Papers by Fanchao Qi
A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have leapt from static chatbots to versatile agents that tackle complex tasks such as science experiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-execute framework and propose 'EAGLET' to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three long-horizon tasks and reduces training costs by 8 compared to baselines. |
Pass off Fish Eyes for Pearls: Attacking Model Selection of Pre-trained Models (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing feature-based model selection methods are vulnerable to fine-tuning and are not reliable indicators for the PTM’s transferability. |
| Approach: | They propose feature-based model selection methods which assess PTMs’ transferability to a specific task in a fast way without fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can make FMS mistakenly judge transferability of models and can be combined with the backdoor attack to misguide the FMS to select poisoned models. |
FaithLens: Detecting and Explaining Faithfulness Hallucination (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuzheng Si, Qingyi Wang, Haozhe Zhao, Yuzhuo Bai, Guanqiao Chen, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a faithfulness hallucination detection model that can provide binary predictions and corresponding explanations to improve trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms advanced models on 12 diverse tasks. |
Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing textual backdoor attacks are vulnerable to backdoors . researchers add extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . |
| Approach: | They propose two tricks that make existing backdoor attacks much more harmful . first trick is to add an extra task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . second trick is using all the clean training data rather than the original clean data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tricks can significantly improve attack performance in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low-poisoning-rate, and label-consistent attacks. |
Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Textual adversarial samples are often misrepresented in research on security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial samples to evaluate their methods on security tasks to demonstrate the real-world concerns rather than developing impractical methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has higher practical value than the current benchmark. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
Turn the Combination Lock: Learnable Textual Backdoor Attacks via Word Substitution (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that neural natural language processing models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject neural models with backdoors activated by word substitution . their results raise a serious alarm to the security of NLP models, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed backdoors are activated by a learnable combination of word substitution and exhibit higher invisibility than previous methods. |
Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level attack models are far from perfect because of unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial adversarialist model that incorporates word substitution and particle swarm optimization to solve two problems separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves much higher success rates and crafts more high-quality adversarial examples as compared to baseline methods. |
Sub-Character Tokenization for Chinese Pretrained Language Models (2023.tacl-1)
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Chenglei Si, Zhengyan Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Fanchao Qi, Xiaozhi Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Yasheng Wang, Qun Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing tokenization methods for Chinese PLMs treat each character as an indivisible token, but ignore the unique feature of the writing system where additional linguistic information exists below the character level. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode Chinese characters into short sequences and construct Chinese vocabulary based on the encoded text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenizers can tokenize inputs into much shorter sequences, improving computational efficiency. |
HyperLoRA: Efficient Cross-task Generalization via Constrained Low-Rank Adapters Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained language models (PLMs) to emerging tasks are costly and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-network that generates task-specific weights without any optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has flexible generalization ability and superior performance over hypenetworks. |
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks can manipulate the output of deep neural networks and possess high insidiousness. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual backdoor defense based on outlier word detection that can handle all the textual attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations. |
Going “Deeper”: Structured Sememe Prediction via Transformer with Tree Attention (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies ignore hierarchical structures of sememes in sememe-based semantic description systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured sememe prediction problem to predict a sememes tree with hierarchical structures rather than a set of sememas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and shows its effectiveness . it predicts a sememe tree with hierarchical structures rather than a set of sememes . |
Automatic Construction of Sememe Knowledge Bases via Dictionaries (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sememe knowledge bases (SKBs) are used to analyze natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to build sememe knowledge bases from an existing dictionary . they propose to use existing dictionaries to build an English and a French SKB . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to HowNet, the most widely used SKB that takes decades to build manually. |
Cross-lingual Lexical Sememe Prediction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Sememes are defined as the minimum semantic units of human languages . but most languages do not have sememe-based linguistic knowledge bases . a new framework is proposed to predict sememes for words in other languages based on semems . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to model correlations between sememes and multi-lingual words in low-dimensional semantic space for sememe prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baseline methods on real-world datasets. |
OpenAttack: An Open-source Textual Adversarial Attack Toolkit (2021.acl-demo)
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Guoyang Zeng, Fanchao Qi, Qianrui Zhou, Tingji Zhang, Zixian Ma, Bairu Hou, Yuan Zang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Various attack models are distinct and implemented with different programming frameworks and settings, which hinders quick utilization and fair comparison of attack models. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source textual adversarial attack toolkit to solve these issues by combining 15 typical attack models into one toolkit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports all attack types, multilinguality, and parallel processing. |
QuoteR: A Benchmark of Quote Recommendation for Writing (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to recommend quotes are evaluated on unpublished datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a dataset that is open and contains three parts including English, standard Chinese and classical Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on all three parts of QuoteR. |
Sememe Prediction for BabelNet Synsets using Multilingual and Multimodal Information (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing sememe KBs only cover a few languages, which hinders the wide utilization of sememes. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual sememe KB based on a dictionary called BabelNet . they use multilingual synonyms, multilingual glosses and images to encode sememes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous methods in terms of MAP and F1 scores. |
Hidden Killer: Invisible Textual Backdoor Attacks with Syntactic Trigger (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual backdoor attacks insert additional contents into normal samples as triggers, causing detection and blocking of backdoors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactic structure as trigger in textual backdoor attacks . they propose to achieve similar attack performance but have higher invisibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves almost 100% success rate but has higher invisibility and stronger resistance to defenses than the insertion-based methods. |
Mind the Style of Text! Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks Based on Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that popular NLP models are vulnerable to both adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct adversarial and backdoor attacks based on text style transfer . the authors propose to use text style to alter the style of a sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that popular models are vulnerable to both attacks based on text style transfer . the results show that the proposed methods perform better than baselines in many aspects . |
WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Zihan Cai, Dian Jin, Lan Yan, Shihao Liang, Kunlun Zhu, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Ning Ding, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Long-form question answering requires two procedures: information retrieval and information synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese long-form question answering dataset called WebCPM . the dataset is based on a web search interface that engages with a search engine in real time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones . the dataset is the first Chinese LFQA dataset . |
Aligning Large Language Models to Follow Instructions and Hallucinate Less via Effective Data Filtering (2025.acl-long)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Cheng Gao, Yuzhuo Bai, Zhitong Wang, Kaikai An, Kangyang Luo, Chen Qian, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training LLMs on data containing unfamiliar knowledge during instruction tuning can encourage hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures how familiar the LLM is with instruction data and introduce an expert-aligned reward model to ensure the quality of selected samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations while maintaining a competitive ability to follow instructions. |
WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing reverse dictionary systems only support English reverse dictionary queries . a reverse dictionary can help people who can't remember a word from memory . |
| Approach: | They propose an online reverse dictionary system that outperforms other reverse dictionary systems . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English cross-lingual reverse dictionary queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reverse dictionary outperforms other reverse dictionary systems on performance . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English queries . |
Try to Substitute: An Unsupervised Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation Method Based on HowNet (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised methods for word sense disambiguation cannot work for HowNet-based WSD because of its uniqueness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which exploits the masked language model task of pre-trained language models to conduct word sense disambiguation using a lexical knowledge base as the sense inventory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significantly better performance than baseline methods. |
GATEAU: Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Gang Chen, Yunshui Li, Kangyang Luo, Chuancheng Lv, Kaikai An, Fanchao Qi, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have attempted to scale up the available data volume by synthesizing long instruction-following samples, but a lack of a well-defined strategy for ensuring data quality may introduce low-quality samples and restrict the model’s performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to identify influential samples enriched with long-range dependency relations that can be used to align large language models to handle instructions with extremely long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies samples with long-range dependency relations and shows that the model trained on these samples exhibits better instruction-following and long-context understanding capabilities. |
Better Robustness by More Coverage: Adversarial and Mixup Data Augmentation for Robust Finetuning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models perform poorly under adversarial attacks due to the large search space. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to cover a much larger proportion of the attack search space by adding textual adversarial examples during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method covers a much larger proportion of the attack search space. |
Modeling Semantic Compositionality with Sememe Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic compositionality (SC) is defined as the phenomenon that the meaning of a complex linguistic unit can be composed of the meanings of its constituents. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate sememes into SC models and employ them in learning multiword expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve significant performance boost compared to baseline methods without sememe knowledge. |