Papers by Fuli Feng

45 papers
K-order Ranking Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing list-wise methods focus on optimizing list ranking consistency for LLMs to improve ranking abilities.
Approach: They propose to extend the Plackett-Luce model to accommodate top-K ranking by extending the DPO’s Plact-Lucer model to dynamically determine appropriate K for different samples.
Outcome: The proposed model can be extended to accommodate top-K ranking and improve training efficiency.
Doc2SoarGraph: Discrete Reasoning over Visually-Rich Table-Text Documents via Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graphs (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on document visual question answering fails to capture the differences and correlations between elements of a document and associated questions.
Approach: They propose a document-visual question-answering challenge that exploits element-level semantics and employs hierarchical Graph structures to capture differences and correlations between elements.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art method and large language model in terms of Exact Match (EM) metric, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness.
Direct Multi-Turn Preference Optimization for Language Agents (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on three multi-turn agent task datasets confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the DMPO loss function.
Approach: They propose a novel loss function for multi-turn agent tasks that replaces the policy constraint with the state-action occupancy measure constraint and adds length normalization to the Bradley-Terry model.
Outcome: Experiments on three multi-turn agent task datasets confirm the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed loss function.
Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large generative models have catalyzed a paradigm shift in content generation to Personalized Generation (PGen).
Approach: They propose a multi-level taxonomy that systematically formalizes PGen's key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows.
Outcome: The proposed taxonomy bridging PGen research across multiple modalities highlights open challenges and promising directions for future exploration.
Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies construct attack prompts via manual or automatic methods, but these methods have limitations on cost and quality.
Approach: They propose an attack framework to instruct LLMs to mimic human-generated prompts through in-context learning and a defense framework that fine-tunes victim LLM's through iterative interactions with the attack framework.
Outcome: The proposed approach is based on experiments on different LLMs to evaluate their effectiveness against red teaming attacks.
Decoding Matters: Addressing Amplification Bias and Homogeneity Issue in Recommendations for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) for recommendation encounter significant challenges such as amplification bias and homogeneity.
Approach: They propose a new decoding approach called Debiasing-Diversifying Decoding (D3) that disables length normalization for ghost tokens to alleviate amplification bias and incorporates a text-free assistant model to encourage tokens less frequently generated by LLMs for counteracting recommendation homogeneity.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed approach’s effectiveness in enhancing accuracy and diversity.
Dual-Phase Accelerated Prompt Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for prompt optimization make light of the importance of high-quality initialization and the identification of effective directions.
Approach: They propose a method which uses a meta-instruction to generate high-quality initial prompts and iteratively optimize them at the sentence level.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves consistent accuracy gain over baselines with less than five optimization steps.
Latent Inter-User Difference Modeling for LLM Personalization (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives, leading to a growing demand for personalized outputs.
Approach: They propose a framework that models inter-user differences in the latent space instead of relying on language-based prompts.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on personalized review generation.
Efficient Multi-Agent System Training with Data Influence-Oriented Tree Search (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems (MAS) have high potential for tackling complex tasks through collaborative intelligence.
Approach: They propose a framework that incorporates influence scores to guide tree search and data selection in data synthesis.
Outcome: The proposed framework incorporates influence scores to guide tree search and data selection in data synthesis.
Assistant-Guided Mitigation of Teacher Preference Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: LLM-as-a-Judge uses large language models to evaluate the quality of LLM generated responses, but training proxy judge models using evaluation data generated by powerful teacher models introduces a critical yet previously overlooked issue: teacher preference bias.
Approach: They propose a new setting that incorporates an additional assistant model, which is not biased toward the teacher model’s responses, to complement the training data.
Outcome: The proposed model reduces teacher preference bias while maintaining strong performance across six evaluation benchmarks.
Hypothetical Training for Robust Machine Reading Comprehension of Tabular Context (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Counterfactual training is expensive because of the complexity of tabular data.
Approach: They propose a hypothetical training framework that uses paired examples with different hypothetical questions to supervise the direction of model gradient towards the counterfactual answer change.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on tabular MRC datasets.
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.
TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing QA systems focus on unstructured text, structured knowledge base, or semi-structured tables.
Approach: They propose a large-scale question answering model based on financial reports . numerical reasoning is usually required to infer the answer .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 58.0% inF1, an 11.1% increase over the baseline model, but still lags behind the best human model.
Examining False Positives under Inference Scaling for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in language models have led to significant improvements in mathematical reasoning across benchmarks.
Approach: They analyze the prevalence of false positives in language models by using heuristic evaluation methods . they find that false positive models produce correct final answers but with flawed deduction paths .
Outcome: The proposed model performance improvements are based on the proposed model and its evaluation metrics.
Leveraging Unpaired Feedback for Long-Term LLM-based Recommendation Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a recent study highlights unpaired feedback as a key challenge for long-term LLM-based recommenders . unpaired user feedback is crucial for improving LLMs in dynamic user environments, authors say .
Approach: They propose a framework that incorporates unpaired feedback into LLMs to improve long-term recommendation performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves long-term recommendation performance by incorporating unpaired feedback without requiring paired supervision.
Counterfactual Debating with Preset Stances for Hallucination Elimination of LLMs (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing solutions to alleviate hallucination have considered utilizing LLMs’ inherent reasoning abilities to alleviating hallucinism, such as self-correction and diverse sampling methods.
Approach: They propose a counterfactual multi-agent debate framework that predetermines LLMs' stances to override their inherent biases for answer inspection.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on four datasets of three tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over existing methods.
MUSTIE: Multimodal Structural Transformer for Web Information Extraction (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states.
Approach: They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness.
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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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.
Unveiling Language-Specific Features in Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoders (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive abilities in various domains such as text generation, instruction following, and reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method to decompose the activations of Large Language Models into a sparse linear combination of SAE features.
Outcome: The proposed method shows that some features are strongly related to specific languages, while others are unaffected by ablating them.
ReList: A Multi-objective Reasoning Framework for Diversified Listwise Query Recommendation (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for related search have limited semantic redundancy and wasted retrieval quota . generative retrieval approaches lack explicit reasoning, relying on superficial click-through rate rewards .
Approach: They propose a framework that transforms related search into a reasoning-enhanced listwise generation task.
Outcome: Experimental results show that ReList outperforms state-of-the-art methods in query diversity and user engagement.
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data.
Approach: They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting.
Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPL significantly enhances LLM personalization.
Approach: They propose a novel approach that emphasizes extracting inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization.
Outcome: The proposed approach extracts inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization.
Decoding in Latent Spaces for Efficient Inference in LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Light Latent-space Decoding (L2D) is an efficient and efficient latent- space decoding method.
Approach: They propose to bypass language-space decoding by matching candidate items with LLM's internal thought representations in the latent space.
Outcome: The proposed method is 10x faster than language-space decoding while maintaining or enhancing performance.
AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification.
Learning to Imagine: Integrating Counterfactual Thinking in Neural Discrete Reasoning (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing NDR models suffer from large performance drop on hypothetical questions, e.g., “what the annualized rate of return would be if the revenue in 2020 was doubled”.
Approach: They propose a learning to imagine module which can be seamlessly incorporated into NDR models to perform the imagination of unseen counterfactual.
Outcome: The proposed model can perform the imagination of unseen counterfactuals on hypothetical questions.
APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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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.
HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that large language models are robust in commonsense reasoning . however, some variations in questions can lead to incorrect responses .
Approach: They propose a large-scale bilingual benchmark consisting of 11,200 cases . they conduct extensive experiments on 41 representative LLMs .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the robustness of large language models in commonsense reasoning.
MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose to use a multi-turn reasoning evaluation framework to cover multi-turn interactions with the environments of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework covers diverse reasoning capabilities, fine-grained difficulty granularity, and necessitates multi-turn interactions with the environments.
Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Focus on Error Identification and Correction (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations focus on problem-solving from examiner perspective, overlooking a dual perspective of examiner regarding error identification and correction.
Approach: They propose to use an annotated dataset to evaluate large language models from the examiner perspective and to use diverse prompts to evaluate eleven representative LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all models while LLaMA-2-7B has comparable abilities to closed-source models GPT-3.5 and Gemini Pro.
Disentangling Reasoning Tokens and Boilerplate Tokens For Language Model Fine-tuning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to enhance agent capabilities for Large Language Models treat all tokens equally . however, reasoning tokens versus boilerplate tokens differ in importance and learning complexity . recent research has focused on enhancing agent capabilities in large language models .
Approach: They propose a Shuffle-Aware Discriminator (SHAD) for adaptive token discrimination . they propose SHAD method which adaptively emphasizes reasoning tokens during fine-tuning .
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance over standard fine-tuning methods.
Consistency-Aware Online Multi-Objective Alignment for Related Search Query Generation (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods fail to reconcile click-through rate (CTR) optimization with topic expansion.
Approach: They propose a query generation framework that aligns click-through rate and topic expansion goals through an online DPO paradigm.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves significant CTR gains (+2.3%) and higher human-rated query quality compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to adapt Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec) do not represent collaborative information in a text-like format, which may not align optimally with LLMs.
Approach: They propose a novel LLMRec method that integrates collaborative information through text-like encoding.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that BinLLM integrates collaborative information better with LLMs.
Self-Improvement Towards Pareto Optimality: Mitigating Preference Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to optimize large language models with human preferences suffer from preference conflicts in the data.
Approach: They propose to construct Pareto-optimal responses to resolve preference conflicts by using a self-improving DPO framework that enables LLMs to self-generate and select Paret-optimized responses.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior Pareto Front performance over baselines on two datasets.
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.
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question.
Approach: They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks.
Customizing In-context Learning for Dynamic Interest Adaption in LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems face challenges to adapt to dynamic user interests without any model-level updates.
Approach: They propose a framework that establishes recommendation-oriented in-context learning by structuring recent user interactions and current inputs into ICL formats.
Outcome: The proposed model adapts to dynamic user interests without model updates without any model updates and is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecICL-8003.
Robust Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research has explored automatic prompt optimization methods to eliminate manual effort in identifying effective prompts for a given task.
Approach: They propose a framework for prompt optimization that can be generalized to an unlabeled target group.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on target group and source group while generalizing to unlabeled target group.
Counterfactual Active Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on active learning methods focus on the out-of-distribution generalization of out- of-distortion samples.
Approach: They propose a counterfactual active learning approach that empowers active learning with counterfact thinking to bridge the seen samples with unseen cases.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing active learning methods on public datasets with comparable IID performance.
Think Twice Before Trusting: Self-Detection for Large Language Models through Comprehensive Answer Reflection (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to self-detection only retrospectively evaluate LLM-generated answers, leading to over-trust in incorrectly generated answers.
Approach: They propose a self-detection paradigm that considers the comprehensive answer space beyond LLM-generated answers to mitigate the over-trust in LLM generated incorrect answers.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be integrated with existing approaches for superior self-detection.
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values.
Approach: They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large.
Tunable LLM-based Proactive Recommendation Agent (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current methods focus on catering to existing user interests, leading to polarized recommendation distributions.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based Actor-Critic Agent framework to cultivate latent interests through multi-step recommendations.
Outcome: The proposed framework optimizes long-term rewards and dynamically evolves with user feedback.
Empowering Language Understanding with Counterfactual Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for language understanding use the recognized patterns in the testing phase that are inherently different from us humans who have counterfactual thinking.
Approach: They propose a counterfactual Reasoning Model which mimics counterfactive thinking by learning from few counterffact samples.
Outcome: The proposed model can detect and make predictions from textual patterns . it can also detect negative sarcastic puns by comparing them with imaginations .
RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Several perspectives of robustness for pre-trained language models have been studied independently, but lacking a unified consideration in multiple perspectives.
Approach: They propose a technique to enhance the multi-perspective robustness of LMs by introducing adversarial perturbation while the model parameters are selectively updated upon their relative importance.
Outcome: The proposed technique improves the robustness of LMs by incorporating four perspectives on model robustness.
TROJail: Trajectory-Level Optimization for Multi-Turn Large Language Model Jailbreaks with Process Rewards (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to training multi-turn attackers to probe model safety vulnerabilities rely on turn-level optimization, which is insufficient for learning long-term attack strategies.
Approach: They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning problem that optimizes the harmfulness of the final-turn response as the outcome reward.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves attack success rates across multiple models and benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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