Papers by Haifeng Li

44 papers
ReCode: Robustness Evaluation of Code Generation Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on robustness in text or code tasks has focused on classification, while robustness for code generation tasks is an uncharted area.
Approach: They propose a robustness evaluation benchmark for code generation models that customizes over 30 transformations specifically for code on docstrings, function and variable names, code syntax, and code format.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on human annotators and on SOTA models with human annnotators.
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience.
Approach: They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability.
DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we construct a real-world Chinese dataset - DuReader_robust .
Approach: They introduce a real-world Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness and generalization of MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalisation.
Outcome: The proposed model fails to perform well on the challenge test set and may provide suggestions for future model development.
Rethinking Smoothness for Fast and Adaptable Entity Alignment Decoding (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs rely on entity and relation embeddings . Fig. 1 shows how to decode knowledge graph in under 6 seconds .
Approach: They propose a framework that only utilizes entity embeddings to decode knowledge graphs.
Outcome: The proposed framework reconstructs KG representation by maximizing smoothness of entity embeddings.
From Synthesis to Clinical Assistance: A Strategy-Aware Agent Framework for Autism Intervention based on Real Clinical Dataset (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is the gold standard for clinical intervention, but large language models struggle to adhere to its standardized procedures.
Approach: They propose a strategy-aware framework to unify high-fidelity intervention dialogue synthesis and clinical decision support.
Outcome: Experiments show that ASDAgent achieves nearly 80% strategic consistency with human experts.
PLATO-Ad: A Unified Advertisement Text Generation Framework with Multi-Task Prompt Learning (2022.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Online advertisement text generation models have achieved remarkable success in generating high-quality text ads, but some challenges remain, such as low-resource scenarios and training efficiency for multiple ad tasks.
Approach: They propose a unified text ad generation framework with multi-task prompt learning to tackle low-resource ade generation problem and a multi-step prompt learning mechanism to efficiently solve multiple aed generation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on offline and online metrics.
ClusterAttn: KV Cache Compression under Intrinsic Attention Clustering (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for sparse attention apply the same pattern across different attention heads and inputs, but fail to capture the intrinsic attention clustering in large language models.
Approach: They propose a training-free sparse attention method that provides an efficient prompt cache compression scheme under intrinsic attention clustering for efficient LLM inference.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces memory usage by 10%–65% and increases throughput by 2.6–4.8 times with no accuracy loss.
Modeling Aspect Correlation for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Recurrent Inverse Learning Guidance (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn complex sentence with multiple aspects do not consider correlation between aspects to distinguish overlapped feature.
Approach: They propose a method that uses aspect correlation to improve aspect correlation modeling . they use Recurrent Mechanism to improve the joint representation of aspects .
Outcome: The proposed method is state-of-the-art in multiaspect scenarios.
Distantly-Supervised Joint Extraction with Noise-Robust Learning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to identifying entity pairs and relations with a single model are noisy . Existing methods only consider one source of noise or make decisions using external knowledge .
Approach: They propose a framework that aligns entity mentions with corresponding tags for joint extraction . they propose DENRL, which employs a lightweight transformer backbone for joint tagging .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on two benchmark datasets with better interpretability.
Uncertainty-Aware Bootstrap Learning for Joint Extraction on Distantly-Supervised Data (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extract entity pairs and their relations from labeled data are noisy and expensive.
Approach: They propose a bootstrap learning approach that is motivated by intuition that the higher the uncertainty of an instance, the more likely the model confidence is inconsistent with the ground truths.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines and related methods on two large datasets.
Uncertainty-Aware Test-Time Search for Optimization Problem Solving (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Language model hallucinations and limited availability of labeled datasets often result in misaligned formulations, code errors and feasibility failures.
Approach: They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search framework that automates optimization problems from natural language descriptions with efficiency and reliability.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art solution accuracy and reduces token usage.
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing pre-training methods focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal ones . large-scale pre- training has drawn much attention in both the community of Compute Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Approach: They propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture which can adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model can learn more generalizable representations with rich non-paired single-modal data.
HomeBench: Evaluating LLMs in Smart Homes with Valid and Invalid Instructions Across Single and Multiple Devices (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing state-of-the-art LLMs cannot perform well in situations where instructions are invalid or multiple devices are involved.
Approach: They propose to integrate large language models into smart home assistants by enhancing their ability to accurately understand user needs and respond appropriately.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first with valid and invalid instructions across devices . it achieves only 0.0% success rate in the scenario of invalid multi-device instructions .
DuReadervis: A Chinese Dataset for Open-domain Document Visual Question Answering (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Open-domain question answering is a task that requires answering questions based on a collection of document images.
Approach: They propose to use document images to answer questions using layouts and visual features instead of text.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces human cost and improves scalability of QA systems by incorporating layouts and visual features.
STACL: Simultaneous Translation with Implicit Anticipation and Controllable Latency using Prefix-to-Prefix Framework (P19-1)

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Challenge: Simultaneous translation is notoriously dif- ficult due to word-order differences.
Approach: They propose a prefix-to-prefix framework that implicitly learns to anticipate in a single translation model.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves low latency and reasonable qual- ity on 4 directions.
DuReader-Retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for non-English passage retrieval are lacking in quality and accuracy.
Approach: They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval . they reduce false negatives by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers .
Outcome: The proposed dataset reduces false negatives in development and testing sets and removes similar training queries.
Mind the Gap in Cultural Alignment: Task-Aware Culture Management for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing cultural alignment approaches fail to align LLMs’ broad cultural values with the specific goals of downstream tasks and suffer from cross-cultural interference.
Approach: They propose a novel pipeline for task-specific cultural alignment that synthesizes task-aware cultural data in line with target task formats.
Outcome: Experiments across five national cultures and ten culture-sensitive tasks show consistent improvements over prompt-based and fine-tuning baselines.
Incomplete Utterance Rewriting by A Two-Phase Locate-and-Fill Regime (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models with incomplete utterances have too large search space, resulting in poor quality of rewriting results.
Approach: They propose a 2-phase rewriting framework which predicts empty slots in the utterance that need to be completed and generates the part to be filled into each position.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on several public rewriting datasets.
PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing home assistants struggle to interpret elliptical commands based on ellipine expressions . current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as context accumulates - limiting their effectiveness in real-world applications .
Approach: They propose a simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands.
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines.
Approach: They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models.
One Token Is Enough: Improving Diffusion Language Models with a Sink Token (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Diffusion Language Models lack a structural constraint to stabilize attention sinks.
Approach: They propose a simple but effective extra sink token that is constrained to attend to itself while remaining globally visible to all other tokens.
Outcome: The proposed token is able to stabilize attention sinks and improve model performance.
ASD-iLLM:An Intervention Large Language Model for Autistic Children based on Real Clinical Dialogue Intervention Dataset (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Currently, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for autism intervention is a significant yet challenging task, especially when directly employing LLMs as an intervention doctor.
Approach: They propose a framework for training LLMs to conduct dialogue interventions in accordance with the principles of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) they also propose 'role-play' strategy in which LLM act as autistic children to comprehensively evaluate the doctor model's capabilities at the dialogue level.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models in both automatic and human evaluation, with intervention strategies and dialogue style more closely resembling those of clinical intervention doctors.
Select to Know: An Internal-External Knowledge Self-Selection Framework for Domain-Specific Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well in general QA but often struggle in domain-specific scenarios.
Approach: They propose a framework that internalizes domain knowledge through internal-external knowledge self-selection and selective supervised fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and matches domain-pretrained LLMs with significantly lower cost.
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one.
Approach: They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries.
Stop When Enough: Adaptive Early-Stopping for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that adaptively determines when to stop reasoning to mitigate overthinking.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces token usage by 20-55% while maintaining or improving accuracy compared to standard CoT prompting.
Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification (P18-1)

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Challenge: Recent years have seen rapid growth in the MRC community . MRC is believed to be a crucial step in building a general intelligent agent .
Approach: They propose an end-to-end neural model that enables multiple passages to verify each other based on their content representations.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline on the English MS-MARCO dataset and the Chinese DuReader dataset, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
MoDE-CoTD: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Complex Reasoning Tasks with Mixture of Decoupled LoRA-Experts (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Current Chain-of-thought Distillation methods hinder CoT reasoning performance . student models are separately distilled from specific reasoning tasks . parameter update of student models severely harms CoT ability on unseen reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a method which distills Chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models to much smaller student models.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the reasoning ability of large language models on 14 datasets.
D-NET: A Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Framework for Improving the Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)

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Challenge: MRC requires machines to understand text and answer questions about the text.
Approach: They propose a simple system Baidu submitted for MRQA 2019 Shared Task that focused on generalization of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models.
Outcome: The proposed system is ranked at top 1 of all participants in terms of averaged F1 score.
Recommend for a Reason: Unlocking the Power of Unsupervised Aspect-Sentiment Co-Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing review-based recommenders favor large and complex language encoders that can only learn latent and uninterpretable text representations.
Approach: They propose a tightly coupled two-stage approach to extract latent user sentiments and item properties from reviews and an Attention-Property-aware Rating Estimator (APRE).
Outcome: Extensive experiments on seven real-world Amazon review datasets show that the proposed approach extracts the latent user sentiments, item properties, and the complicated interactions between the two components.
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for vision-language pre-training can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework for joint learning . they propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space .
Outcome: The proposed model improves visual and visual semantic alignment on images and texts.
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level.
Approach: They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set.
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments.
Approach: They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%.
Mixup Decoding for Diverse Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating multiple translations for source and target languages neglect the one-to-many mapping between the source and the target languages.
Approach: They propose a method to generate different translations for the input sentence by linearly interpolating it with different sentence pairs sampled from the training corpus during decoding.
Outcome: Experiments on WMT’16 en-ro, WMT'14 en de, and WMT ‘17 zh-en show that the proposed method outperforms all previous diverse machine translation methods.
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for Seq2Seq as it does not analyze long-distance relations in text.
Approach: They propose a framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure.
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task .
Approach: They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework .
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs.
Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to parse text-to-SQL data are lacking labeled data for unseen evaluation databases.
Approach: They propose a framework for enhancing SQL queries by automatically producing large numbers of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar.
Outcome: The proposed framework can produce high-quality natural language questions over strong baselines.
ChatMatch: Evaluating Chatbots by Autonomous Chat Tournaments (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing automated evaluation systems of chatbots rely on static chat scripts as ground truth, which is hard to obtain.
Approach: They propose an interactive chatbot evaluation framework that allows chatbots to compete with each other like in a sports tournament.
Outcome: The proposed framework can rank chatbots independently from their model architectures and domains . existing evaluation systems rely on static chat scripts as ground truth .
3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: 3D visual grounding aims to localize the desired objects in a 3D point cloud by a free-form language description.
Approach: They propose a relation-aware framework which captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks . it captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes .
Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment bottlenecks due to computational demands.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that exploits activation and weight sparsity . they use a three-tier routing strategy that uses magnitude-based pruning .
Outcome: Experiments on Llama and Mistral models show that DAWS outperforms activation-weight sparsity pruning methods.
ERNIE-Gram: Pre-Training with Explicitly N-Gram Masked Language Modeling for Natural Language Understanding (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to model coarse-grained linguistic information do not integrate coarse-gram information into pre-training.
Approach: They propose an explicitly n-gram masking method to enhance integration of coarse-grained linguistic information into pre-training.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on English and Chinese text corpora and fine-tunes on 19 downstream tasks.
Graph-Based Chain-of-Thought Pruning for Reducing Redundant Reflections in Reasoning LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Extending CoT through RL can induce undesirable thinking patterns such as overthinking . prior work has focused on inefficient reflection, which manifests in two problematic patterns: Indiscriminate Reflection and Repetitive Reflectione .
Approach: They propose a graph-based approach to optimize CoT by pruning each linear CoT into a directed acyclic graph with explicit dependency edges.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces the average reasoning tokens by 42% while maintaining or improving accuracy.
LOKA: Conflict-Aware LLM Knowledge Update with Adaptive Knowledge Memory (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches that tackle unlearning and learning separately encounter *task conflicts* and *knowledge management issues* when applied to comprehensive knowledge updates.
Approach: They propose a conflict-aware framework for Large language mOdel Knowledge updAtes that integrates updated knowledge across multiple memory units during training and integrates it with original LLM.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on theoretical analysis and empirical evidence and validates the proposed framework with empirical and theoretical evidence.
Example Quality Matters: Multi-Aspects Example Augmentation for Private Library Programming (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to code generation fail to consider the quality of retrieved examples.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that combines existing API examples to improve complexity and readability.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves up to 22% accuracy improvement over baseline methods.
ModularMoE: Fast LLM Customization with Parameter-Sharing Mixture-of-Experts for Low-Resource Settings (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models impose significant computational and storage burdens on personal devices . existing customization approaches incur excessive computational costs or lead to suboptimal performance .
Approach: They propose a training framework that converts pre-trained LLMs into parameter-sharing MoE models for lightweight deployment.
Outcome: The proposed training framework outperforms state-of-the-art training frameworks at the same sparsity level while delivering up to 2.71 inference speedup.

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