Papers by Dou Hu
DialogueCRN: Contextual Reasoning Networks for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on ERC lack the ability to extract and integrate emotional clues from the conversational context. |
| Approach: | They propose a new model that uses multi-turn reasoning modules to extract and integrate emotional clues from conversational context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three public benchmark datasets and is highly effective and superior to existing models. |
Representation Learning with Conditional Information Flow Maximization (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-theoretic representation learning frameworks are based on the information bottleneck principle, which preserves redundant features irrelevant to the given task. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional information flow maximization framework to learn sufficient representations for the input data and target task by maximizing both input-representation and representation-label mutual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract noise-invariant sufficient representations for the input data and target task. |
Uncertainty-aware Propagation Structure Reconstruction for Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect fake news neglect a broader propagation uncertainty issue . Existing studies leverage the user interactions in a social media conversation thread to detect false news. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual graph-based model for improving fake news detection . they propose to explore latent interactions in the actual propagation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two real-world datasets showing that it is superior to existing models. |
Supervised Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize emotions have limitations in discovering the intrinsic structure of data relevant to emotion labels, and struggle to extract generalized and robust representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised adversarial contrastive learning framework for learning class-spread structured representations in a controlled manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can extract generalized and robust representations on three datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Multi-stream Information Fusion Framework for Emotional Support Conversation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ESC do not capture the dynamic transition of emotion intensity due to the difficulty to model its dynamic transition. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse three streams for the effective modelling of emotion intensity using a multi-stream fusion unit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the emotional distress of users with high-intensity of negative emotions by incorporating three different kinds of streams for the dynamic transition of emotion intensity. |
Structure-adaptive Adversarial Contrastive Learning for Multi-Domain Fake News Detection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for fake news detection capture domain-shared semantic features but fail to generalize well due to poor adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable structure knowledge transfer between multiple domains . they compare content-only and propagation-rich data to preserve structural patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn semantic and structural features across domains. |
A Unified Propagation Forest-based Framework for Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on fake news detection have focused on textual news material, but there is a lack of authoritative regulators. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explore latent correlations between propagation trees and a root-induced training strategy to encourage representations of propagation tree to be closer to their prototypical root nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework explores latent correlations between propagation trees to improve fake news detection. |
ACQUIRED: A Dataset for Answering Counterfactual Questions In Real-Life Videos (2023.emnlp-main)
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Te-Lin Wu, Zi-Yi Dou, Qingyuan Hu, Yu Hou, Nischal Chandra, Marjorie Freedman, Ralph Weischedel, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | despite its importance, there are few datasets that cover multimodal counterfactual reasoning . a dataset focusing on this area is limited because of its limited coverage over synthetic environments . |
| Approach: | They develop a video question answering dataset that provides questions on multimodal reasoning . they ask questions about counterfactual hypotheses over visual events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows a significant performance gap between models and humans . it provides questions that span physical, social, and temporal dimensions . |
VALOR-EVAL: Holistic Coverage and Faithfulness Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods focus on object hallucinations, focusing on object outputs . current evaluation methods struggle to address subtle semantic distinctions between outputs and reference data . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark covering objects, attributes, and relations . they propose metric that generalizes CHAIR metric and incorporates faithfulness and coverage . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is more comprehensive and better correlated with humans than existing evaluation methods. |
VarMAE: Pre-training of Variational Masked Autoencoder for Domain-adaptive Language Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to standard benchmarks due to the limited resources available in a domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based language model called VarMAE for domain-adaptive language understanding that encodes the context of a token into a smooth latent distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on science- and finance-domain NLU tasks show that the proposed model can be efficiently adapted to new domains with limited resources. |
Multi-Task Representation Alignment on Language Understanding: A Mutual Information Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multitask learning fail to address task interference issues . Existing methods focus on task balancing or probabilistic modeling but fail to learn sufficient representations for all target tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task representation alignment framework to achieve task-specific alignment and self-alignment on shared representations from a mutual information perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 13 representative MTL methods under label-noisy and data-constrained conditions. |
Towards Propagation Uncertainty: Edge-enhanced Bayesian Graph Convolutional Networks for Rumor Detection (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on rumor detection focus on text content and propagation structure . however, the uncertainty caused by unreliable relations in propagation structures is common . |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based model that captures propagation uncertainty for rumor detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than baseline methods on rumor detection and early rumour detection tasks. |
LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuxuan Hu, Jihao Liu, Ke Wang, Jinliang Zheng, Weikang Shi, Manyuan Zhang, Qi Dou, Rui Liu, Aojun Zhou, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without extensive domain-specific tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
Domain Differential Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (D19-56)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks are data hungry and domain sensitive, so it is difficult to obtain labeled data for every domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for domain adaptation where we model the difference between domains instead of smoothing over them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on domain adaptation in multiple experimental settings. |
compare-mt: A Tool for Holistic Comparison of Language Generation Systems (N19-4)
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| Challenge: | Unlike machine translation, natural language outputs are nuanced and there are no clear yes/no distinctions about whether they are correct or not. |
| Approach: | They describe compare-mt, a tool for holistic analysis and comparison of the results of systems for language generation tasks such as machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The compare-mt tool is an open-source pure-python package that has already proven useful to generate analyses that have been used in our papers. |
P3: Prompts Promote Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt optimization have shown effectiveness of using multiple components to optimize models . however, such unilateral approaches often yield suboptimal results due to interdependent nature of these components. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that optimizes both system and user prompts . they use offline optimized prompts to promote online prompt optimization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on general and reasoning tasks. |
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. |
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation with Domain-Aware Feature Embeddings (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on domain adaptation for neural machine translation systems where in-domain data is scarce or nonexistent. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that adapts models with domain-aware feature embeddings, which are learned via an auxiliary language modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in multiple experimental settings and with back translation. |
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO. |
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Zelin Li, Huayu Sha, Binze Hu, Yuhui Wang, Chenhao Huang, Shichun Liu, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios. |
Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a computationally difficult task in Chinese since there is no natural delimiter between words in sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-driven Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention mechanism to select the most relevant characters to enhance Transformer architecture for Chinese named entity recognition. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show the proposed mechanism improves performance. |
Memory Matters More: Event-Centric Memory as a Logic Map for Agent Searching and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for storing and retrieving memory are limited by shallow semantic retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory mechanism that organizes and retrieves past experiences to support decision-making. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LoCoMo and NarrativeQA show that CompassMem improves retrieval and reasoning performance across multiple backbone models. |
Regularized Contrastive Decoding with Hard Negative Samples for LLM Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are prone to generate hallucinations, which can undermine their reliability in high-stakes applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture hallucination signals for mitigating hallucis in large language models by regularizing the model's internal signals to a weaker model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better hallucination mitigation performance on four benchmarks. |
Partial Order-centered Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Few-shot Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot relation extraction are limited to labeled instances and rely on data labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a partial order-centered hyperbolic representation learning framework which imposes constraints on relations on instances by modeling partial order in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on three benchmark datasets on 1-shot settings lacking relation descriptions. |
Impartial Multi-task Representation Learning via Variance-invariant Probabilistic Decoding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on balancing loss or gradients but fail to address this issue due to the representation discrepancy in latent space. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that harmonizes representation spaces across tasks to ensure impartial learning by harmonizing representation spaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 12 representative methods under the same multi-task settings, especially in heterogeneous task combinations and data-constrained scenarios. |