Papers by Fei Gao
OmniCharacter: Towards Immersive Role-Playing Agents with Seamless Speech-Language Personality Interaction (2025.acl-long)
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Haonan Zhang, Run Luo, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Ting-En Lin, Pengpeng Zeng, Qiang Qu, Feiteng Fang, Min Yang, Lianli Gao, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on replicating dialogues in textual form, neglecting the role’s voice traits as a crucial effect in interaction, which tends to be more immersive experiences in realistic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a first seamless speech-language personality interaction model to achieve immersive RPAs with low latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits role-specific personality traits and vocal traits throughout the interaction, enabling a mixture of speech and language responses. |
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
OVM, Outcome-supervised Value Models for Planning in Mathematical Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining accuracy throughout multiple reasoning steps, especially in mathematical reasoning where an error in earlier steps can propagate to subsequent ones and ultimately leading to an incorrect answer. |
| Approach: | They propose an Outcome-supervised Value Model (OVM) that employs outcome supervision for training a value model, which prioritizes steps that lead to accurate conclusions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on two multi-step reasoning datasets, GSM8K and Game of 24. |
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)
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Hongzhan Chen, Hehong Chen, Ming Yan, Wenshen Xu, Gao Xing, Weizhou Shen, Xiaojun Quan, Chenliang Li, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on role-playing agents have focused on enhancing their conversational capability, role-specific knowledge and style, but there has been a gap in assessing their social intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the sociality of role-playing agents using LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from various sources and covers a wide range of 500 characters and over 6,000 question prompts and 30,800 multi-turn role-playing utterances. |
Towards Unified Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Text Classification (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Fuli Luo, Chuanqi Tan, Minghui Qiu, Fei Yang, Qiuhui Shi, Songfang Huang, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning has boosted performance of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) on few-shot text classification, but PLMs are unfamiliar with prompt-style expressions during pre-training, which limits the few- shot learning performance on downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt-based fine-tuning that captures prompting semantics from non-target NLP datasets and propose 'Prompt-Options-Verbalizer' for joint prompt learning across different NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt-based fine-tuning frameworks on few-shot text classification tasks. |
Efficient Sequence Learning with Group Recurrent Networks (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recurrent neural networks have achieved state-of-the-art results in many artificial intelligence tasks, such as language modeling, neural machine translation and speech recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient architecture to improve the efficiency of such RNN model training by adopting the group strategy for recurrent layers while exploiting the representation rearrangement strategy between layers as well as time steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves comparable or better accuracy compared with baselines, with a much smaller number of parameters and at a lower computational cost. |
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)
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Run Luo, Haonan Zhang, Longze Chen, Ting-En Lin, Xiong Liu, Yuchuan Wu, Min Yang, Yongbin Li, Minzheng Wang, Pengpeng Zeng, Lianli Gao, Heng Tao Shen, Yunshui Li, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Xiaobo Xia, Jingkuan Song, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | a new framework for image-text instruction data evolution improves MLLM performance . lack of high-quality instruction data remains a major bottleneck in ML modeling . |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal instruction data evolution framework that iteratively enhances data quality through fine-grained perception, cognitive reasoning, and interaction evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves MLLM performance in nine vision-language tasks while using significantly less data. |
Harvesting Events from Multiple Sources: Towards a Cross-Document Event Extraction Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event extraction aims to extract structured information from unstructured text. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-document event extraction pipeline that integrates event information from multiple documents and provides a comprehensive perspective on events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves about 72% F1 in end-to-end cross-document event extraction, setting up a benchmark for future research. |
Mixture-of-Minds: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Table Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Yuhang Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Ke Li, Mingyi Wang, Qiao Liu, Qifei Wang, Jiayi Liu, Fei Liu, Serena Li, Weiwei LI, Mingze Gao, Abhishek Kumar, Xiangjun Fan, Zhuokai Zhao, Lizhu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise on understanding and reasoning over tables, but current approaches remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes table reasoning into three specialized roles: planning, coding, and answering. |
Depth Growing for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models with tens and even more than a hundred blocks have shown effectiveness in image recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach with three specially designed components to construct deeper NMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on WMT14 EnglishGerman and EnglishFrench translation tasks. |
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fei Zhao, Chengqiang Lu, Yufan Shen, Qimeng Wang, Yicheng Qian, Haoxin Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Zhen Wu, Shangyu Xing, Xinyu Dai
| Challenge: | RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images . |
| Approach: | They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a . |
| Outcome: | The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images. |
Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models (2026.acl-long)
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Binghai Wang, Yantao Liu, Yuxuan Liu, Tianyi Tang, Shenzhi Wang, Chang Gao, Chujie Zheng, Yichang Zhang, Le Yu, Shixuan Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Bowen Yu, Fei Huang, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies observe a phenomenon where reward models achieve high accuracy on static datasets but fail to generalize effectively during RLHF. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy to improve performance on RM-Bench and JudgeBench. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on RM-Bench and JudgeBench by an average of 5% and improves creative writing tasks by 7%. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
When to Trust LLMs: Aligning Confidence with Response Quality (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuchang Tao, Liuyi Yao, Hanxing Ding, Yuexiang Xie, Qi Cao, Fei Sun, Jinyang Gao, Huawei Shen, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Existing methods express reliability by confidence level, but lack objective guidance . Existing approaches express reliability but lack guidance on when to trust LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based approach to align confidence with quality to ensure reliability . they propose 'conqORD' to help model to verbalize greater confidence for higher quality responses . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CONQORD significantly improves confidence and response accuracy . the proposed approach can be used to determine reliability of large language models . |
CoSafe: Evaluating Large Language Model Safety in Multi-Turn Dialogue Coreference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not noticed the safety risks of large language models . authors evaluated 1,400 questions in multi-turn dialogue coreference . |
| Approach: | They are the first to evaluate LLM safety in multi-turn dialogue coreference . they created a dataset of 1,400 questions and tested five open-source models . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that model safety decreases in multi-turn dialogue coreference scenarios . the highest success rate was with the LLaMA2-Chat-7b model, while the lowest was with mistral-7B-Instruct model . |
Machine Translation With Weakly Paired Documents (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies explore the possibility of unsupervised machine translation with monolingual data only. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mine bilingual sentences from weakly paired documents . they use word distribution-level alignments to constrain word distributions of two weakly-paired documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous results on six translation tasks using weakly paired bilingual documents and a large number of bilingual sentences. |
Task-aware Contrastive Mixture of Experts for Quadruple Extraction in Conversations with Code-like Replies and Non-opinion Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) for this specific task presents two primary challenges: the accurate extraction of multiple elements and the understanding of complex dialogue reply structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-task approach to extract sentiment quadruples from conversations by integrating expert-level contrastive loss within task-oriented mixture of experts layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing fine-tuning techniques in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. |
Do Current Video LLMs Have Strong OCR Abilities? A Preliminary Study (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark evaluates video-based optical character recognition (Video OCR) performance of multi-modal models in videos . the benchmark aims to improve video LLMs' ability to extract text from video content . previous benchmarks have focused on video QA, but not video-related QA. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the video OCR performance of multi-modal models in videos . they use a semi-automated approach that integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 1,028 videos and 2,961 question-answer pairs . it integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement . |
Enhancing Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution by Discourse Structure and Semantic Information (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-document event coreference resolution models lack the ability to capture long-distance dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct document-level Rhetorical Structure Theory trees and cross-document Lexical Chains to model structural and semantic information of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on English and Chinese datasets by large margins. |
Towards Generalizable and Robust Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL parsers must be generalizable and robust against input perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework to learn text-to-SQL parsing in stages to improve parser's ability to acquire general SQL knowledge instead of capturing spurious patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the Spider, SParC, and CoSQL datasets. |
Deputy: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Dynamic Low-Rank Substitution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing dynamic schemes such as early-exit and layer-drop reduce FLOPs but break batch processing or introduce KV-cache inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic low-rank substitution framework that employs a lightweight decision module at each layer to dynamically determine the execution branch for different tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces computation by approximately 40% compared to the original dense model while outperforming existing baseline methods. |
IRT-Router: Effective and Interpretable Multi-LLM Routing via Item Response Theory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance across a wide range of tasks . however, selecting the optimal LLM to respond to a user query often necessitates a delicate balance between performance and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM routing framework that efficiently routes user queries to the most suitable LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in terms of effectiveness and interpretability. |
From Discrimination to Generation: Low-Resource Intent Detection with Language Model Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fine-tune discriminative models on specific defined intent classes, preventing them from being directly adopted to new intent domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained generative intent model to detect new intents from different domains with no parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines that need further fine-tuning or domain-specific samples. |
Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, but the vast model parameters pose challenges in downstream fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompting strategy that analyzes each dialogue utterance before task execution to enhance LLMs' comprehension in multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds efficacy of few-shot ones. |
DialogueMMT: Dialogue Scenes Understanding Enhanced Multi-modal Multi-task Tuning for Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ERC methods fail to handle emotional cues from both visual sources and discourse structures due to the complexity of visual scenes and contextual dependencies in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Emotion Recognition in conversations that utilizes multi-task instruction tuning to enhance the model's understanding of multi-modal dialogue scenes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmark ERC datasets and is based on a video-language connector and a chain-of thought strategy. |
Unsupervised Multimodal Clustering for Semantics Discovery in Multimodal Utterances (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for semantics discovery focus on text, video, and audio, failing to leverage the rich multimodal information in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to construct augmentation views for multimodal data and use them to perform pre-training to establish well-initialized representations for subsequent clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on benchmark multimodal intent and dialogue act datasets by 2-6% over state-of-the-art methods. |
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Enyu Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhiheng Xi, Songyang Gao, Xiaoran Fan, Zichu Fei, Jingting Ye, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability. |
Soft Contextual Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing training data are limited in natural language tasks due to text characteristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method that softly augments a randomly chosen word in a sentence by its contextual mixture of multiple related words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on small and large scale machine translation datasets. |
Clear Up Confusion: Iterative Differential Generation for Fine-grained Intent Detection with Contrastive Feedback (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on fine-grained intent detection have focused on collecting large-scale and high-quality samples via crowdsourcing resulting in data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative differential generation framework with contrastive feedback to generate high-quality pseudo samples and accurately capture the crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality pseudo samples and captures crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics are not capable of evaluating text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that compares system output against reference texts based on semantics rather than surface forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric shows a high correlation with human judgment of text quality on a number of text generation tasks. |
Harnessing the Power of Large Language Model for Uncertainty Aware Graph Processing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for graph processing rely on assumptions about data relations that are inadequate when handling large and complex graph data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model enhanced by an uncertainty-aware module to provide a confidence score on the generated graph data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms by a substantial margin on ten datasets. |