Papers by Hao Yan

42 papers
AdaMix: Adaptive Mixing for Short and Long Reasoning Adapters (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for large reasoning models have improved efficiency but still face limitations such as conflicting objectives and limited adaptability.
Approach: They propose an adaptive reasoning framework that applies a uniform, computation-intensive deep reasoning strategy to all problems.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the average response length of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B by 54.9% while improving accuracy by up to 4.8% on five mathematical datasets.
Federated Document-Level Biomedical Relation Extraction with Localized Context Contrast (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on relation extraction focus on document-level training without sharing raw medical texts.
Approach: They propose a federated framework for relation extraction that enables collaborative training without sharing raw medical texts.
Outcome: The proposed framework extends document-level relation extraction to a federated environment.
Failures are Treasures: Constructing a Pedagogical Bridge for Agentic Strategy Distillation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on imitating successful trajectories, whereas small language models are fragile and often collapsing after encountering errors.
Approach: They propose a Pedagogical Bridge for Reflective Insight and Distillation of Guiding Errors that combines reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action to enable agents to diagnose and correct critical errors while abstracting transferable strategies from contrastive student–teacher trajectories.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed model significantly elevates performance in large language models (SLMs) .
Multi-source Meta Transfer for Low Resource Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing MCQA datasets are small in size, which increases difficulty of model learning and generalization.
Approach: They propose a multi-source meta transfer framework for low-resource multiple-choice question answering . they extend meta learning by incorporating multiple training sources to learn a generalized feature representation across domains .
Outcome: The proposed framework is independent of backbone language models and can bridge the distribution gap between training sources and target.
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers.
Approach: They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets.
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge.
Approach: They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters.
SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales.
DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations.
Approach: They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations.
DecoupleSearch: Decouple Planning and Search via Hierarchical Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a framework that decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding.
Outcome: The proposed framework decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding.
UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing joint entity relation extraction models setup two separate label spaces for the two sub-tasks .
Approach: They propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks’ label spaces by applying a unified classifier to predict each cell’s label.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor and is faster.
TEaR: Improving LLM-based Machine Translation with Systematic Self-Refinement (2025.findings-naacl)

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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.
Non-Autoregressive Document-Level Machine Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive translation models struggle with document context and handling discourse phenomena.
Approach: They propose a simple but effective design of sentence alignment between source and target to improve their performance on document-level machine translation.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves high acceleration on documents and sentence alignment significantly enhances their performance.
DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge . et al., 2023; Liu e.t. al. 2023) suggest a dual-process framework for multi-step reasoning .
Approach: They propose a synergistic dual-process framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and coherence even in smaller-scale models.
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly.
Approach: They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt.
From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool.
Approach: They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations.
Outcome: The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations.
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost .
Approach: They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs .
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead.
Test-Time Code-Switching for Cross-lingual Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a thriving research area . current code-switching methods suffer from term boundary detection issues and out-of-dictionary problems.
Approach: They propose a test-time code-switching framework which bridges the gap between bilingual training and monolingual test- time prediction.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 3.7% on four cross-lingual datasets.
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities.
Approach: They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention.
From Observation to Understanding: Front-Door Adjustments with Uncertainty Calibration for Enhancing Egocentric Reasoning in LVLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods that adapt LVLMs to egocentric tasks overlook critical agent-environment interactions, limiting their ability to perform egoic reasoning.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot paradigm to enhance egocentric reasoning by simulating human causal reasoning by formalizing ego-centric reasoning using a structural causal model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves egocentric reasoning abilities on six tasks.
Multi-task Adversarial Attacks against Black-box Model with Few-shot Queries (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing adversarial text attacks rely on abundant access to shared internal features and numerous queries, limited to a single task type.
Approach: They propose a black-box attack that exploits the transferability of adversarial texts . they use a deep-level substitute model trained in a plug-and-play manner for text classification .
Outcome: The proposed attack can target multiple tasks with minimal perturbations . it can target commercial APIs, large language models, and image-generation models .
ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning .
Approach: a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path .
Outcome: Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness.
Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Evolving Memory and Self-Reflection (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually incorrect information, also known as hallucination.
Approach: They propose a framework for verifiable text generation with evolving memory and self-reflection that incorporates long-term memory to retain documents and recent documents.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks.
Learning with Noisy Labels for Sentence-level Sentiment Classification (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing research on learning with noisy labels dates back to the 1980s, but it is still vibrant today.
Approach: They propose a novel DNN model called NetAb to deal with noisy labels during training and train the networks using their respective loss functions in mutual reinforcement.
Outcome: The proposed model can fit training data with noisy labels and predict clean labels.
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.
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms.
Approach: They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs.
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective.
Approach: They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment.
History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for conversational KBQA assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation.
Approach: They propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model that models long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on a widely used question type dataset.
Efficient Paths and Dense Rewards: Probabilistic Flow Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to mitigate inference inefficiency and optimization difficulty are fragmented and constrained by inherent trade-offs.
Approach: They propose a framework that reconceptualizes discrete reasoning steps as a continuous probabilistic flow, quantifying the contribution of each step toward the ground-truth answer.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a superior balance between inference efficiency and reasoning performance on challenging benchmarks.
Retrieved In-Context Principles from Previous Mistakes (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in in-context learning (ICL) have limited customization and inadequate error coverage.
Approach: They propose a method to retrieve in-context principles from mistakes to improve model performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework enhances model performance when applied to various prompting strategies.
NLoPT: N-gram Enhanced Low-Rank Task Adaptive Pre-training for Efficient Language Model Adaption (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have superior performance on downstream tasks . however, conventional TAPT adjusts all parameters of the PLMs, which distorts the learned generic knowledge embedded in the original PLM's weights.
Approach: They propose a two-step n-gram enhanced low-rank task adaptive pre-training method to customize a PLM to the downstream task.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance on six datasets from four domains.
Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on interactive semantic parsing relies on human annotations to train a model . prior work relied on human-annotated feedback data, which is prohibitively expensive and not scalable .
Approach: They propose a task of simulating NL feedback for interactive semantic parsing . they propose evaluators to assess the quality of the simulated feedback .
Outcome: The proposed simulator can generate high-quality NL feedback to boost the error correction ability of a specific parser.
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research.
Approach: They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers.
Outcome: Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement .
Language Modeling with Sparse Product of Sememe Experts (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing language modeling methods rely on large-scale text data to learn the sequential patterns of words.
Approach: They propose to use sememes to represent the implicit semantics behind words for language modeling . they propose to employ sememe-driven language models to fine-grained semem-level semantics .
Outcome: Experiments on language modeling and the downstream application of headline generation show the effectiveness of SDLM.
War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that enhances LLM reasoning without finetuning by using test-time scaling.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline models in both budget and model size.
An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for test-time scaling, but they are often used under time constraints.
Approach: They propose to use LLMs to make models think before answering questions . they also use self-correction and best-of-N decoding to encourage deeper thinking .
Outcome: The proposed models are able to achieve higher inference accuracy with extra inference computation under time constraints.
T-Know: a Knowledge Graph-based Question Answering and Infor-mation Retrieval System for Traditional Chinese Medicine (C18-2)

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Challenge: Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is one of precious intangible cultural heritages of the Chinese nation.
Approach: They propose to use authorized and anonymized clinical records, medicine clinical guidelines, teaching materials, classic medical books, academic publications, etc. as data resources to build a TCM knowledge graph.
Outcome: The proposed system extracts triples from free texts to build a TCM knowledge graph.
Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem.
Approach: They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself.
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess the financial knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in China.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date for LLMs in finance.
Bayes-enhanced Lifelong Attention Networks for Sentiment Classification (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing deep learning paradigms focus on learning a model from training data of a single task and the learned model is also tested on the same task.
Approach: They propose a Bayes-enhanced lifelong attention network to learn attention knowledge from a sequence of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong ones.
Outcome: The proposed model is able to learn attention knowledge from a set of sentiment classification tasks and build lifelong attentions.
Unveil: Unified Visual-Textual Integration and Distillation for Multi-modal Document Retrieval (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Document retrieval in real-world scenarios faces significant challenges due to diverse document formats and modalities.
Approach: They propose a visual-textual embedding framework that integrates textual and visual features for robust document representation.
Outcome: The proposed visual-textual embedding framework surpasses existing methods while preserving semantic fidelity.
Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to build LLMs with stacking are limited by their information coverage and low fault tolerance.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages large language models to iteratively generate new queries from an input query.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on open-domain question answering benchmarks.
ENPAR:Enhancing Entity and Entity Pair Representations for Joint Entity Relation Extraction (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for joint entity relation extraction use multitask learning frameworks, but annotations for additional tasks are hard to obtain.
Approach: They propose a pre-training method to improve the joint extraction performance with just extra entity annotations.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on ACE05, SciERC, and NYT and outperformed BERT on other tasks.

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