Papers by Haibo Ding
PromptPrism: A Linguistically-Inspired Taxonomy for Prompts (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | PromptPrism is a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically-inspired taxonomy that enables prompt analysis across three hierarchical levels: functional structure, semantic component, and syntactic pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy bridges traditional language understanding with modern LLM research . it improves prompt quality and improves model performance across tasks . |
How Can We Know When Language Models Know? On the Calibration of Language Models for Question Answering (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that language models capture different types of knowledge regarding facts or commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They examine how language models can be calibrated to make their confidence scores correlate better with the likelihood of correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration methods improve confidence scores on QA tasks and improve accuracy. |
SLOT: Structuring the Output of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Structured outputs are essential for large language models (LLMs) but often deviate from predefined schemas hampering reliable application development. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach that transforms unstructured LLM outputs into precise structured formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic approach transforms unstructured LLM outputs into precise structured formats. |
Learning to Classify Events from Human Needs Category Descriptions (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method outperforms baseline methods, producing substantially better precision. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot learning method that generates weak labels and trains a classifier with weakly labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on a human needs categorization task . it produces substantially better precision than baseline methods . |
X-FACTR: Multilingual Factual Knowledge Retrieval from Pretrained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models (LMs) capture factual knowledge by filling in the blanks of cloze-style prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-switching-based method to improve the ability of multilingual LMs to access knowledge and verify its effectiveness on several benchmark languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the ability of multilingual LMs to access knowledge and verify its effectiveness on several benchmark languages. |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Aosong Feng, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Yun Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Yueyan Chen, Xian Wu, Ninad Kulkarni, Yi Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Dmitriy Bespalov, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Yifei Teng, Darren Yow-Bang Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing systems require users to manually select models or employ rigid routing rules that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of query complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-constrained intelligent prompt routing framework that automatically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 43.9% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency. |
Diffusion Language Model Inference with Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zheng Huang, Kiran Ramnath, Yueyan Chen, Aosong Feng, Sangmin Woo, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Shuai Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference use heuristics to determine which positions to unmask and which tokens to commit . MEDAL is an inference-time scaling framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 22.0% improvement over existing inference strategies across multiple benchmarks. |
Understanding and Improving Zero-shot Multi-hop Reasoning in Generative Question Answering (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Generative question answering (QA) models generate answers to complex questions, but their mechanism for doing so is still poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They decompose multi-hop questions into multiple corresponding single-hop question chains and find marked inconsistency in QA models’ answers on these pairs of ostensibly identical question chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models lack zero-shot multi-hop reasoning ability when trained on single-hop questions and on logical forms. |
Learning to Ideate for Machine Learning Engineering Agents (2026.eacl-short)
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Yunxiang Zhang, Kang Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kiran Ramnath, Yun Zhou, Sangmin Woo, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing machine learning engineering (MLE) agents struggle to iteratively optimize their implemented algorithms for effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that separates ideation from implementation that allows an implementation agent to request strategic help from a dedicated Ideator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms implementation-only agent baselines on MLE-Bench and can be trained with reinforcement learning to generate more effective ideas. |
Human Needs Categorization of Affective Events Using Labeled and Unlabeled Data (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on identifying affective events in text, which are activities or states that positively or negatively affect the people who experience them. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize affective events based upon human need categories that often explain people’s motivations and desires: PHYSIOLOGICAL, HEALTH, LEISURE, SOCIAL, FINANCIAL, COGNITION, and FREEDOM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns from unlabeled data and produces significantly better results than individual classifiers. |
Black-Box Visual Prompt Engineering for Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision Language Models (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate object hallucination are impractical for proprietary LVLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to identify optimal visual prompts that enhance LVLM responses without access to model internals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is model-agnostic and can be used on open-source and proprietary LVLMs. |
GLaRA: Graph-based Labeling Rule Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) models often need to be trained with many manual labels to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose to train named entity recognition systems using heuristic labeling rules . they create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of +20% over the baseline on three NER datasets. |
Retrieval as Attention: End-to-end Learning of Retrieval and Reading within a Single Transformer (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | eschewing separate architecture and training for knowledge-intensive tasks is cumbersome . end-to-end training only based on supervision from the end task is awkward . |
| Approach: | They propose a single Transformer that performs retrieval as attention and end-to-end training solely based on supervision from the end QA task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art retrievers and readers on in-domain datasets. |
Weakly Supervised Named Entity Tagging with Learnable Logical Rules (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for building entity tagging systems use weak supervision . previous methods focus on disambiguating entity types based on contexts and expert-provided rules . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that bootstraps high-quality logical rules to train a neural tagger in a fully automated manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms weakly supervised methods on three datasets . it rivals state-of-the-art supervised method with lexicon of over 2,000 terms . |
Explicitly Capturing Relations between Entity Mentions via Graph Neural Networks for Domain-specific Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is well studied for the general domain, but the performance is still moderate for specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly connect entity mentions based on global coreference relations and local dependency relations to build better entity mention representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves the NER performance even with a tiny amount of labeled data. |
GOVERN: Gradient Orientation Vote Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Reinforced Distillation (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance in OpenQA, but for practical deployment, knowledge distillation is crucial to maintain high performance while operating under computational constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to perform unsupervised knowledge distillation without the guidance of labels to achieve 99.5% of performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 99.5% of performance in a commercial question-answering system. |