Papers by Haoyu Shi
Encoding Spreadsheets for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haoyu Dong, Jianbo Zhao, Yuzhang Tian, Junyu Xiong, Mengyu Zhou, Yun Lin, José Cambronero, Yeye He, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Spreadsheets are characterized by their extensive two-dimensional grids, flexible layouts, and varied formatting options, which pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a structural-anchor-based compression, inverse index translation, and data-format-aware aggregation module to compress spreadsheets effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing model in GPT4 and achieves a state-of-the-art 78.9% F1 score. |
HermEs: Interactive Spreadsheet Formula Prediction via Hierarchical Formulet Expansion (2023.acl-long)
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Wanrong He, Haoyu Dong, Yihuai Gao, Zhichao Fan, Xingzhuo Guo, Zhitao Hou, Xiao Lv, Ran Jia, Shi Han, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | HermEs is a spreadsheet formula prediction language that is difficult for Excel users without programming experience to master. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical approach to formula prediction via HiEraRchical forMulet ExpanSion . they propose generating formulas in a fixed order using hierarchically generated formulas . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves formula prediction accuracy by guaranteeing correct grammar and streamlining token-level decoding with high-level Formulet. |
Table-LLM-Specialist: Language Model Specialists for Tables using Iterative Fine-tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Language models such as GPT and Llama have shown remarkable ability on diverse natural language tasks, yet their performance on complex table tasks is suboptimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-validator paradigm to iteratively generate-then-validate training data from language models to fine-tune stronger Table-Specialist models that can specialize in a given task, without using manually-labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla language models on diverse table tasks and can match or surpass GPT-4 level quality. |
PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Logical table-to-text generation requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained logical form generator framework to improve generation fidelity . they use a dataset to test the logical inference accuracy of the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on LOGICNLG and CONTLOG on two benchmarks. |
Not All Tokens Matter: Towards Efficient LLM Reasoning via Token Significance in Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce unnecessarily long explanations that reduce efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a length-aware reward that selectively penalizes insignificance tokens . they also propose 'dynamic length control' that encourages more detailed reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces response length while maintaining correctness, the authors show . it selectively penalizes insignificance tokens while maintaining accuracy . |
TaCube: Pre-computing Data Cubes for Answering Numerical-Reasoning Questions over Tabular Data (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing auto-regressive pre-trained language models are challenged by recent emerging numerical reasoning datasets due to the error-prone implicit calculation. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-computation tool to pre-compute aggregation/arithmetic results for the table in advance, so they are handy and readily available for PLMs to answer numerical reasoning questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on TAT-QA and T5 and BART-large on multiple benchmarks. |
HiTab: A Hierarchical Table Dataset for Question Answering and Natural Language Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Zhoujun Cheng, Haoyu Dong, Zhiruo Wang, Ran Jia, Jiaqi Guo, Yan Gao, Shi Han, Jian-Guang Lou, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on table reasoning focus on flat tables and hierarchical tables . a new dataset, HiTab, aims to examine numerical reasoning over hierarchic tables based on hierarchically structured tables - a strong challenge for existing baselines and a valuable benchmark for future research. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical question answering and natural language generation dataset to study hierarchic tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is effective in QA and natural language generation over hierarchical tables. |
MSCode: Advancing Human Motion-Language Understanding via Modality-Shared Codebook (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for motion understanding lack precise alignment between motion and modalities . existing methods lack precise semantics and a mismatch between motion, text . |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-shared codebook that enables unified representation learning and precise alignment between motion and linguistic modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses current state-of-the-art methods in many areas . it enables unified representation learning and precise alignment of motion and modalities . |
TableLoRA: Low-rank Adaptation on Table Structure Understanding for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data are crucial in many fields and their understanding by large language models (LLMs) under high parameter efficiency paradigm is important. |
| Approach: | They propose a module that uses 2D LoRA to encode low-rank information on cell positions to improve table serialization and representation of two-dimensional structured information within a one-dimensional sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four tabular-related datasets show that TableLoRA outperforms vanilla LoRA and surpasses table encoding methods tested in control. |
CEMT:Controllable Element-Oriented Machine Translation via Structured Linguistic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from paraphrasing errors, omissions, or hallucinations when input contains translation-specific elements that require strict preservation or controlled transformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Controllable Element-Oriented Machine Translation framework that decomposes the translation process into a linguistically grounded analysis, strategy formulation, and final generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the WMT23/24 Chinese–English benchmarks while significantly reducing element-level constraint violations. |
KET-QA: A Dataset for Knowledge Enhanced Table Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets that ignore the challenge of missing knowledge in TableQA are limited in their use. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a knowledge base as the external knowledge source for TableQA and construct a dataset with fine-grained gold evidence annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves remarkable performance improvements on three different settings, but still lags behind the human-level performance. |
RAM2C: A Liberal Arts Educational Chatbot based on Retrieval-augmented Multi-role Multi-expert Collaboration (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations indicate that RAM2C-empowered LLMs excel in Chinese reading teaching, offering more personalized, and ethically safe teaching response. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to retrieve large language models into educational dialogues and organize them into multi-experts groups with distinct roles to generate the data. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations show that RAM2C-empowered LLMs excel in Chinese reading teaching, offering more personalized, and ethically safe teaching response. |
RAG in the Wild: On the (In)effectiveness of LLMs with Mixture-of-Knowledge Retrieval Augmentation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. |
| Approach: | They evaluate RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. |
FORTAP: Using Formulas for Numerical-Reasoning-Aware Table Pretraining (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tables store rich numerical data, but numerical reasoning over tables is still a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a spreadsheet formula is a valuable supervision for numerical reasoning in tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three representative datasets of formula prediction, question answering, and cell type classification. |
TablePilot: Recommending Human-Preferred Tabular Data Analysis with Large Language Models (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data analysis is crucial in many scenarios, yet its complexity and density can make it challenging to determine the most appropriate analysis operations for a new table. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular data analysis framework that recommends query-code-result triplets for new tables . they propose Rec-Align, a method to further improve recommendation quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 77.0% top-5 recommendation recall on a dataset designed for tabular data analysis recommendation. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |