Papers by Heming Xia
Enhancing Continual Relation Extraction via Classifier Decomposition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies only adopt a vanilla strategy when learning representations of new relations . experimental results show that the importance of the first training stage to CRE models may be underestimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that splits the last FFN layer into separated previous and current classifiers to maintain previous knowledge and encourage model to learn more robust representations at this training stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two benchmarks. |
AppBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex User Instruction (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) still cannot perform well in this situation even with the help of in-context learning and finetuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability to plan and execute multiple APIs from various sources in order to complete the user’s task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the existing state-of-the-art LLMs still cannot perform well in this situation even with in-context learning and finetuning. |
Bi-Drop: Enhancing Fine-tuning Generalization via Synchronous sub-net Estimation and Optimization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models can be fine-tuned on limited training data, which can overfit and thus diminish performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning strategy that selectively updates model parameters using gradients from various sub-nets dynamically generated by dropout. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on the GLUE benchmark and exhibits excellent generalization ability and robustness for domain transfer, data imbalance, and low-resource scenarios. |
Enhancing Tool Retrieval with Iterative Feedback from Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods have shown that large language models can handle a certain amount of tools through in-context learning or fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool retrieval with iterative feedback from the large language model by prompting the tool usage model to provide feedback for the tool retriever model in multi-round. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves advanced performance in both in-domain evaluation and out-of-domain assessment. |
ImageNetVC: Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Commonsense Evaluation on 1000 ImageNet Categories (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming general-purpose APIs, requiring visual knowledge to be understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the visual capability of large-scale large-language models through visual commonsense evaluation using a human-annotated dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset compares the visual commonsense knowledge of large-scale models with those of unimodal LLMs and visually augmented models. |
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song, Longyu Guan, Qingxiu Dong, Rui Li, Yixin Yang, Yifan Pu, Weiyao Luo, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language benchmarks, yet current evaluations focus on single-image reasoning. |
| Approach: | STRIPCIPHER is a benchmark designed to evaluate model ability on understanding implicit narratives in silent comics. |
| Outcome: | STRIPCIPHER is a high-quality, human-annotated dataset featuring fine-grained annotations and comprehensive coverage of varying difficulty levels. |
Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for shaping large reasoning models rely on reinforcement learning or fine-tuning with gold-standard reasoning traces. Existing techniques for behavior shaping rely only on additional reward modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns a model's self-concept with a target belief blueprint and internalizes desired traits by fine-tuning on synthesized, self-reflective QA pairs that affirm the target belief. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms behavior-supervised and preference-based models while requiring significantly lower training costs. |
PEToolLLM: Towards Personalized Tool Learning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning studies focus on general-purpose tool-use capability, but ignore the importance of personalized tool-user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to adapt Large Language Models to personalized tool learning task, which is trained through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on PEToolBench show that the proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in the personalized tool learning task. |
SpecVLM: Enhancing Speculative Decoding of Video LLMs via Verifier-Guided Token Pruning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Video large language models (Vid-LLMs) rely on dense video token representations and require substantial memory and computational overhead in both prefilling and decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free speculative decoding framework that prunes up to 90% of video tokens to enable efficient speculation without sacrificing accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 2.68 speedup on LLaVA-OneVision-72B and 2.11 speed up on Qwen2.5-VL-32B. |
Premise-based Multimodal Reasoning: Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2022.acl-long)
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Qingxiu Dong, Ziwei Qin, Heming Xia, Tian Feng, Shoujie Tong, Haoran Meng, Lin Xu, Zhongyu Wei, Weidong Zhan, Baobao Chang, Sujian Li, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing work in vision language cross-modal reasoning uses binary or multi-choice classification based on source image and textual query. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a textual premise is the background presumption on each source image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a dataset of 15,360 movie screenshots and human-curated premise templates from 6 pre-defined categories. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Can Large Multimodal Models Uncover Deep Semantics Behind Images? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on visual deep semantics focus primarily on superficial description of images, revealing a notable deficiency in the systematic investigation of the inherent deep semantic. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess Large Multimodal Models’ (LMMs) capacities of visual deep semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates a substantial gap between the deep semantic comprehension capabilities of existing LMMs and humans. |
From Query to Logic: Ontology-Driven Multi-Hop Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit limitations in complex multi-hop question answering tasks that necessitate non-linear, structured reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-driven reasoning and chain framework that combines LLMs’ generative capabilities with the structural benefits of knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across a diverse set of models and standard MQA benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves competitive performance while producing more interpretable reasoning chains. |
Towards Harmonized Uncertainty Estimation for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in handling a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that employs a lightweight model trained on data aligned with the target LLM’s performance to adjust uncertainty scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves improvements of up to 60% over existing methods. |
KNN-SSD: Enabling Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding via Nearest Neighbor Layer Set Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have proven highly capable in handling downstream tasks, but the token-by-token generation in autoregressive decoding results in quadratic computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that proposes skipping certain layers to construct a draft model, which eliminates the need for additional parameters or training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.31.6 speedup in LLM inference while being sensitive to domain shifts. |
Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
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Heming Xia, Zhe Yang, Qingxiu Dong, Peiyi Wang, Yongqi Li, Tao Ge, Tianyu Liu, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel decoding paradigm that drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . they aim to provide a catalyst for further research on Speculative Decoding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . it can be used to accelerate inference in large language models. |
TokenSkip: Controllable Chain-of-Thought Compression in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting approach that enables LLMs to selectively skip less important tokens, allowing for controllable CoT compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenSkip reduces CoT token usage while preserving strong reasoning performance. |
Merlin’s Whisper: Enabling Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models via Black-box Persuasive Prompting (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated proficiency in tackling complex tasks through step-by-step thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box persuasive prompting framework that generates concise responses without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while preserving performance. |
How Far are LLMs from Being Our Digital Twins? A Benchmark for Persona-Based Behavior Chain Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on dialogue simulation while overlooking human behavior simulation, which is crucial for digital twins. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate persona metadata into LLMs and use it to iteratively infer contextually appropriate behaviors within dynamic scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 15,846 distinct behaviors across 1,001 unique personas and incorporates persona metadata to iteratively infer appropriate behaviors within dynamic scenarios. |
HAUNTATTACK: When Attack Follows Reasoning as a Shadow (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that embeds harmful instructions into reasoning questions . they evaluate 11 LRMs and observe an average attack success rate of over 70% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reasoning models by 13 percentage points over baseline. |
Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show draft-then-verify paradigm can achieve around 5x speedup for the popular Transformer architectures with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Spec-Drafter and Spec Verification to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding by combining a model optimized for efficient and accurate drafting and a reliable method for verifying the drafted tokens efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 5x speedup on seq2seq tasks with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding, refreshing the impression that draft-then-verify paradigm introduces only 1.4x2x speed up. |
Taking a Deep Breath: Enhancing Language Modeling of Large Language Models with Sentinel Tokens (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored compression and accumulation methods to compress contexts, but these methods lose useful context information during the compression process, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows LLMs to take a deep breath and insert a special token at the end of each chunk. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on language modeling and out-of-domain tasks validate the superiority of the proposed method. |