Papers by Hao Kang
Event Ontology Completion with Hierarchical Structure Evolution Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection require predefined schemas, but manual defining is expensive and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to achieve event clustering, hierarchy expansion and type naming . they propose 'neighbor Contrastive Clustering' module and a Hierarchy-Aware Linking module . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets. |
ResearchArena: Benchmarking Large Language Models’ Ability to Collect and Organize Information as Research Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel across many natural language processing tasks but face challenges in domain-specific, analytical tasks such as conducting research surveys. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in conducting research surveys. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is designed to evaluate LLMs' capabilities in conducting research surveys. |
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process. |
Token Prediction as Implicit Classification to Identify LLM-Generated Text (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach for identifying large language models (LLMs) involved in text generation is proposed . instead of adding an additional classification layer, we reframe the classification task as a next-token prediction task . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for identifying large language models involved in text generation . instead of adding an additional classification layer, they reframe the task as a next-token prediction task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs exceptionally well in the text classification task . it can distinguish distinctive writing styles among various LLMs even without an explicit classifier. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
An Evaluation Resource for Grounding Translation Errors (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current fine-grained error analyses do not ground the errors to the reasons why the annotated text spans are erroneous. |
| Approach: | They use a bi-directional grounding scheme to ground erroneous text in two directions . if the error spans of both directions are consistent, the explanation is valid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed grounding process improves translation error detection significantly. |
MRN: A Locally and Globally Mention-Based Reasoning Network for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level relation extraction focus on sentencelevel RE, but recent studies reveal that a large number of relations can actually be expressed through multiple sentences, which necessitates document- level RE. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model that captures local and global contextual information as well as close and distant mention interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three widely used datasets, namely DocRED, CDR, and GDA. |
Pattern-revising Enhanced Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Bases (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Simple question answering over knowledge bases is one of the most important natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct pattern extraction and entity linking first and put forward pattern revising procedure to mitigate the error propagation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in this task by an absolute large margin. |
Scaling Unverifiable Rewards: A Case Study on Visual Insights (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to scale complex, open-ended tasks with unverifiable rewards are not scalable to multi-stage pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-based refinement framework that scales inference across stages of a multi-agent pipeline, instead of refining a single output over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework scales inference across stages of a multi-agent pipeline, instead of refining a single output over time as in prior work. |
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)
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Qingbin Liu, Yanchao Hao, Xiaolong Liu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao, Xi Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Jiaoyan Chen
| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai, Zhaolu Kang, Yaxuan Guo, Hao Wang, Kexin Zhang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, but systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. |
| Outcome: | MAS-Bench evaluates agent's ability to generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. |
Pushing the Limits of LLM Tool Calling via Experiential Knowledge Integration and Activation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat tool use as a problem of prompt design, API documents specification, or supervised or unsupervised alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-augmented tool execution framework that integrates experiential knowledge with reasoning-width-expanded inference and knowledge-aware training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld on three model scales. |
Complex Event Schema Induction with Knowledge-Enriched Diffusion Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on event schema induction have been hindered by errors and data quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enriched discrete diffusion model that distills event scenario knowledge from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves outstanding performance across evaluation metrics. |
SKIntern: Internalizing Symbolic Knowledge for Distilling Better CoT Capabilities into Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have high computational costs and privacy concerns due to their high computational expenses and data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that empowers SLMs to internalize symbolic knowledge and few-shot examples gradually through a progressive fine-tuning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 5% while reducing inference costs by up to 4 across a wide range of SLMs in both in-domain (ID) and out-of domain (OOD) tasks. |
Interpret and Control Dense Retrieval with Sparse Latent Features (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Dense embeddings deliver strong retrieval performance but lack interpretability and controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach using sparse autoencoders to interpret and control dense embeddings via latent sparsity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach retains the same retrieval accuracy as the original dense vectors, affirming their faithfulness. |
LVLM-Compress-Bench: Benchmarking the Broader Impact of Large Vision-Language Model Compression (2025.findings-naacl)
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Souvik Kundu, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Sungduk Yu, Phillip Howard, Tiep Le, Sharath Nittur Sridhar, David Cobbley, Hao Kang, Vasudev Lal
| Challenge: | LVLMs have been shown to perform well on simple uni-modal benchmarks, but their detailed study on multi-modal models is still lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze the impact of compression on LVLMs on multi-modal input driven tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes the impact of compression on generative performance of large vision language models on multi-modal input driven tasks. |
LMDX: Language Model-based Document Information Extraction and Localization (2024.findings-acl)
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Vincent Perot, Kai Kang, Florian Luisier, Guolong Su, Xiaoyu Sun, Ramya Sree Boppana, Zilong Wang, Zifeng Wang, Jiaqi Mu, Hao Zhang, Chen-Yu Lee, Nan Hua
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have revolutionized Natural Language Processing but their application in extracting information from visually rich documents has not been successful. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model-based document information extraction and localization methodology to reframe the document information extract task for a LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables extraction of singular, repeated, and hierarchical entities with and without training data. |
Spectral Disentanglement: Rank-Aware Task Adaptation for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Continual Learning (CL) for Large Language Models faces a fundamental Stability-Plasticity Dilemma . Rank-Blindness enforces a single rank constraint across diverse tasks, leading to catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks and underfitting on complex new ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a rank-spectrum-based rehearsal-free framework that explicitly disentangles knowledge into two orthogonal subspaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a superior stability-plasticity balance compared to single-rank baselines. |
Evaluating Personalized Tool-Augmented LLMs from the Perspectives of Personalization and Proactivity (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Personalized tool utilization is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with user preference in interaction scenarios with various tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a key-point-based LLM evaluation method that mitigates biases by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates biases in the LLM-as-a-judge system by manually annotating key points for each test case and providing them to LLM as the reference. |