Papers by Heng Fan
Harmful Factuality: LLMs Correcting What They Shouldn’t (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained for factual accuracy, but can conflict with the critical demand for source fidelity. |
| Approach: | They propose a reproducible framework to elicit and measure HFH using controlled entity-level perturbations and strategic entity selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces HFH rates by 50% across summarization, rephrasing, and QA tasks. |
From Implicit Graph Encoding to Explicit Evidence: A Training-Free LLM Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Guo Tang, Ke Cheng, Huiming Fan, Heng Chang, Wenxiang Zheng, Xianhao Ou, Junjia Xiang, Ming Liu, Yujun Zhou, Li Lanyu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with implicit modality alignment and suboptimal graph linearization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time adaptive framework that reframes TKG prediction as explicit evidence-driven reasoning. |
| Outcome: | ExE-LLM outperforms fully trained graph neural networks on four benchmarks . it achieves SOTA performance in inductive settings, significantly outperforming fully trained neural networks . |
EMCompress: Video-LLMs with Endomorphic Multimodal Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Static, sparse frame sampling either dilutes evidence across task-irrelevant segments at significant cost or misses fine-grained temporal semantics altogether. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that compresses multimodal input while preserving answer invariance across reasonable downstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses prior methods by 0.40 F-1 with competitive query rewriting. |
ProMCP: Profiling Token Flows and Latency Costs in Model Context Protocol–Based LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly used as agents that interact with external tools and data sources to solve tasks that require fresh knowledge, precise computation, or action in a real environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes the MCP workflow into a six-stage communication pipeline and enables granular attribution of computational costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes the MCP workflow into a six-stage communication pipeline, enabling granular attribution of computational costs. |
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. |
DAM: Dynamic Attention Mask for Long-Context Large Language Model Inference Acceleration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-context understanding is crucial for many NLP applications, but transformers struggle with efficiency due to quadratic complexity of self-attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic sparse attention mechanism that assigns adaptive masks at the attention-map level, preserving heterogeneous attention patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high alignment with full-attention models while reducing memory and compute overhead. |
Minimize Exposure Bias of Seq2Seq Models in Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Ranran Haoran Zhang, Qianying Liu, Aysa Xuemo Fan, Heng Ji, Daojian Zeng, Fei Cheng, Daisuke Kawahara, Sadao Kurohashi
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation triplets from plain text introduce exposure bias . prior work has focused on pipeline methods that ignore intrinsic interactions between subtasks and propagate classification errors through the tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reduces the decoding length to three within a triplet and removes the order among triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overfits to both datasets while showing better generalization. |
Analyzing and Internalizing Complex Policy Documents for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jiateng Liu, Zhenhailong Wang, Xiaojiang Huang, Yingjie Li, Xiang Li, Chenlei Guo, Xing Fan, Ruhi Sarikaya, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Large language model agents rely on in-context policy documents to act as effective user assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic benchmark generator with Controllable Complexity in agent policy across four levels to evaluate agents under increasing complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the baseline in data-sparse and high-complexity settings. |
DP-GTR: Differentially Private Prompt Protection via Group Text Rewriting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt privacy focus on document-level rewriting, neglecting rich, multi-granular representations of text. |
| Approach: | a framework that leverages local differential privacy and composition theorem via group text rewriting is proposed . the framework is compatible with existing rewrite techniques and is publicly available at anonymous.4open.science for reproducibility. |
| Outcome: | DP-GTR is the first framework to integrate document-level and word-level information while exploiting in-context learning to improve privacy and utility. |
CALM: Unleashing the Cross-Lingual Self-Aligning Ability of Language Model Question Answering (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the **C**ross-Lingual Self-**Aligning ability of **L**anguage **M**odels to align knowledge across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in both zero-shot and retrieval-augmented settings. |
Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart (2026.findings-acl)
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null Chenkang, Fan Yu, Junjie Nian, Sihan Zhao, Zhuoka Feng, Zijun Yao, Wang Heng, Yu Minshen, Yixin Cao
| Challenge: | Experiments show that extended generation does not guarantee correctness . a recurring pattern in Long-CoT failures is a problem for large reasoning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time control framework that truncates the trajectory before the trap segment and adaptively restarts decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TAAR improves reasoning performance without fine-tuning model parameters. |
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zelin Tan, Hejia Geng, Xiaohang Yu, Mulei Zhang, Guancheng Wan, Yifan Zhou, Qiang He, Xiangyuan Xue, Heng Zhou, Yutao Fan, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zaibin Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Chen Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Philip Torr, Lei Bai
| Challenge: | elucidating scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact during pre-training . they find that large models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws offer practical guidance for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training. |