Papers by He Cui
Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Guangyi Liu, Zeyu Feng, Yuan Gao, Zichao Yang, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to composable text operations often require plug-and-play . a single LM can perform arbitrary text operation composition in the latent space . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient approach for composable text operations in the latent space of text . they connect pretrained LMs to the laten space and adapt them to the space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on existing methods in the latent space of text. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
ChatEdit: Towards Multi-turn Interactive Facial Image Editing via Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to interactive facial image editing treat multi-turn editing as a sequence of successive single-turn edits, leading to attribute forgetting and error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interactive facial image editing through dialogues based on the CelebA-HQ dataset and a benchmark dataset to evaluate this. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves existing ones. |
Heterogeneous Adaptive Policy Optimization: Tailoring Optimization to Every Token’s Nature (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that use entropy as a discrete filter or post-hoc regulator are limited in their ability to optimize for reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-aware algorithm that continuously adapts optimization dynamics based on token-level entropy throughout the entire training process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, and logic tasks across multiple models demonstrate HAPO’s consistent superiority over DAPO. |
RMSSinger: Realistic-Music-Score based Singing Voice Synthesis (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for singing voice synthesis are limited to fine-grained music scores . manual adjustment destroys regularity of note durations, making fine-grain music scores "crushed" |
| Approach: | They propose a method to synthesize singing voices given realistic music scores . they use real-music-score-based Singing Voice Synthesis to generate high-quality voices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates manual annotation and simplifies phoneme-level mel-note alignment. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
Self-Guided Function Calling in Large Language Models via Stepwise Experience Recall (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for function calling require expert effort and prompt engineering becomes inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs fine-grained, stepwise retrieval from a continually updated experience pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of 6.1% on easy and 4.7% on hard questions. |
AdaFuse: Adaptive Ensemble Decoding for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Chengming Cui, Tianxin Wei, Ziyi Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Zhichen Zeng, Zhining Liu, Xuying Ning, Duo Zhou, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Existing ensemble approaches to large language models lack flexibility for mid-generation adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive ensemble decoding framework that dynamically selects semantically appropriate fusion units during generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing ensemble frameworks on open-domain QA, arithmetic reasoning, and machine translation tasks. |
AUGUST: an Automatic Generation Understudy for Synthesizing Conversational Recommendation Datasets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on conversational recommendation systems lacks high-quality data . existing datasets lack large-scale and high-level data based on human annotators . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic dataset synthesis approach that generates large-scale recommendation dialogues using structured graphs based on user-item information from the real world. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can generate large-scale and high-quality recommendation dialogues . it exploits user preferences, knowledge graphs, and conversation ability from existing datasets based on real-world data . |
Beyond Human Labels: A Multi-Linguistic Auto-Generated Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Resume Parsing (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Efficient resume parsing is critical for global hiring, yet the lack of dedicated benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on multilingual, structure-rich resumes hinders progress. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-in-the-loop pipeline to generate 2,500 synthetic resumes spanning 50 templates, 30 career fields, and 5 languages to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform poorly on multilingual resumes and lack of standardized templates. |
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)
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Guoliang Zhao, Zixin Cui, Chao Ye, Dengwu He, Fei Huang, Yubo Liu, Shuanglong Li, Tzungren Kuo, Bin Ding, Shuang Zhang, null KunhongZhu, Zhi Guo, Liu Lin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine. |
PlanningArena: A Modular Benchmark for Multidimensional Evaluation of Planning and Tool Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLMs can be significantly improved by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates external tools into large language models to evaluate their ability to generate action plans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to generate action plans and generate action plan templates. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)
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Guanting Dong, Daichi Guo, Liwen Wang, Xuefeng Li, Zechen Wang, Chen Zeng, Keqing He, Jinzheng Zhao, Hao Lei, Xinyue Cui, Yi Huang, Junlan Feng, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs’ Behavior Style to Conflicting Prompts (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments with seven Large Language Models reveal their varying behaviors. |
| Approach: | They investigate the behaviors of Large Language Models when faced with conflicting prompts versus their internal memory. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments with seven LLMs reveal their varying behaviors. |
When and How to Augment Your Input: Question Routing Helps Balance the Accuracy and Efficiency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | augmented generation of knowledge-based long-tail questions can be useful for large language models, but can cause significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive question routing framework that uses a query router to augment input to the right time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing approaches in accuracy and efficiency on benchmarks such as AmbigNQ, HotpotQA, MMLU-STEM, and PopQA. |
Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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Guangyi Liu, Zichao Yang, Tianhua Tao, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Zhen Li, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss method which computes the matching loss of a target sequence with all n-grams in the generated sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the common CE loss and strong baselines on a wide range of tasks. |
NaturalGAIA: A Verifiable Benchmark and Hierarchical Framework for Long-Horizon GUI Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current research faces an "Evaluation-Realism Dilemma" due to unstable MLLM judges or manual verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a verifiable evaluation dataset grounded in real-world human GUI intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art framework in achieving a weighted pathway success rate of 45.6% while reducing token consumption and execution time by 76%. |
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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Bingxiang He, Ning Ding, Cheng Qian, Jia Deng, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Haiwen Hong, Huan-ang Gao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Huimin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks. |
Beyond Cross-Modal Alignment: Measuring and Leveraging Modality Gap in Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that vision-language models have modality gaps that persist even in well-aligned models. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-dominance score to measure and leverage modality gaps . they propose automatic interpretability metrics to evaluate these features in a scalable manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for training-free probing and editing methods for understanding model perception across genders and generating adversarial examples. |
MTR-DuplexBench: Towards a Comprehensive Evaluation of Multi-Round Conversations for Full-Duplex Speech Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating single-round interactions, neglecting other critical aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate full-duplex speech language models in multi-round settings . they segment continuous full-dual dialogues into discrete turns for evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared full-duplex speech language models with full-dual speech models . the results show that the models perform better in multi-round settings than standard models compared to benchmarks . |
Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied reasoning are coarse-grained and expensive . branch-and-browse framework enables fine-grounded, memory-guided, and efficient multi-branch reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods. |
MoNET: Tackle State Momentum via Noise-Enhanced Training for Dialogue State Tracking (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that MoNET outperforms previous DST methods in alleviating state momentum issues and improving the anti-noise ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to use previous state of each turn in training data as input to learn to predict current state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multiWOZ datasets and shows that it can update and correct slot values and improve anti-noise ability. |
On the Generalization of Training-based ChatGPT Detection Methods (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that training-based methods are ineffective to detect LLM generated texts from unseen tasks or topics which are not collected during training. |
| Approach: | They propose to train classification models to distinguish LLMs from human texts by a distribution shift caused by prompts, text lengths, topics, and language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can detect LLMs from black-box models, but they suffer from distribution shifts due to a wide range of factors, including prompts, text lengths, topics, and language tasks. |
Learning with Less: Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models via Unlabeled Data (2025.findings-naacl)
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Juanhui Li, Sreyashi Nag, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Limeng Cui, Hansu Gu, Suhang Wang, Qi He, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior language understanding abilities in many real-world NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based sample selection method that incorporates signals from both teacher and student to enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance across datasets with higher data efficiency. |
Beat LLMs at Their Own Game: Zero-Shot LLM-Generated Text Detection via Querying ChatGPT (2023.emnlp-main)
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Biru Zhu, Lifan Yuan, Ganqu Cui, Yangyi Chen, Chong Fu, Bingxiang He, Yangdong Deng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ming Gu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of performing tasks but are likely to be misused. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot black-box method to detect LLM-generated texts . they revise the text to be detected using the ChatGPT model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect LLM-generated texts with a zero-shot black-box model . it is based on intuition that the model will make fewer revisions to LLMs than to human-written texts . |
EcomScriptBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for E-commerce Script Planning via Step-wise Intention-Driven Product Association (2025.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Limeng Cui, Xin Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Wenju Xu, Chen Luo, Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar, Yang Li, Hansu Gu, Hui Liu, Changlong Yu, Jiaxin Bai, Yifan Gao, Haiyang Zhang, Qi He, Shuiwang Ji, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Goal-oriented script planning is used by humans to plan for typical activities . however, this capability remains underexplored due to several challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables product-enriched scripts by associating products with each step based on the semantic similarity between the actions and their purchase intentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate product-enriched scripts from 2.4 million scripts . human annotations are conducted to provide gold labels for a sampled subset . |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
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Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
Fast and Accurate Neural Machine Translation with Translation Memory (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge demonstrates the superiority of TM-based neural machine translation only on TM specialized tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a translation memory-based approach to machine translation using a single bilingual sentence as its TM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines on two general tasks and improves on the TM-specialized translation tasks. |
New Terms, New Toxicity: Consensus-based Chinese Neologism Toxicity Detection via Search-Augmented LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Shiyao Cui, QingLin Zhang, Di Wang, Yida Lu, Zhexin Zhang, Jinhua Gao, Jinglin Yang, Min He, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Neologisms can foster new linguistic consensus by stabilizing shared meanings and usage in common communicative norms. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that captures the origins and consensus-verification criteria of toxic neologisms . they propose 'SeTox' framework that integrates real-time web context for naeologim detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large-scale models in detecting neologism toxicity. |
Uni-Encoder: A Fast and Accurate Response Selection Paradigm for Generation-Based Dialogue Systems (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decode a given context-candidate pair are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that keeps full attention over each pair while only encoding the context once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves new state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets with high computational efficiency. |
A Reward-Guided Dual-Phase Framework for Adaptive Inference-Time Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yingqian Cui, Zhenwei Dai, Pengfei He, Bing He, Hui Liu, Zhan Shi, Xianfeng Tang, Jingying Zeng, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Benoit Dumoulin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made strong progress in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-phase test-time scaling framework that separates planning and execution and performs search over each phase independently. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning and code generation benchmarks show that the proposed approach improves accuracy while reducing redundant computation. |
RevCore: Review-Augmented Conversational Recommendation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommendation systems lack item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where reviews are seamlessly incorporated into conversational recommendation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields better performance on recommendation and conversation responding. |