Papers by Hao Liao
EmpathyEar: An Open-source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot (2024.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | EmpathyEar is an open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot . currently, ERG systems rely on text, sound, and vision . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot to fill the gap in traditional text-only ERG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables users to generate emotional responses to user queries . it can also generate avatars with talking faces and synchronized speeches . |
Synergizing Large Language Models and Pre-Trained Smaller Models for Conversational Intent Discovery (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current attempts at CID rely on pretrained Small Language Models (SLMs) this lacks the ability to label new intents and is a challenge for small language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Large Language Models (LLMs) with pre-trained SLMs for CID to enhance the semantic comprehension of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the semantic comprehension of LLMs and the operational agility of SLMs by realigning existing descriptors within the SLM’s feature space to correct cluster distortion and promote robust learning of representations. |
Forest for the Trees: Overarching Prompting Evokes High-Level Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly propelled the progress of natural language process (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a deductive paradigm that decomposes the reasoning process and a prompting method that elicits high-level thinking of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ChatGPT and CoT by 19.0% and 3.1% on MMLU’s College Physics, 8.8% and 2.3% on GSM8k, and 10.3% and 2.5% on StrategyQA, respectively. |
Conversation Disentanglement with Bi-Level Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on pairwise utterance relations but pay inadequate attention to utterant-to-context relation modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a general disentangle model based on bi-level contrastive learning that brings closer utterances in the same session while encouraging each utterrance to be near its clustered session prototypes in representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both settings across public datasets. |
A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for conversational understanding rely on static ontologies, limiting their ability to handle new and unforeseen user needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to review the state-of-the-art techniques in OnExp for conversational understanding and highlight emerging frontiers . they categorize existing literature into three main areas: (1) New Intent Discovery, (2) New Slot-Value Discovery, and (3) Joint OnExp. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods highlight several emerging frontiers in OnExp to improve agent performance in real-world scenarios and discuss their corresponding challenges. |
Modeling Multi-Dimensional Cognitive States in Large Language Models under Cognitive Crowding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) mainly address isolated tasks such as emotion analysis or stance detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale model that combines large-level annotations with hyperbolic space to model human cognitive states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on cognitive dimensions on single dimension tasks while retaining strong hierarchical structure. |
TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zhaopeng Feng, Yan Zhang, Hao Li, Bei Wu, Jiayu Liao, Wenqiang Liu, Jun Lang, Yang Feng, Jian Wu, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation (MT). human evaluations reveal that LLM-generated translations still contain various errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based self-refinement framework that feeds error information back into LLMs to facilitate self-finement, leading to enhanced translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms internal refinement and feedback methods while ensuring a robust translation quality baseline. |
ControlText: Unlocking Controllable Fonts in Multilingual Text Rendering without Font Annotations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Bowen Jiang, Yuan Yuan, Xinyi Bai, Zhuoqun Hao, Alyson Yin, Yaojie Hu, Wenyu Liao, Lyle Ungar, Camillo Jose Taylor
| Challenge: | a new method for visual text rendering requires glyph annotations to be obtained . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates diffusion with a text segmentation model to achieve multilingual text rendering using just raw images without font label annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve font-controllable multilingual text rendering without label annotations. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
Knowing-but-Doing: Diagnosing and Defending Role-Play-Driven LLMs Jailbreaks via Moral Disengagement (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in role-play scenarios, but their safety implications remain under-characterized. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic benchmark for role-play jailbreaks based on Bandura’s Moral Disengagement theory and propose 'MD-Trace' based defense that reduces attack success while maintaining Role Fidelity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves safety behavior for benign personas while increasing unsafe compliance for malicious ones. |
WildDoc: How Far Are We from Achieving Comprehensive and Robust Document Understanding in the Wild? (2025.emnlp-main)
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An-Lan Wang, Jingqun Tang, Lei Liao, Hao Feng, Qi Liu, Xiang Fei, Jinghui Lu, Han Wang, Hao Liu, Yuliang Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document understanding in the wild are based on scanned or digital documents . however, these benchmarks fail to capture the challenges posed by documents in the real world . |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that incorporates a diverse set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a set of manually captured document images reflecting real-world conditions and is compared with digital or scanned documents. |
Eliminating Out-of-Domain Recommendations in LLM-based Recommender Systems: A Unified View (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Liao, Jiwei Zhang, Jianxun Lian, Wensheng Lu, Mingqi Wu, null Shuowangg, Yong Zhang, Yitian Huang, Mingyang Zhou, Rui Mao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce OOD recommendations fall into three grounding paradigms: retrieval, constrained generation and discrete item tokenizer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that instantiates three grounding paradigms under a single architecture . embedding-based retrieval, constrained generation and discrete item-tokenizer methods are implemented . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eradicates OOD recommendations across all variants and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy compared to strong ID-based and LLM-based baselines. |
Pretraining Context Compressor for Large Language Models with Embedding-Based Memory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Efficient processing of long contexts in large language models is essential for real-world applications such as retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled compressor-LLM framework that preserves contextual information within condensed embedding representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in three domains and across eight datasets while adapting to different downstream LLMs. |
Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | OpenAI's O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 have significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution and summarize O1-like works from open-source projects like DeepSeek R1 and Kimi-k1.5. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on open-source models and pioneer advanced methodologies like Scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
Let Retrievers Think Before Action: Thought-Augmented Embedding for Dense Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated that explicit step-by-step thinking can substantially improve performance on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
AIR-Bench: Automated Heterogeneous Information Retrieval Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
Toward Consistent World Models with Multi-Token Prediction and Latent Semantic Enhancement (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn internal world models rely on one-step supervision . however, standard MTP suffers from structural hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which anchors predictions to ground-truth hidden state trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between discrete tokens and continuous state representations, reducing structural hallucinations, and improving robustness to perturbations. |
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. |
PersonaArena: Dynamic Simulation for Evaluating and Enhancing Persona-Level Role-Playing in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on character-level settings and static evaluation formats fail to capture the complexity of everyday social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic simulation framework for evaluating and improving persona-level role-playing in large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages user-generated social content to construct a nuanced persona bank and elicits multi-turn, context-rich interactions within simulated social environments. |
Actively Learn from LLMs with Uncertainty Propagation for Generalized Category Discovery (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generalized category discovery (GCD) is a crucial task in open-world computing, where new categories frequently emerge, necessitating models that can adapt and learn continually. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate the feedback from LLMs into an active learning paradigm to simplify the labeling task and minimize the spread of inaccurate feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves baseline models at a nominal average cost. |
Hierarchical Reward Modeling for Fault Localization in Large Code Repositories (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited fault localization capabilities due to limited context length. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical localization reward model to evaluate and select the most accurate fault localization candidates from the outputs of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the final line-level localization recall by 12% on the SWE-Bench-Lite dataset. |
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. |
Explainable Recommendation with Personalized Review Retrieval and Aspect Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the development of explainable recommendation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that combines prediction and generation tasks to produce more persuasive explanations by obtaining additional information from the training sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three datasets and shows that it is more persuasive than previous models. |
Cognitive Policy-Driven LLM for Diagnosis and Intervention of Cognitive Distortions in Emotional Support Conversation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for ESC ignore cognitive distortions in help-seekers' expressions . current models provide basic emotional comfort, rather than helping help- seekers address psychological distress at a deeper cognitive level. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model framework to enhance LLMs' ability to diagnose and intervene cognitive distortions in help-seekers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms 15 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of distortion diagnosis accuracy, intervention strategy effectiveness, and safety risk control. |
Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature focuses on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template. |
| Approach: | They propose a collection of supervised learning tasks augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model to improve LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy. |
WebDP: Understanding Discourse Structures in Semi-Structured Web Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Web documents are one of the most primary and biggest data resources in current era, and understanding their discourse structure will benefit various downstream document processing applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a web document discourse structure representation schema by extending classical discourse theories and adding special features to well represent discourse characteristics of web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is feasible but challenging for current models. |
Task-Level Thinking Steps Help Large Language Models for Challenging Classification Task (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results prove the superiority of our proposed method on challenging classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-level thinking step that eliminates bias introduced by demonstrations . they propose 'progressive revision framework' which can improve the thinking steps by correcting hard demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves best performance on three kinds of classification tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
R-CHAR: A Metacognition-Driven Framework for Role-Playing in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing role-playing structures lack cognitive consistency in complex scenarios . Existing models excel in math and coding tasks but lack coherent reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognition-driven framework that enhances role-playing performance . experimental results show performance improvements across varying scenario complexities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in social intelligence tasks and shows strength in long-context comprehension and group-level social interactions. |
DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji
| Challenge: | a new task of conversational aspect-based sentiment analysis (DiaASQ) is designed to detect the quadruple of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of conversational aspect-based sentiment quadruple analysis to detect the quadrangle of target-aspect-opinion-sentiment in a dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a high-quality dataset in Chinese and English . it improves the end-to-end quadruple prediction and integrates rich feature representations . |
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. |
Dolphin: Document Image Parsing via Heterogeneous Anchor Prompting (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Feng, Shu Wei, Xiang Fei, Wei Shi, Yingdong Han, Lei Liao, Jinghui Lu, Binghong Wu, Qi Liu, Chunhui Lin, Jingqun Tang, Hao Liu, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Current document image parsing solutions rely on specialized models or generate content autoregressively. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal document image parsing model that integrates specialized models with autogeneous content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse page-level and element-level settings while ensuring superior efficiency. |
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. |