Papers by Fan Xing
Maximizing the Effectiveness of Larger BERT Models for Compression (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for capturing large BERT models as teachers do not fully exploit the potential advantages of larger teachers. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages a pretrained teacher model to guide the training of a lightweight student model to enhance knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances knowledge transfer by leveraging a pretrained teacher model to guide the training of a lightweight student model. |
Unified Contextual Query Rewriting (2023.acl-industry)
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Yingxue Zhou, Jie Hao, Mukund Rungta, Yang Liu, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Vishal Vasudevan, Kellen Gillespie, Zeynab Raeesy
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are becoming increasingly popular in real-world applications to assist users in daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified contextual query rewriting model that unifies QR for friction reduction and contextual carryover . they leverage the text-to-text unified framework which uses independent tasks with weighted loss to account for task importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces friction and contextual carryover by using multiple auxiliary tasks. |
Towards Human-aligned Evaluation for Linear Programming Word Problems (2024.lrec-main)
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Linzi Xing, Xinglu Wang, Yuxi Feng, Zhenan Fan, Jing Xiong, Zhijiang Guo, Xiaojin Fu, Rindra Ramamonjison, Mahdi Mostajabdaveh, Xiongwei Han, Zirui Zhou, Yong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for MWPs diverge from human judgment and face challenges in recognizing mathematically equivalent answers. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation metric rooted in graph edit distance that features benefits such as permutation invariance and more accurate program equivalence identification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation metric features benefits such as permutation invariance and more accurate program equivalence identification. |
Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly-supervised Paraphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate paraphrases with weak supervision are limited in real-world scenarios due to the lack of coherent and controllable generated paraphrase. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate high-quality paraphrases with weak supervision . they obtain abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts. |
FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic benchmark for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance . FINCHAIN spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains and three difficulty levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to bridge symbolic reasoning and factual verification. |
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech . |
ARM2: Adaptive Reasoning Model with Vision Understanding and Executable Code (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models suffer from the "over-thinking" problem, causing performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model that balances reasoning performance and efficiency across multiple formats through a reinforcement learning framework augmented with length-aware optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces token costs while preserving performance compared to traditional models. |
PENTATRON: PErsonalized coNText-Aware Transformer for Retrieval-based cOnversational uNderstanding (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | In a large fraction of the global traffic from smart digital assistants, frictions in dialogues may be attributed to incorrect understanding of the entities in a user's query due to factors including ambiguous mentions, mispronunciation, background noise and faulty on-device signal processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a parametric transformer-based language model to learn patterns from in-session customer-device interactions coupled with a non-parametric personalized entity index to compute the correct query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the existing system and shows that it can learn the correct query from in-session customer-device interactions. |
Learning to Ask Denotative and Connotative Questions for Knowledge-based VQA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have attracted increasing attention due to their prominent performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to let LLMs learn to ask informative questions to collect visual information . they introduce concepts of denotation and connotation to promote image and question understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate high-quality questions and efficiently collect required information without expensive training or annotations. |
Contextual Rephrase Detection for Reducing Friction in Dialogue Systems (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI based dialogue systems like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant, are getting more and more prevalent in real-world applications to help users across the globe. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextual rephrase detection model ContReph to automatically identify rephrasings from multi-turn dialogues using contextual information and user-agent interaction signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the pairwise rephrase detection models by leveraging the context and user-agent interaction signals. |
CL-QR: Cross-Lingual Enhanced Query Reformulation for Multi-lingual Conversational AI Agents (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing QR systems that reformulate defective user queries are limited in English due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a query reformulation method which reformulates defective user queries to improve non-English QR performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves non-English QR performance by leveraging abundant reformulation resources in English. |
Position-Aware Depth Decay Decoding (D3): Boosting Large Language Model Inference Efficiency (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent dynamic computation methods show that not all components are required for inference, enabling a training-free pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-position aware layer skipping framework to save 1.5x times operations efficiently while maintaining performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 1.5x speedup on large language models with no retraining and with comparable performance on the GSM8K and BBH benchmarks. |
CGF: Constrained Generation Framework for Query Rewriting in Conversational AI (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Jie Hao, Yang Liu, Xing Fan, Saurabh Gupta, Saleh Soltan, Rakesh Chada, Pradeep Natarajan, Chenlei Guo, Gokhan Tur
| Challenge: | Large-scale conversational AI agents such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant help millions of users to perform a lot of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Constrained Generation Framework for query rewriting at global and personalized levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the query rewriting performance. |
SedarEval: Automated Evaluation using Self-Adaptive Rubrics (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation paradigms rely on generic scoring rubrics that fail to consider the specificities of each question and its problem-solving process. |
| Approach: | They propose a new evaluation paradigm based on self-adaptive rubrics that mimic a human evaluator's analytical process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm achieves higher concordance rate with human graders than existing paradigms, including GPT-4. |
Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting During Domain Adaptation of Seq2seq Language Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on lifelong learning requires incremental memory space to learn a model . existing work on experience replay or elastic weighted consolidation requires incremental space . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a recall optimization mechanism to memorize parameters of previous tasks via regularization and a domain drift estimation algorithm to compensate the drift between different domains in the embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA models on paraphrase and dialog response generation tasks. |
RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation (2024.findings-naacl)
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Yancheng Wang, Ziyan Jiang, Zheng Chen, Fan Yang, Yingxue Zhou, Eunah Cho, Xing Fan, Yanbin Lu, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingzhen Yang
| Challenge: | Existing recommendations systems are limited in generalizing to new tasks due to model scale and data size constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered autonomous recommender agent, RecMind, which is capable of leveraging external knowledge to provide zero-shot personalized recommendations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing zero/few-shot LLM-based recommendation baseline methods in various tasks and achieves comparable performance to a fully trained recommendation model P5. |
Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingjie Li, Xiang Li, Chenlei Guo, Xing Fan, Ruhi Sarikaya, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Large language model agents rely on in-context policy documents to act as effective user assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity in agent policy across four levels to evaluate agents under increasing complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline in data-sparse and high-complexity settings. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
A Survey on Multi-modal Intent Recognition: Recent Advances and New Frontiers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal intent recognition (MIR) requires integrating non-verbal cues from real-world contexts to enhance human intention understanding. |
| Approach: | They present a comprehensive review of multi-modal intent recognition . they provide a survey of the field covering textual, visual, and acoustic signals . |
| Outcome: | The present survey summarises the current state of multi-modal intent recognition . it includes a comprehensive taxonomy and advanced methods . |
Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Defective queries impact the robustness of conversational AI systems such as Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant. |
| Approach: | They propose a Personalized Query Rewriting system that takes into account individual preferences or unique error patterns identified from a user's historical interactions with the conversational AI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has been proven on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments. |
Multi-Granularity Fusion Text Semantic Matching Based on WoBERT (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-matching methods struggle with semantic nuances in short texts . a novel approach to improve text semantic matching is being developed . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity fusion model that harnesses a pre-trained language model to capture text semantic nuances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese short text matching datasets compared to traditional methods . the proposed model captures individual text semantic nuances and improves accuracy . |
Automatic Generation of Citation Texts in Scholarly Papers: A Pilot Study (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on automatic generation of citation texts in scholarly papers have not investigated this problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an implicit citation extraction model based on BERT and a multi-source pointer-generator network with cross attention mechanism for citation text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate short texts to describe cited papers in scholarly papers with training data. |
Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve comprehension of current user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the CQR model's ability to generate user preference-aligned rewrites. |
PAIGE: Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder for Query Rewriting in Dialogue Systems (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fix faulty queries are limited in their ability to fix them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Personalized Adaptive Interactions Graph Encoder that integrates user's affinities and query semantics to refine utterance embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed Query Rewriting (QR) techniques improve the rewrite accuracy of state-of-the-art baselines by 12.5–17.5% while having nearly ten times fewer parameters. |
Mitigating Training Imbalance in LLM Fine-Tuning via Selective Parameter Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that the order of training samples can affect model performance, but this is not the case. |
| Approach: | They propose to merge supervised fine-tuning models with different data orders to mitigate this imbalance by parameter merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the weighted-average method on five datasets. |