Papers by Feng Nie
Learning Semantic Correspondences from Noisy Data-text Pairs by Local-to-Global Alignments (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation use a large-scale training corpus to learn semantic correspondences between structured input data and associated texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a local-to-global alignment framework that uses local and global models to learn semantic correspondences from large-scale datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be generalized to restaurant and computer domains and improve alignment accuracy. |
REPT: Bridging Language Models and Machine Reading Comprehension via Retrieval-Based Pre-training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved great success on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) however, the poor support in evidence extraction hinders them from further advancing MRC. |
| Approach: | They propose a REtrieval-based pre-training approach that strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training by inherited downstream MRC tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training, which is further inherited by downstream tasks. |
MUSTIE: Multimodal Structural Transformer for Web Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Madian Khabsa, Hamed Firooz, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Recent sequential modeling approaches focus on extracting information from textual sources while ignoring rich information from other modalities such as image and web layout. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel MUltimodal Structural Transformer that integrates multiple modalities for web information extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on WebSRC and Common Crawl benchmarks. |
SAD: A Large-Scale Strategic Argumentative Dialogue Dataset (2026.acl-long)
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YongKang Liu, Jiayang Yu, Mingyang Wang, Yiqun Zhang, Ercong Nie, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Kaisong Song, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Argumentation is a key part of human reasoning and decision-making . existing argumentative corpora focus on single-turn settings, but multi-turn dialogues are often realized as multi-turned dialogues . |
| Approach: | They present a dataset for strategic multi-turn argumentation dialogues . they annotate each utterance with five strategy types, allowing multiple strategies per utterrance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that explicit prompting improves fluency, stylistic coherence and persuasiveness. |
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Liang, Junhan Zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Operation-guided Neural Networks for High Fidelity Data-To-Text Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural models for data-to-text generation generate descriptions that are not consistent with structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for data-to-text generation that uses symbolic operations to generate texts from structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the fidelity of the generated texts to the input structured data. |
Program Enhanced Fact Verification with Verbalization and Graph Attention Network (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification based on structured data are challenging and require further study. |
| Approach: | They propose a program-enhanced verbalization and a graph attention network to integrate programs and execution into textual inference models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on a benchmark dataset . it is compared with existing frameworks on symbolic and informal inference models . |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Qifan Wang, Yuning Mao, Jingang Wang, Hanchao Yu, Shaoliang Nie, Sinong Wang, Fuli Feng, Lifu Huang, Xiaojun Quan, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing prompt tuning methods only introduce prompts at the input layer, limiting performance and leaving large room for improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts for pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods with pre-trained models on the SuperGLUE benchmark. |
UniKeyphrase: A Unified Extraction and Generation Framework for Keyphrase Prediction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream methods that ignore the diversity among keyphrases or weakly capture the relation between tasks implicitly ignore keyphrase diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel end-to-end learning framework that jointly learns to extract and generate keyphrases by exploiting latent semantic relation between extraction and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms mainstream methods on a benchmarked document on keyphrase prediction. |
A Simple Recipe towards Reducing Hallucination in Neural Surface Realisation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural language generation systems often hallucinate contents when trained on loosely corresponding pairs of the input structure and text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a language understanding module for data refinement with self-training iterations to induce strong equivalence between the input data and the paired text. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the E2E challenge dataset show that the proposed framework reduces relative unaligned noise by 50% compared with the current state-of-the-art ensemble generator. |
Look Within or Beyond? A Theoretical Comparison Between Parameter-Efficient and Full Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is an alternative to Full-Parameter Fine-tuning, but its effectiveness on complex tasks such as reasoning and instruction-following remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose to use PEFT to reduce the number of trainable parameters while freezing the weights of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well on standard tasks, but weaknesses on complex and adversarial settings call for new directions beyond current paradigms. |
PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Zijing Wang, YongKang Liu, Mingyang Wang, Ercong Nie, Deyuan Chen, Zhengjie Zhao, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Multimodal instruction fine-tuning degrades textual reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs to mitigate this degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces multimodal instruction fine-tuning degradation by incorporating a plateau-guided model merging method into MLLMs. |
Bi-Tuning with Collaborative Information for Controllable LLM-based Sequential Recommendation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize sequential recommendation systems rely on item ID sequences, but they lack collaborative knowledge and limited controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple bi-tuning framework with collaborative information for controllable Large Language Model-based Sequential Recommendation (Laser) they incorporate learnable virtual tokens at prefix and suffix of input text to adapt LLMs with collaborative knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art recommendations on real-world datasets. |