Papers by Feng Xie
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| 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 . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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%. |