Papers by Dongfang Liu
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
Improving Attributed Text Generation of Large Language Models via Preference Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they produce unreliable content. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the attribution task as preference learning and introduce an automatic preference optimization framework that synthesizes attribution preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality than existing methods. |
Take Off the Training Wheels! Progressive In-Context Learning for Effective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL) however, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment method that embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses vanilla ICL and achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. |
MUSTIE: Multimodal Structural Transformer for Web Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Madian Khabsa, Hamed Firooz, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent sequential modeling approaches focus on extracting information from textual sources while ignoring rich information from other modalities such as image and web layout. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel MUltimodal Structural Transformer that integrates multiple modalities for web information extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on WebSRC and Common Crawl benchmarks. |
MEPT: Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning as a Manifold Mapper (2025.emnlp-main)
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Runjia Zeng, Guangyan Sun, Qifan Wang, Tong Geng, Sohail Dianat, Xiaotian Han, Raghuveer Rao, Xueling Zhang, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations show that Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning outperforms state-of-the-art parameter efficient baselines on SuperGLUE. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for manifold mapping using multiple prompt experts. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on SuperGLUE while reducing activated prompts by 79.25%. |
LycheeCluster: Efficient Long-Context Inference with Structure-Aware Chunking and Hierarchical KV Indexing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based methods compromise semantic integrity through fixed-size chunking and suffer from inefficient linear scanning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that preserves local semantic coherence through boundary-aware chunking and constructs a recursive hierarchical index rooted in the triangle inequality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 3.6 end-to-end inference speedup with negligible degradation in model performance. |
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Liang, Junhan Zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Qifan Wang, Yuning Mao, Jingang Wang, Hanchao Yu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Fuli Feng, Lifu Huang, Xiaojun Quan, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods only introduce prompts at the input layer, limiting performance and leaving large room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts for pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with pre-trained models on the SuperGLUE benchmark. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs can confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering "I don't know". |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework that fuses evidence from multiple sources and iteratively revises the hallucinous content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. |
On-the-Fly VLA Adaptation via Test-Time Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Changyu Liu, Yiyang Liu, Taowen Wang, Qiao Zhuang, James Chenhao Liang, Wenhao Yang, Renjing Xu, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu, Cheng Han
| Challenge: | Existing vision-language-action models are unsuitable for simulated or physical-world deployments . current methods fail when confronted with inherent real-world dynamic variability. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time reinforcement learning framework that enables on-the-fly policy adaptation during inference. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves adaptability, stability and task success in dynamic, previously unseen scenarios. |
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering system lack large-scale question matching corpora . lack of large-sized question matching results in problem solving . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus which is released to the public . they use a search engine to collect large-sized question pairs related to high-frequency words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrasing. |
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |