Papers by Feng Xie

41 papers
Exploring Question-Specific Rewards for Generating Deep Questions (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Recent question generation approaches use the sequence-to-sequence framework to optimize the log likelihood of ground-truth questions using teacher forcing.
Approach: They propose to optimize for QG-specific objectives via reinforcement learning to improve question quality.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the fluency, relevance, and answerability of generated questions.
Enhancing Speech-to-Speech Dialogue Modeling with End-to-End Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: End-to-end speech-to speech (S2S) dialogue systems face key challenges in incorporating external knowledge into their models.
Approach: They propose a framework that directly retrieves relevant textual knowledge from speech queries.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the performance of end-to-end speech-tospeech dialogue systems while achieving higher retrieval efficiency.
Generative-to-Discriminative Test-Time Adaptation via Manifold-Aware Diffusion and Bayesian Distillation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing discriminative approaches suffer from "confident but wrong" failure mode, blindly adapting to OOD noise leading to error accumulation.
Approach: They propose a TTA framework that harmonizes the robustness of generative diffusion models with the efficiency of discriminative regression networks via Bayesian Diffusion Distillation (BDD).
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces MAE from 0.6872 to 0.5673 and boosts binary accuracy by 5.81 percentage points (reaching 57.33%) it also reduces the MAE of the MOSI to SIMS shift and achieves an 11.18-point gain over the baseline.
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations.
Approach: They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space .
Outcome: Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning.
Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy and propose 'agentic memory' to train such unified behaviors.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines on five long-horizon benchmarks and achieves higher-quality long-term memory and more efficient context usage.
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches.
Approach: They propose a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces tool-call rounds by 20% while improving accuracy and efficiency while maintaining the same level of performance as existing models.
Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to prune Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are overparameterized and require fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a pruning method that uses first-order pruning to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms first-order pruning and zero-order methods at sparsity levels.
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions.
Approach: They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations.
Demonstrating ViviDoc: Generating Interactive Documents through Human-Agent Collaboration (2026.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Recent LLM-based agents can automate content creation, but naively applying them yields uncontrollable and unverifiable outputs.
Approach: They propose a human-agent collaborative system that generates interactive educational documents from a single topic input.
Outcome: The proposed system generates documents comparable in quality to human-authored ones.
PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing reward models evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking bidirectional interaction nature of empathy.
Approach: They propose a reward model that evaluates empathy from a single perspective . they propose PERM to integrate a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality .
Outcome: a new reward model outperforms state-of-the-art models on an emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset.
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses.
Scalable-DSC: A Structural Template Prompt Approach to Scalable Dialogue State Correction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to correct wrong slot values in dialogue state tracking are intertwined with specific DST models, limiting their applicability to other DSTs.
Approach: They propose a Scalable Dialogue State Correction model that corrects wrong slot values in predicted dialogue states by using a structural template prompt.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4.
DuNST: Dual Noisy Self Training for Semi-Supervised Controllable Text Generation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to augment self-training (ST) in attribute-controllable language generation are limited and limited.
Approach: They propose a new ST framework that integrates self-generated pseudo text into attribute-controllable language generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be applied to semi-supervised controllable language generation.
REAL: REtrieval-reAsoning and Logic-constructed Attention Behaviors for Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to evict keyvalue caches ignore diverse behavior in failure cases, such as bias and distraction.
Approach: They propose a method to analyze attention head behaviors in success and failure scenarios by maximizing signal-to-noise ratio and minimizing noise from bias and distraction.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves comparable accuracy to the strongest baseline, HeadKV-R2 on LongBench v2 while requiring 32x less space.
EmoCharacter: Evaluating the Emotional Fidelity of Role-Playing Agents in Dialogues (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: EmoCharacter evaluates emotional fidelity of role-playing agents in dialogues . current evaluations focus on personality fidelity, tone imitation, and knowledge consistency .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess emotional fidelity of role-playing agents in dialogues using large language models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures emotional fidelity of role-playing agents and the characters they portray.
GOBench: Stage-Wise Diagnostics and the Visual Paradox in Multimodal Graph Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, score outcomes only and cannot localize where failures occur along the modeling pipeline.
Approach: They propose a Graph Optimization benchmark that aligns multiple modalities with solver-derived oracles and a diagnostic protocol that evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results.
Outcome: Graph Optimization benchmark (GOBench) evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results . vision reliably increases inference cost, while reliability impact is regime-dependent . current benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, fail to localize failures .
UCL-Bench: A Chinese User-Centric Legal Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing legal benchmarks focusing on knowledge and logic evaluate LLMs on various tasks in legal domain, but few have explored the practical application of LLM by actual users.
Approach: They propose a Chinese user-centric legal benchmark that aims to assess the practical application of LLMs by real users.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on various tasks in legal domain but does not outperfect ChatGPT.
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs.
Pruning-then-Expanding Model for Domain Adaptation of Neural Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for domain adaptation suffer from catastrophic forgetting, large domain divergence, and model explosion.
Approach: They propose a method which prunes the model and keeps the important neurons or parameters responsible for both general-domain and in-domain translation.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on different language pairs and domains compared with strong baselines.
IGenBench: Benchmarking the Reliability of Text-to-Infographic Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Generated infographics may appear correct at first glance but contain easily overlooked issues, such as distorted data encoding or incorrect textual content.
Approach: They propose to evaluate reliability of text-to-infographic generation using IGenBench . they employ multimodal large language models to verify each question .
Outcome: The proposed framework decomposes reliability verification into atomic yes/no questions based on a taxonomy of 10 question types.
Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents.
Approach: They propose a framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process.
Outcome: Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of the proposed framework.
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing reasoning-oriented LLMs lack a blind self-thinking paradigm . current models fail to recognize when their reasoning is underinformed or based on ambiguous user instructions .
Approach: They propose a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing.
ViDoRAG: Visual Document Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dynamic Iterative Reasoning Agents (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on image-based question answering (QA) but ignore the fundamental challenges of efficient retrieval, comprehension, and reasoning within dense visual documents.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-agent RAG framework tailored for complex reasoning across visual documents that employs a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM)-based hybrid strategy to handle multi-modal retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by over 10% on the competitive ViDoSeek benchmark.
FRAG: A Flexible Modular Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation based on Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation struggle with a trade-off between flexibility and retrieval quality.
Approach: They propose a flexible modular KG-RAG framework that uses query text instead of KGs . they propose to use query text to infer the structural information of reasoning paths .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency and low resource consumption.
Ask Again, Then Fail: Large Language Models’ Vacillations in Judgment (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing large language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions . this is a challenge for generating reliable responses and building user trust .
Approach: They propose a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism and two metrics to quantify this inconsistency . they also develop a framework that teaches large language models to maintain original correct judgments .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the general capabilities of large language models by allowing them to maintain original correct judgments.
DPDV: Dual-Pathway and Dual-View Representation Learning for Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-Video Retrieval (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text-based person anomaly search fail to address the pose-semantic gap . asymmetric cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships .
Approach: They propose a video retrieval framework that partitions visual features into two categories based on relevance to the text query and performs effective interaction.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves leading retrieval performance on five benchmark datasets.
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
ViLBench: A Suite for Vision-Language Process Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Despite its advantages, evaluation on PRMs remains less explored, especially in the multimodal domain.
Approach: They propose to benchmark vision large language models as output reward models and process reward models as process-supervised reward models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms both ORM and PRM on vision-language benchmarks and achieves an average improvement of 3.3% over standard CoT and up to 2.5% over its untrained counterpart on ViLBench.
WebAnchor: Anchoring Agent Planning to Stabilize Long-Horizon Web Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning and strategy coherence.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that decouples planning and execution.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline and first-step RL frameworks on four benchmarks.
GenomeQA: Benchmarking General Large Language Models for Genome Sequence Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on specialized DNA models trained for sequence prediction or evaluate biological knowledge using text-only questions.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate general-purpose LLMs on sequence-based genome inference tasks.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark outperforms baseline models on sequence-based genome inference tasks.
Importance-based Neuron Allocation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to multilingual neural machine translation tend to preserve general knowledge, but ignore language-specific knowledge.
Approach: They propose to divide model neurons into general and language-specific parts based on their importance across languages.
Outcome: The proposed model can preserve general knowledge but ignore language-specific knowledge on several languages, and is universal and cost-effective.
Semantic Graphs for Generating Deep Questions (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing research has focused on generating factoid questions relevant to one fact obtainable from a single sentence.
Approach: They propose a framework that first constructs a semantic-level graph and then encodes it by introducing an attention-based GGNN.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures the global structure of the document and facilitates reasoning over multiple facts.
Counterfactual Inference for Text Classification Debiasing (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to capture unintended dataset biases are expensive and require elaborate balancing strategies.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic text classification debiasing framework which can effectively avoid employing data manipulations or designing balancing mechanisms.
Outcome: The proposed framework can effectively avoid data manipulations or designing balancing mechanisms to capture unintended dataset biases.
Token-level Adaptive Training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing token imbalance phenomenon in natural language as different tokens appear with different frequencies, which leads to different learning difficulties for tokens in Neural machine translation (NMT).
Approach: They propose to assign tokens with different frequencies to target tokens during training to encourage the model to pay more attention to low-frequency tokens.
Outcome: The proposed model yields consistent improvements on ZH-EN, EN-RO, and EN-DE translation tasks, especially on sentences that contain more low-frequency tokens.
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels.
Approach: They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining.
Datasets and Recipes for Video Temporal Grounding via Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for video temporal grounding suffer from limited temporal awareness and poor generalization.
Approach: They propose a two-stage training framework that integrates supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning to improve both the accuracy and robustness of VTG models.
Outcome: The proposed training framework outperforms existing models on multiple benchmarks on open-domain and challenging scenarios.
SkewRoute: Training-Free LLM Routing for Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Score Skewness of Retrieved Context (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models incur high inference costs during deployment, causing hallucination . no dedicated routing methods exist for RAG, and existing training-based routers face challenges scaling to this domain .
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play routing framework that optimizes performance and cost . the framework delivers over 3x higher routing effectiveness while reducing runtime to less than 0.001x .
Outcome: The proposed framework delivers over 3x higher routing effectiveness while reducing runtime to less than 0.001x compared to existing methods.
HumanLLM: Benchmarking and Improving LLM Anthropomorphism via Human Cognitive Patterns (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs).
Approach: They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters.
LAiW: A Chinese Legal Large Language Models Benchmark (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Xie et al., 2023) show that large language models (LLMs) can generate legal text, but lack the legal syllogism . legal experts are cautious about their practical application due to the opaque nature of the LLMs.
Approach: They propose a Chinese legal LLM benchmark structured around the legal syllogism . they evaluate LLMs across three levels of capability, each reflecting a more complex stage of legal .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark identifies that LLMs lack the legal syllogism, which hinders trust and understanding from legal experts.
Escaping the Sisyphus Dilemma: Experience Replay for Robust Text-to-Optimization Modeling (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented strategies for large language models fail to capture dynamic reasoning required to resolve execution failures.
Approach: They propose a framework that implements Experience Replay to transform transient rectification steps into persistent knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model accuracy by 8.45% on complex tasks while reducing token consumption by 28.65% and interaction turns by 25.82%.

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