Papers by He Chang
Beyond Token Length: Step Pruner for Efficient and Accurate Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods for large reasoning models suffer from excessive verbosity, known as "overthinking." Existing models penalize generated tokens to promote conciseness, but these methods encounter two challenges: they may develop hacking behavior in later stages of training by discarding reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that steers large reasoning models toward more efficient reasoning . they prioritize correctness while imposing penalties for redundant steps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by 69.7% on AIME24. |
Policy Shaping and Generalized Update Equations for Semantic Parsing from Denotations (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing learning approaches for parsing from denotations (SpFD) do not provide access to correct representations, so there are two steps for every training example. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for parsing from denotations that generalizes three different learning algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous work by 5.0% absolute on exact match accuracy on a question answering dataset. |
Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on equally treating the contribution of each modality or statically using text as the dominant modality to conduct interaction, which neglects the situation where each modal may become dominant. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework (KuDA) that uses sentiment knowledge to guide the model dynamically selecting the dominant modality and adjusting the contributions of each modality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to highlight the contribution of dominant modality through the correlation evaluation loss. |
Representation Degeneration Problem in Prompt-based Models for Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based fine-tuning (PF) models have shown improved performance on few-shot natural language understanding benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to alleviate anisotropy in the embedding space by aligning with pre-trained language models' training objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms mainstream methods on many NLU benchmarks. |
Efficient Shapley Values Estimation by Amortization for Text Classification (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Shapley Values are often estimated with a small number of stochastic model evaluations, but this can only be mitigated by aggregating thousands of model evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a model with thousands of model evaluations to estimate Shapley Values without additional model evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model estimates Shapley Values accurately with up to 60 times speedup compared to traditional methods and does not suffer from stability issues as inference is deterministic. |
A Semi-Supervised Stable Variational Network for Promoting Replier-Consistency in Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods favor uninformative and non replier-specific responses due to lack of relevant information guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a semi-supervised variable network to generate replier-specific responses . they use vMF as latent space to obtain stable KL performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two large conversation datasets and generates diverse and replier-specific responses. |
MedEval: A Multi-Level, Multi-Task, and Multi-Domain Medical Benchmark for Language Model Evaluation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical datasets require high quality domain-specific datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level, multi-task, and multi-domain medical benchmark to facilitate the development of language models for healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides granular potential usage and supports a wide range of tasks. |
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Minyi Zhao, Yi Liu, Jianfeng Wen, Boshen Zhang, Hailang Chang, Zhiheng Ouyang, Jie Wang, Wensong He, Shuigeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better. |
SWE-Fixer: Training Open-Source LLMs for Effective and Efficient GitHub Issue Resolution (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in code generation benchmarks, but these benchmarks focus on single-file scenarios with constrained context scope. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework to effectively resolve GitHub issues using a code file retrieval module and a model-based code editing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on two GitHub benchmarks. |
PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu
| Challenge: | PRESTO dataset contains 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants to study some of the more challenging aspects of parsing realistic conversations. |
| Outcome: | The dataset contains 550K contextual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) focus on reducing discrepancy between tokens and tokens, but transfer of valuable label information is often not considered or ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that borrows entity information from the source domain to enhance NER in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the state-of-the-art model on several datasets. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
ChipSeek: Optimizing Verilog Generation via EDA-Integrated Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhirong Chen, Kaiyan Chang, Zhuolin Li, Cangyuan Li, Xinyang He, Chujie Chen, Mengdi Wang, Haobo Xu, Yinhe Han, Huawei Li, Ying Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize Register-Transfer Level (RTL) code fail to simultaneously optimize functional correctness and hardware efficiency metrics such as Power, Performance, and Area (PPA). |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework that integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a reward mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates direct feedback from EDA simulators and synthesis tools into a hierarchical reward based reinforcement learning framework. |
Query-Driven Multimodal GraphRAG: Dynamic Local Knowledge Graph Construction for Online Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to build knowledge graphs with LLMs are constrained by static knowledge bases and ineffective multimodal data integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a Query-Driven Multimodal GraphRAG framework that dynamically constructs local knowledge graphs tailored to query semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms unsupervised competitors in cross-modal understanding of complex queries. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. |
How do Language Models Reshape Entity Alignment? A Survey of LM-Driven EA Methods: Advances, Benchmarks, and Future (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) is critical for knowledge graph (KG) integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods in three stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes methods in three key stages: data preparation, feature embedding, and alignment. |
Scattered Hypothesis Generation for Open-Ended Event Forecasting (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event forecasting focus on the most probable outcomes, neglecting the intrinsic uncertainty of real-world events. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes inclusiveness and diversity of the hypothesis by integrating validity-gated score into the overall objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two real-world benchmark datasets. |
Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning for Chest X-Ray Report Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Radiology report generation aims at generating descriptive text from radiology images automatically. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised contrastive loss method that generates descriptive text from radiology images automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous work on correctness and text generation metrics for two public benchmarks. |
Instructions are all you need: Self-supervised Reinforcement Learning for Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning approaches suffer from dependency on external supervision and sparse reward signals from multi-constraint tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning framework that eliminates dependency on external supervision by deriving reward signals directly from instructions and generating pseudo-labels for reward model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves strong improvements across 3 in-domain and 5 out-of-domain datasets while maintaining computational efficiency. |
Continuous Relational Diffusion Driven Topic Model with Multi-grained Text for Microblog (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic models assume that there are only 0/1-state relationships between the two parties in social networks, but the relationship status in real life is more complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic model that leverages unsupervised learning to mine hidden topics in document collections using multi-grained text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to microblog with multi-grained text to realize the representation of the relationship state and make up for the context and structural information lost by previous representation methods. |
Mitigating Language-Level Performance Disparity in mPLMs via Teacher Language Selection and Cross-lingual Self-Distillation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) yield impressive performance on cross-language tasks, yet significant performance disparities exist across different languages within the same mPLm. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the learned knowledge from well-performing languages to guide under-performing ones within the same mPLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it can guide under-performing languages while minimizing language-level performance disparities across different mPLMs. |
Scene Graph Modification Based on Natural Language Commands (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Xuanli He, Quan Hung Tran, Gholamreza Haffari, Walter Chang, Zhe Lin, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Nhan Dam
| Challenge: | Numerous parsing methods have been developed for a single sentence, while a typical human-computer interaction session or conversation is not singleturn. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify an existing scene graph given a new user's command by using graph-based sparse transformer and cross attention information fusion to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform previous systems adapted from the machine translation and graph generation literature and contribute to the research community. |
Robustness and Adversarial Examples in Natural Language Processing (2021.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to raise awareness of practical concerns about NLP robustness . it aims at addressing the weaknesses of NLP systems when faced with adversarial inputs and data with a distribution shift . |
| Approach: | This tutorial aims to bring awareness of practical concerns about NLP robustness . it reviews recent studies on analyzing the weakness of NLP systems when facing adversarial inputs . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial aims to bring awareness of practical concerns about NLP robustness . it will examine the weaknesses of NLP systems when faced with adversarial inputs and data with a distribution shift . |
How Can Synthetic Data Improve Multilingual Language Model Pretraining? A Data Quality Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are a long-tail problem for multilingual LLMs due to limited high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that translates high-quality, knowledge-rich English data into low-resource languages . they propose SynRank, which leverages synthetic data as positive samples to train a classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches handcrafted rule-based filtering by human experts and significantly improves knowledge-intensive tasks with less data. |
Understanding ME? Multimodal Evaluation for Fine-grained Visual Commonsense (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that understand image and text but also cross-reference in-between are lacking in evaluation data resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal evaluation pipeline to automatically generate question-answer pairs to test models’ understanding of the visual scene, text, and related knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can answer the highly semantic VCR question correctly but fails to answer related visual question (Q2), textual question (q3), and background knowledge question ( Q4) as shallow mappings with language priors and unbalanced utilization of information between modalities. |
SpiderFlow: Efficient Topology-Aware Scheduling for LLM Training Across Decentralized GPU Clusters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training large language models lack topologyaware task scheduling mechanisms and model parallelization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-aware scheduling system specifically designed for decentralized GPU clusters . they propose heuristic methods at the inter-cluster level with ILP-based optimization within clusters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces job completion time by 1.2-1.3 and improves throughput by 1.12-1.25 . it also reduces scheduling overhead by 20-90 on average compared to state-of-the-art scheduling systems. |
What Makes an Ideal Quote? Recommending “Unexpected yet Rational” Quotations via Novelty (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior systems focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that maps quotations and contexts into deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can recommend quotations that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. |
Dataset Bias Mitigation in Multiple-Choice Visual Question Answering and Beyond (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhecan Wang, Long Chen, Haoxuan You, Keyang Xu, Yicheng He, Wenhao Li, Noel Codella, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined dataset biases in VQA benchmarks with short-phrase answers Multiple-choice Question with the LONG Answers (VCR, VLEP, etc.) |
| Approach: | They propose to use Adversarial Data Synthesis (ADS) to generate synthetic training and debiased evaluation data and introduce Intra-sample Counterfactual Training (ICT) to assist models in utilizing synthesized training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves model performance even in domain-shifted scenarios. |
MicroEdit: Neuron-level Knowledge Disentanglement and Localization in Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models are designed for single or limited edits, lacking the capacity to support long-term, multi-round knowledge updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuron-level editing method that performs minimal interventions within large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a sparse autoencoder, MicroEdit disentangles knowledge representations and activates only a minimal set of necessary neurons for precise parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that MicroEdit outperforms prior methods and robustly handles lifelong knowledge editing across QA and Hallucination settings on LLaM and Mistral. |
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Sunbowen Lee, Junting Zhou, Chang Ao, Kaige Li, Xeron Du, Sirui He, Haihong Wu, Tianci Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yitao Liang, Zhoufutu Wen, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed the robustness degra-dation caused by data distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation . they aim to identify identity cognition contradictions and analyse multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information; (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
Global and Local Hierarchical Prompt Tuning Framework for Multi-level Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods to recognize hierarchical discourse relations without explicit connectives are inefficient and ignore the utilization of the output probability distribution information of the verbalizer. |
| Approach: | They propose a global and local hierarchical prompt tuning framework which leverages top-up propagated probability as the global hierarchy to inject it into multi-level verbalizer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive results on two benchmacks. |
Leveraging Gloss Knowledge in Neural Word Sense Disambiguation by Hierarchical Co-Attention (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for Word Sense Disambiguation use labeled data, but lack gloss knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-attention mechanism to generate co-dependent representations for context and gloss . they propose to incorporate gloss knowledge into neural networks for Word Sense Disambiguation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on standard English all-words WSD datasets. |