Papers by Haifeng Li
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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%. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 . |
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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 . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |