, Yuhao Zhou, Dong Yan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets. |
DeepGen: Diverse Search Ad Generation and Real-Time Customization (2022.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that generate ads manually are not effective in generating ad copy and generating millions of ads for large businesses. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that generates fluent ads from advertiser’s web pages in an abstractive fashion and solves practical issues such as factuality and inference speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fluent ads from advertiser’s web pages in an abstractive fashion and solves practical issues such as factuality and inference speed. |
Entity-level Interaction via Heterogeneous Graph for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for name-based entity recognition neglect the integrity of entity semantics and conduct cross-modal interaction at token-level. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal named entity recognition model that captures visual information and fuses it into tokens to rid non-entity tokens of visual noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures entity-related visual information and fuses it into tokens . it eliminates visual noise and makes non-entity tokens easily misidentified as entities . |
Multi-Scale Spectral Selection and Entropy-Guided Uncertainty Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal content detection fail to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies and ignore inherent noise in multimodal features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal rumor detection method based on a frequency domain spectral selection method and entropy-guided uncertainty fusion method to capture cross-modal semantic inconsistencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multimodal rumor detection . it shows stronger detection capability and robustness on multiple datasets . |
Persona-E²: A Human-Grounded Dataset for Personality-Shaped Emotional Responses to Textual Events (2026.acl-long)
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Yuqin Yang, Haowu Zhou, Haoran Tu, Zhiwen Hui, Shiqi Yan, HaoYang Li, Dong She, Xianrong Yao, Yang Gao, Zhanpeng Jin
| Challenge: | A critical bottleneck is the lack of ground-truth human data to link personality traits to emotional shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset to capture reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives. |
HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Zhoujun Cheng, Haoyu Dong, Zhiruo Wang, Ran Jia, Jiaqi Guo, Yan Gao, Shi Han, Jian-Guang Lou, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on table reasoning focus on flat tables and hierarchical tables . a new dataset, HiTab, aims to examine numerical reasoning over hierarchic tables based on hierarchically structured tables - a strong challenge for existing baselines and a valuable benchmark for future research. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical question answering and natural language generation dataset to study hierarchic tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is effective in QA and natural language generation over hierarchical tables. |
TASO: Task-Aligned Sparse Optimization for Parameter-Efficient Model Adaptation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Daiye Miao, Yufang Liu, Jie Wang, Changzhi Sun, Yunke Zhang, Demei Yan, Shaokang Dong, Qi Zhang, Yuanbin Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LoRA introduces substantial parameter redundancy, which not only increases the number of trainable parameters but also hinders the effectiveness of fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages importance information from the pretrained model’s weights to mitigate LoRA redundancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters required for task adaptation while providing a task-aligned perspective for LoRA redundancy reduction. |
Enhancing Multimodal Unified Representations for Cross Modal Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Shengpeng Ji, Shulei Wang, Hanting Wang, Minghui Fang, Jieming Zhu, Zhenhua Dong, Sashuai Zhou, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing studies on discrete unified representations overlook important distinctions between different dimensions of features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a codebook to optimize unified representations from pretraining and fine- and coarse-grained disentangling to optimize the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the interpretability of multimodal unified representations . they use training-free optimization of codebook and fine and coarse cross-modal disentangling . |
Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering (2026.acl-long)
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Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to overcome object hallucination are limited . Existing mitigations include costly retraining and a training-free inference framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improves accuracy by 5.8% on POPE. |
XL-NBT: A Cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a multi-lingual approach to training dialog systems is expensive and tedious, but it can be useful for cross-lingual support. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate data for multiple languages and train a multi-lingual dialog system for each language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the expensive human annotation and achieves promising results. |
Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Chenlong Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks due to their remarkable ability in context modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel context encoding to reduce attention entropy by incorporating attention sinks and selective mechanisms to reduce irregular attention . they also propose to incorporate attention sink mechanisms into the parallel encoded context to reduce the irregular attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lower irregular attention entropy and narrow performance gaps. |
Perovskite-LLM: Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models for Perovskite Solar Cell Research (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiang Liu, Penglei Sun, Shuyan Chen, Longhan Zhang, Peijie Dong, Huajie You, Yongqi Zhang, Chang Yan, Xiaowen Chu, Tong-yi Zhang
| Challenge: | a rapid advancement of perovskite solar cells has led to an exponential growth in research publications. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced system for perovskite solar cells that integrates three key components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing models in domain-specific knowledge retrieval and scientific reasoning tasks. |
Finch: Benchmarking Finance & Accounting across Spreadsheet-Centric Enterprise Workflows (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoyu Dong, Pengkun Zhang, Yan Gao, Xuanyu Dong, Yilin Cheng, Mingzhe Lu, Adina Yakefu, Shuxin Zheng
| Challenge: | FinWorkBench evaluates real-world enterprise-grade finance and accounting workflows . a human evaluation of GPT 5.1 Pro passes only 38.4% of workflows, a study finds . |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow construction process that combines LLM-assisted mining and expert annotation to build 172 composite workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed process combines expert annotation with LLM-assisted mining of workflows from authentic enterprise environments. |
Revisiting the Reliability of Language Models in Instruction-Following (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Several benchmarks have been proposed to measure instruction-following accuracy, but these scores do not translate to reliable services in real-world use. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric reliable@k and develop an automated pipeline to generate cousin prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be instantiated with cousin prompts and generates high-quality cousin prompt data. |
AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides more nuanced evaluations of alignment capabilities for large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they use a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability and a “alignment score” to assess the robustness and stability of models across diverse prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 13 tasks across three categories and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios. |
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu, Ke Lei, Jieming Zhu, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Ruiming Tang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for addressing item-level user interests are lacking in cross-domain generalization . RecBase model is domain-agnostic and can be used to enhance recommender systems' effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective that leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross- domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks on eight real-world datasets. |
ProTOD: Proactive Task-oriented Dialogue System Based on Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialogue systems engage with users in a reactive manner, relying on a basic single-query mechanism and employing passive policy planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based proactive TOD framework to improve system proactivity and goal completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves system proactivity and goal completion rates by 10% while enhancing proactive engagement. |
Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Fangda Ye, Kuicai Dong, Xie Zhifei, Yuxin Hu, Yihang Yin, Shurui Huang, Shikai Dong, Chen Zhang, Jianzhu Bao, Shuicheng Yan
| Challenge: | Recent agentic search frameworks are text-centric, overlooking multimodal evidence . a pressing task is multimodal long-form generation, a new paper argues . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
AdaTag: Multi-Attribute Value Extraction from Product Profiles with Adaptive Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract product attribute values are limited by knowledge sharing across different attributes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adaptive decoding to handle extraction of product attribute values by parameterizing the decoder with pretrained attribute embeddings, through a hypernetwork and a Mixture-of-Experts module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to handle multiple attributes without sharing the entire network parameters across all attributes. |
Knowledge-aware Pronoun Coreference Resolution (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pronoun coreference resolution only use triplets, the most common format for knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages different types of knowledge to resolve pronoun coreference with a neural model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two datasets from different domains. |
Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment rely on entity embeddings derived from monolingual KG structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic entity graph to represent entities with contextual information in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. |
Inverting the Shield: Systematically Generating Safety Tests from Policy Specifications (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing safety evaluation paradigms rely on constructed benchmarks or dynamic red-teaming to probe potential vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates specification-based software testing with AI safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher coverage and attack success counts compared to baselines. |
Reward Generalization in RLHF: A Topological Perspective (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianyi Alex Qiu, Fanzhi Zeng, Jiaming Ji, Dong Yan, Kaile Wang, Jiayi Zhou, Yang Han, Josef Dai, Xuehai Pan, Yaodong Yang
| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods share a common topology of information flow, but their alternatives have not been thoroughly explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a theory of reward generalization in reinforcement learning from human feedback . they propose induced Bayesian networks to model the impact of dataset topologies on reward generalisation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average win rate of 65% on three NLP tasks. |
NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries (2024.findings-eacl)
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Wei Zhao, Zhitao Hou, Siyuan Wu, Yan Gao, Haoyu Dong, Yao Wan, Hongyu Zhang, Yulei Sui, Haidong Zhang
| Challenge: | Creating spreadsheet formulas remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users . a novel task is proposed to generate spreadsheet formulae from a user's NL query . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table given a Natural Language query as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task generates formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a natural language query as input. |