Papers by Eric Wang
AllenNLP Interpret: A Framework for Explaining Predictions of NLP Models (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretation codebases make it difficult to apply these methods to new models and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interpreting NLP models that provides explanations for specific models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides interpretation primitives for any AllenNLP model and task, a suite of built-in interpretation methods, and a library of front-end visualization components. |
Gradient-based Analysis of NLP Models is Manipulable (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that explanation techniques can be unstable and can be manipulated to hide the actual reasoning behind the predictions of NLP models. |
| Approach: | They propose to merge a BERT-based sentiment classifier with a Facade Model that overwhelms the gradients without affecting the predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overwhelms the gradients without affecting the predictions on a variety of NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, NLI, and QA. |
Picking Apart Story Salads (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Story salads are mixtures of multiple documents that can be generated at scale . they exhibit challenging inference problems, and require global context and coherence . |
| Approach: | They propose to generate salads that exhibit challenging inference problems by exploiting the Wikipedia hierarchy . they propose a task where the objective is to group sentences from the same narratives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a novel, challenging clustering task using Wikipedia . it is difficult to identify relevant information and assemble it into coherent narratives . |
EVM-QuestBench: An Execution-Grounded Benchmark for Natural-Language Transaction Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models overlook execution accuracy and safety. |
| Approach: | They propose an execution-grounded benchmark for natural-language transaction-script generation on EVM-compatible chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark finds large performance gaps in the models with 5 independent rounds. |
Do NLP Models Know Numbers? Probing Numeracy in Embeddings (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models cannot capture numeracy, but they can be useful for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate numerical reasoning capabilities of a question-answering model . they probe token embedding methods on synthetic list maximum, number decoding, and addition tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels on questions that require numerical reasoning, i.e., it already captures numeracy. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Show, Describe and Conclude: On Exploiting the Structure Information of Chest X-ray Reports (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies do not consider the complex structure information between and within report sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which exploits the structure information between and within report sections for generating CXR imaging reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on two CXR report datasets. |
MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical datasets require high quality domain-specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides granular potential usage and supports a wide range of tasks. |
Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization Enables Tuning-free Self-Alignment of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations on eight recent LLMs reveal that DRPO significantly enhances alignment performance, enabling base models to outperform their SFT/RLHF-tuned counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach to self-alignment called Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization (DRPO) it leverages a dynamic rewarding mechanism to identify and rectify alignment weaknesses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and is highly adaptable to various alignment challenges. |
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages (2024.naacl-long)
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Jiayi Wang, David Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Toadoum Sari Sakayo, Lyse Naomi Wamba, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Iro, Saheed Abdullahi, Stephen Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Ogbu, Sam Ochieng’, Verrah Otiende, Chinedu Mbonu, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp
| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation (MT) have focused on scaling multilingual machine translation models and evaluation data to hundreds of languages, including multiple under-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use n-gram matching metrics to measure progress in multilingual machine translation to 13 typologically diverse African languages to create high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics have a higher correlation with human judgments than n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU and METEOR. |
MARS: Unleashing the Power of Speculative Decoding via Margin-Aware Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Jingwei Song, Xinyu Wang, Hanbin Wang, Xiaoxuan Lei, Tianyu Shi, Shixin Han, Eric Yang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Lynn Ai
| Challenge: | Autoregressive large language models suffer from high inference latency due to memorybandwidth constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decouples generation and verification by decoupling tokens and a lightweight draft model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers consistent and significant speedups over state-of-the-art baselines while preserving generation quality across diverse benchmarks. |
RLPrompt: Optimizing Discrete Text Prompts with Reinforcement Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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Mingkai Deng, Jianyu Wang, Cheng-Ping Hsieh, Yihan Wang, Han Guo, Tianmin Shu, Meng Song, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for finding the optimal prompt for a task are difficult to optimize. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient discrete prompt optimization approach with reinforcement learning that generates the optimal discrete stimulus after training with reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on a parameter-efficient policy network that generates the optimal discrete prompt after training with reward. |
Re-Tuning: Overcoming the Compositionality Limits of Large Language Models with Recursive Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve compositional tasks are limited by complexity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that tunes large language models to break down a problem into subproblems, solve those subproblem, and combine the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves model performance on three representative compositional tasks: integer addition, dynamic programming, and parity. |
Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to data-to-text generation focus on improving content fidelity, but lack explicit control over writing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to control writing styles by using existing sentences as "soft" templates . they conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains to test their approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. |
Enough Coin Flips Can Make LLMs Act Bayesian (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit the ability to generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt, an emergent capability known as in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models use in-context learning to generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize given few-shot examples in their input prompt, an emergent capability known as in-context learning. |
Entity Resolution in Open-domain Conversations (2021.naacl-industry)
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Mingyue Shang, Tong Wang, Mihail Eric, Jiangning Chen, Jiyang Wang, Matthew Welch, Tiantong Deng, Akshay Grewal, Han Wang, Yue Liu, Yang Liu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Recent work on incorporating external knowledge into the response generation models has attracted great interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural entity linking approach to incorporate external knowledge into the response generation models to improve the relevancy of retrieved knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the baseline model by 62.8% relative to the baseline. |
RedCoast: A Lightweight Tool to Automate Distributed Training of LLMs on Any GPU/TPUs (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine learning (ML) are attributed to large language models (LLMs), but their escalating memory requirements require developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and user-friendly tool to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs and to simplify ML pipeline development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool automates distributed training and inference for LLMs, and simplifies ML pipeline development. |
Event Detection from Social Media for Epidemic Prediction (2024.naacl-long)
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Tanmay Parekh, Anh Mac, Jiarui Yu, Yuxuan Dong, Syed Shahriar, Bonnie Liu, Eric Yang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
| Challenge: | Social media is an easy-to-access platform providing timely updates about societal trends and events. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extract epidemic-related events from social media posts to provide early warnings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect epidemic events for three unseen epidemics of Monkeypox, Zika, and Dengue while existing models fail miserably. |