Papers by Fei Shen

44 papers
Steering Away from Refusal: A Black-box Jailbreak Method Based on First-Token Distribution (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to analyze black-box jailbreaks lack direct optimization signals to refine adversarial prompts.
Approach: They propose a distribution-jailbreak attack method that selects effective jailbreak templates and iteratively optimizes adversarial suffixes by maximizing the KL divergence from the standard refusal distribution.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate (ASR) on all tested open-source models and delivers over 94% ASR on GPT-4.1.
Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for style transfer are based on an inductive learning approach, which represents the style as embeddings, decoder parameters, or discriminator parameters and directly applies these general rules to the test cases.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-based context-aware style representation that involves top-K relevant sentences in the target style in the transfer process.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and is general and effective to the task of unsupervised style transfer.
ReFSQL: A Retrieval-Augmentation Framework for Text-to-SQL Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods that align natural language with SQL Language underestimate inherent structural characteristics of SQL and lead to structure errors.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-argument framework that aligns natural language with SQL Language and trains one encoder-decoder-based model to fit all questions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves accuracy and robustness of text-to-SQL generation on five datasets.
REALM: A Dataset of Real-World LLM Use Cases (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on LLM adoption and their social implications lack empirical grounding, weakening their validity.
Approach: They propose to integrate a dataset of over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles to provide insights into LLM adoption across different domains.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes over 94,000 LLM use cases collected from Reddit and news articles.
Experience-driven Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions . training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to limited rewards and prohibitive costs.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significant gains over the base model with 1K public trajectories as RL experiences . it achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o .
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly.
Approach: They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models.
Exploring Key Point Analysis with Pairwise Generation and Graph Partitioning (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for key point analysis rely on semantic similarity instead of measuring the existence of shared key points .
Approach: They propose a key point analysis approach with pairwise generation and graph partitioning to summarize arguments into a concise set of key points.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses existing models on ArgKP and QAM datasets.
SocialBench: Sociality Evaluation of Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
Profiling-Free Mixed-Precision Quantization for MoE LLMs via Fuzzy Rule Interpolation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models are scaling in size and capability, driving substantial computational and memory costs.
Approach: They propose a mixed-precision quantization framework that uses fuzzy rule interpolation to predict quantization error from only sparse samples.
Outcome: The proposed framework accelerates the profiling phase by up to 15.7 on DeepSeek-V2 while achieving comparable or slightly superior zero-shot accuracy.
Maximizing Local Entropy Where It Matters: Prefix-Aware Localized LLM Unlearning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to machine unlearning treat all tokens indiscriminately and enforce uncertainty over the entire vocabulary.
Approach: They propose a framework that targets the prefix in a response and minimizes uncertainty in the critical subspace.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior forgetting efficacy and utility preservation compared to baselines.
The Mirage of Model Editing: Revisiting Evaluation in the Wild (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: despite near-perfect results, effectiveness of model editing in real-world applications remains unclear.
Approach: They propose QAEdit and WILD to better reflect real-world use of model editing . they propose a benchmark aligned with widely used question answering datasets and a task-agnostic evaluation framework .
Outcome: The proposed QAEdit benchmark and WILD evaluation framework show that current models perform worse than previously reported.
Textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that current models rely on shallow heuristics to predict solutions . a textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning framework enforces the models to distinguish semantically similar examples while holding different mathematical logic.
Approach: They propose a textual Enhanced Contrastive Learning framework which enforces models to distinguish semantically similar examples while holding different mathematical logic.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on benchmark and challenge datasets in English and Chinese.
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited.
Approach: They propose an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT.
Outcome: Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines.
Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter (P19-1)

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Challenge: Recent research has achieved impressive results in single-turn dialogue modelling, but multi-turn models still remain challenging.
Approach: They propose to rewrite human utterances as a pre-process to help multi-turn dialgoue modelling.
Outcome: The proposed architecture achieves remarkably good performance on the utterance rewriting task.
Automated Fine-Grained Mixture-of-Experts Quantization (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures is inadequate for model compression.
Approach: They propose a specialized quantization framework for Mixture of Experts architectures . they find that expert networks exhibit distinctive channel-wise outlier distributions ."
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on the Mixtral-8x7b-v0.1 architecture while maintaining minimal computational overhead.
MMEvol: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
ComSearch: Equation Searching with Combinatorial Strategy for Solving Math Word Problems with Weak Supervision (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing weakly-supervised methods for solving math word problems are expensive and time-consuming.
Approach: They propose a weakly-supervised approach to solve math word problems . they propose 'comsearch' algorithm which compresses the search space by excluding mathematically equivalent equations.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm can compress the search space by excluding mathematically equivalent equations.
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks.
Approach: They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset.
Enhancing Character-Level Understanding in LLMs through Token Internal Structure Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) use tokenization methods but often obscure internal character structures within tokens.
Approach: They propose a method that improves models’ ability to capture character positions within tokens by training them on reverse character prediction tasks using the tokenizer’s vocabulary.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed method improves position prediction accuracy in large language models, enabling more precise identification of target characters in original text.
Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) relying on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional embeddables, resulting in degradation of quality.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeds.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance of prompt-based methods on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets.
Seeking Diverse Reasoning Logic: Controlled Equation Expression Generation for Solving Math Word Problems (2022.aacl-short)

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Challenge: Existing methods to solve Math Word Problems rely on human annotation . empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown and multiple-un unknown benchmarks.
Approach: They propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance on single-unknown and multiple-un unknown benchmarks with 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unequal datasets.
Small LLMs Are Weak Tool Learners: A Multi-LLM Agent (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with impressive capabilities, but they lack domain specificity, real-time information and face challenges in solving specialized problems.
Approach: They propose a multi-LLM approach that decomposes the aforementioned capabilities into a planner, caller, and summarizer.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models by demonstrating its effectiveness and advantages in tool learning.
Label-Driven Denoising Framework for Multi-Label Few-Shot Aspect Category Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for ACD use label information of aspect categories to detect aspect categories . but, they still suffer from noise problems due to lack of supervised data .
Approach: They propose a Label-Driven Denoising Framework to alleviate noise problems for ACD subtask . they use the label information of each aspect to generate a better prototype .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the performance of the multi-label few-shot Aspect Category Detection task.
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
PRDetect: Perturbation-Robust LLM-generated Text Detection Based on Syntax Tree (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Recent methods for detecting LLM-generated text have shown impressive performance, but in real-world scenarios, users often introduce perturbations to the text.
Approach: They propose a method that detects syntactic trees that are minimally affected by perturbations and exhibit distinct differences between human-written and LLM-generated text.
Outcome: The proposed method shows that it is significantly better against perturbations on the HC3 and GPT-3.5-mixed datasets and also has the shortest time expenditure.
Universally Empowering Zeroth-Order Optimization via Adaptive Layer-wise Sampling (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models are slow and lack of performance.
Approach: They propose a Zeroth-Order optimization framework that uses forward passes to fine-tune Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 1.7 to 3.0 wall-clock acceleration on LLaMA and OPT models.
When to Trust LLMs: Aligning Confidence with Response Quality (2024.findings-acl)

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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 .
PATIENT-𝜓: Using Large Language Models to Simulate Patients for Training Mental Health Professionals (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues.
Approach: They propose a patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy training that uses large language models to act as a simulated therapy patient.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the skill acquisition and confidence of mental health trainees beyond textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients.
Jailbreak LLMs through Internal Stance Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to exploit LLMs' inherent safety mechanism, including GCG and AutoDAN, are ineffective for certain malicious requests.
Approach: They propose a method that generates jailbreak prompts to suppress a refusal stance and induce affirmative responses by modifying adversarial prompts.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the best baseline approach in Llama-2-7b-chat and achieves a 92.2% success rate across all models.
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior.
Approach: They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework .
Outcome: The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design .
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B.
Approach: They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model.
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them .
Approach: They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families.
LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: LegalBench evaluated 20 LLMs in 162 legal tasks in 20 countries and jurisdictions.
Approach: They present a comprehensive evaluation of 21 popular Large Language Models and the first comparative analysis of the empirical results.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are based on the Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and are compared to 21 popular LLMs.
MUSEG: Reinforcing Video Temporal Understanding via Timestamp-Aware Multi-Segment Grounding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for MLLMs struggle with fine-grained temporal reasoning . despite advances in video understanding, current methods struggle with time-sensitive tasks .
Approach: They propose a time-stamp-aware multi-segment grounding method that enhances temporal understanding by introducing timestamps.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on time-sensitive tasks and generalizes well across diverse temporal understanding scenarios.
daDPO: Distribution-Aware DPO for Distilling Conversational Abilities (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Knowledge distillation (KD) with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has emerged as a promising approach to enhance the conversational abilities of smaller models using a larger teacher model.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates the teacher's distributional information into DPO distillation while preserving theoretical guarantees.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in restoring performance for pruned models and enhancing smaller models within the same LLM family.
A Law Reasoning Benchmark for LLM with Tree-Organized Structures including Factum Probandum, Evidence and Experiences (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a recent study focuses on generating impartial and interpretable judicial judgments based on established criminal fact.
Approach: They propose a law reasoning schema enriched with hierarchical factum probandum, evidence, and implicit experience that enables public scrutiny and preventing bias.
Outcome: The proposed schema enables public scrutiny and prevents bias in the "Intelligent Court" it employs a suite of legal analysis tools to address the challenge task.
Low-Entropy Watermark Detection via Bayes’ Rule Derived Detector (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text watermarking ignore strong evidences embedded in low-entropy tokens, causing statistical measures to falsely indicate the absence of a watermark.
Approach: They propose a Bayes' Rule derived watermark Detector which exploits watermark information from every token by leveraging the posterior probability of watermark’s presence.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 50% and 70% relative improvements over baselines in code generation and math problem-solving tasks.
The Evolution of Thought: Tracking LLM Overthinking via Reasoning Dynamics Analysis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Explicit reasoning trajectories increase performance but often trigger overthinking . despite its importance, this study examines how each step of reasoning affects the final outcome .
Approach: They propose a Reasoning Completion Point Detector that detects the RCP by monitoring rank dynamics of termination tokens.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces token usage by up to 44% while preserving accuracy.
InternLM-Law: An Open-Sourced Chinese Legal Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: InternLM-Law is a large language model (LLM) tailored for addressing diverse legal tasks related to Chinese laws.
Approach: They introduce a large language model (LLM) tailored for addressing diverse legal tasks related to Chinese laws.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than existing models in a variety of legal tasks related to Chinese laws.
MadaKV: Adaptive Modality-Perception KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Multimodal Long-Context Inference (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing KV cache eviction methods fail to capture modality-specific information, resulting in suboptimal performance.
Approach: They propose a modality-adaptive key-value (KV) cache eviction strategy to enhance the efficiency of multimodal large language models in long-context inference.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the KV cache memory footprint and model inference latency while maintaining high accuracy across multimodal long-context tasks.
Parallel Instance Query Network for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing.
Approach: They propose a method that sets up global and learnable instance queries to extract entities from a sentence in a parallel manner.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on nested and flat datasets.
Pruning Foundation Models for High Accuracy without Retraining (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Despite the superior performance of foundation models, it is challenging to deploy large language models in practical applications due to their massive parameters and computations.
Approach: They propose a pruning algorithm to prune LLMs in one-shot without retraining . they propose retrainable pruning algorithms to prune multiple weights in LLM .
Outcome: The proposed pruning methods perform better than baseline pruning methods on sparse and unstructured sparsity models.
The Fall of ROME: Understanding the Collapse of LLMs in Model Editing (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies have found that model editing methods can cause large language models to collapse with just a single edit.
Approach: They propose a method that uses prefixed keys and adds prefixes during testing to prevent model collapse.
Outcome: The proposed method prevents model collapse while maintaining effectiveness, the authors show . Rank-One Model Editing (ROME) has been found to cause model collapse with just a single edit .
Unfolding the Headline: Iterative Self-Questioning for News Retrieval and Timeline Summarization (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: a new approach to timeline summarization is proposed for open-domain news content . large language models (LLMs) can be used to extract and organize news events from multiple documents .
Approach: They propose a method to integrate Large Language Models into news timeline summarization by iterating on how events are linked and posing new questions.
Outcome: The proposed system is able to generate and refresh chronological summaries based on documents retrieved in each round.

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