Papers by Heng Yu

43 papers
Bridging the Gap between Native Text and Translated Text through Adversarial Learning: A Case Study on Cross-Lingual Event Extraction (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Recent research in cross-lingual learning has found that combining large-scale pretrained multilingual language models with machine translation can yield good performance.
Approach: They propose a model architecture that jointly encodes a source language input sentence with its translation to the target language during training and takes a target language sentence with it as input during evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed model architecture can integrate machine translation to improve event extraction while adding machine-translated data yields unstable performance due to representational gap.
Multiscale Collaborative Deep Models for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation models with deeper neural networks are difficult to train.
Approach: They propose a MultiScale Collaborative framework to boost gradient back-propagation . they let each encoder block learn a fine-grained representation and enhance it .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on translation tasks with three translation directions and achieves a BLEU score of 30.56 on the English-to-German task.
Weakly-Supervised Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis via Joint Aspect-Sentiment Topic Embedding (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis of review text use only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples.
Approach: They propose a weakly-supervised approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis which uses only a few keywords describing each aspect/sentiment without using any labeled examples.
Outcome: The proposed method generates quality joint topics and outperforms baselines significantly on benchmark datasets.
LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Currently, large language models (LLMs) train on short text segments due to the computational overhead quadratic in the input lengths of their Transformer architectures.
Approach: They propose a method that allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 2.7 decoding speed up and 7.5 memory saving over the original model.
Towards Enhancing Faithfulness for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation (NMT) has achieved great success due to the ability to generate high-quality sentences.
Approach: They propose a training strategy with a multi-task learning paradigm to build a faithfulness enhanced NMT model.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate high-quality sentences that are very close to natural language.
Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for neural machine translation only observe one source sentence at training time . this discrepancy in data distribution leads to a formidable learning challenge .
Approach: They propose an uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation approach to capture universal semantic information among multiple source sentences and enhance hidden representations with this information.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baseline and existing methods on translation tasks.
LORE: Continual Logit Rewriting Fosters Faithful Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Using aspect-oriented summarization as a case study, we propose **LOgit REwriting**, a new controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM’s intentions.
Approach: They propose a controlled generation paradigm which can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm can be faithful to external knowledge and to the LLM's intentions while balancing that with accuracy.
PQR: Improving Dense Retrieval via Potential Query Modeling (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing training data is sparse, with each document associated with one or a few labeled queries.
Approach: They propose a training-free potential query retrieval framework to address this problem . they use a Gaussian mixture distribution to model all potential queries for a document .
Outcome: The proposed method is able to capture comprehensive semantic information from a document with multiple queries.
ProgGen: Generating Named Entity Recognition Datasets Step-by-step with Self-Reflexive Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable adaptability across domains, but they are often not suitable for structured knowledge extraction tasks such as named entity recognition (NER).
Approach: They propose a method that instructs LLMs to self-reflect on the specific domain and generates domain-relevant attributes for creating attribute-rich training data.
Outcome: The proposed method produces NER datasets in domains with domain-relevant attributes and generates entity terms and NER context data around these entities.
Why Does New Knowledge Create Messy Ripple Effects in LLMs? (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing research has focused on post-training knowledge editing (KE) for language models to ensure that knowledge remains accurate and up-to-date.
Approach: They propose to use a GradSim indicator to detect when and why updated knowledge ripples in language models.
Outcome: The proposed indicator GradSim shows that LMs that fail to handle ripple effects have low GradSIM.
Text Classification Using Label Names Only: A Language Model Self-Training Approach (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current text classification methods require a large number of labeled documents as training data.
Approach: They propose a model that uses only the label name of each class to train classification models on unlabeled data without using any labeled examples.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 90% accuracy on four benchmark datasets using label names as the only supervision .
Social-Group-Agnostic Bias Mitigation via the Stereotype Content Model (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for mitigating bias require social-group-specific word pairs for each social attribute (e.g., gender) Existing approaches require only one social attribute, rendering them impractical and costly .
Approach: They propose that stereotype content models capture the underlying connection between bias and stereotypes by embedding only two psychological dimensions of warmth and competence.
Outcome: The proposed method performs comparably to group-specific debiasing on multiple bias benchmarks, but has theoretical and practical advantages over existing methods.
EVEDIT: Event-based Knowledge Editing for Deterministic Knowledge Propagation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge editing approaches only operate on (subject, relation, object) triple . current methods are limited to (substance, relation) triple, causing low confidence in their answers.
Approach: They propose a task of event-based knowledge editing that pairs facts with event descriptions to improve model confidence.
Outcome: The proposed method improves model confidence by 55.6% while maintaining the naturalness of generation.
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge.
Approach: They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict.
Knowledge-Enriched Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-tutorials)

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Challenge: Knowledge-enriched text generation poses unique challenges in modeling and learning . a roadmap will outline the state-of-the-art methods to tackle these challenges .
Approach: They propose a roadmap to tackle the challenges of knowledge-enriched text generation . they will dive deep into various technical components to illustrate how to represent knowledge .
Outcome: This tutorial outlines the state-of-the-art methods to tackle the problem . it aims to show how to represent knowledge, feed knowledge into a generation model, evaluate results .
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)

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Challenge: We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents.
Approach: They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction .
Outcome: The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities.
From Specific-MLLMs to Omni-MLLMs: A Survey on MLLMs Aligned with Multi-modalities (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: MLLMs are able to integrate multiple modalities into a single model to tackle complex tasks in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a comprehensive survey of Omni-MLLMs to address the challenges and opportunities of multimodal modeling.
Outcome: The proposed model can integrate multiple modalities into a single model and provide novel perspectives.
Lifelong Event Detection with Knowledge Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Traditional supervised Information Extraction (IE) methods can extract structured knowledge elements from unstructured data, but it is limited to a pre-defined target ontology.
Approach: They propose a new lifelong event detection framework that is generalizable to other IE tasks and updates old knowledge with new event types’ mentions using a self-training loss.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines with a 5.1% gain in the F1 score and can boost the F2 score for over 30% on some new long-tail rare event types with few training instances.
Deep Learning on Graphs for Natural Language Processing (2021.naacl-tutorials)

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Challenge: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful tools for non-Euclidean data modeling and are used in many graph-related NLP tasks.
Approach: This tutorial will cover applying deep learning on graph techniques to NLP using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) Graph4NLP is the first library for researchers and practitioners for easy use of GNNs for various NLP tasks.
Outcome: This tutorial will cover the latest developments in deep learning on graph techniques and their applications in various NLP tasks.
CA-GAR: Context-Aware Alignment of LLM Generation for Document Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent techniques such as Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) and Generative Document Retrieleval (GDR) leverage LLMs to enhance retrieval performance but face key challenges: GAR’s generated content may not always align with the target document corpus, while GDR limits the generative capacity of LLM.
Approach: They propose a Context-Aware Generation-Augmented Retrieval approach which integrates corpus information into their generation process.
Outcome: Experimental results show that CA-GAR outperforms existing methods on seven tasks and four non-English languages.
Zemi: Learning Zero-Shot Semi-Parametric Language Models from Multiple Tasks (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing semi-parametric language models lack the capacity to perform zero-shot tasks . large language models have shown impressive zero-shoot ability, but huge model size costs . semi-parametric language model can be used to augment a smaller language model with retrieved background knowledge .
Approach: They propose a semi-parametric language model for zero-shot task generalization that augments a smaller language model with retrieved related background knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms T0-3B by 16% across seven diverse evaluation tasks while being 3.8x smaller in scale.
COVID-19 Claim Radar: A Structured Claim Extraction and Tracking System (2022.acl-demo)

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Challenge: a new system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 related news . the system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation.
Approach: They propose a COVID-19 Claim Radar system that extracts supporting and refuting claims . the system leverages Wikidata as the hub to consolidate coreferential knowledge elements .
Outcome: The system extracts supporting and refuting claims from COVID-19 pandemic information . it leverages Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements .
Unlearning Bias in Language Models by Partitioning Gradients (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent research has shown that large-scale pretrained language models exhibit issues relating to racism, sexism, religion bias, and toxicity in general.
Approach: They propose a gray-box method for debiasing pretrained masked language models using partitioned contrastive gradient unlearning (PCGU) aims to optimize only the weights that contribute most to a specific domain of bias by computing a first-order approximation based on the gradients of contrastive sentence pairs.
Outcome: The proposed method is low-cost and can pinpoint the sources of social bias in large pretrained language models.
Eval-RAR: Evaluation-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation fail to provide explicit supervision for internal reasoning process.
Approach: They propose an Evaluation-driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning framework that uses reinforcement learning and a fine-grained evaluation reward to optimize the process.
Outcome: Eval-RAR outperforms existing methods on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop tasks.
VReST: Enhancing Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Tree Search and Self-Reward Mechanism (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown exceptional performance in multimodal tasks, but their effectiveness in complex visual reasoning is constrained.
Approach: They propose a training-free approach that enhances Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models . they propose integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Reward mechanisms into the reasoning tree .
Outcome: The proposed approach surpasses current prompting methods and secures state-of-the-art performance across three multimodal reasoning benchmarks.
Improving Question Answering with External Knowledge (D19-58)

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Challenge: ARC-Easy, ARC Challenge, and OpenBookQA use Wikipedia to augment training data . performance degrades when additional instances exhibit higher difficulty than original training data.
Approach: They propose two methods for exploiting external knowledge for QA in science . they enrich the original corpus with relevant text snippets from an open-domain resource . the second method simply increases the amount of training data by appending additional in-domain instances.
Outcome: The proposed methods achieve gains in accuracy of 8.1%, 13.0%, and 12.8% on science QA tasks.
Timeline Summarization based on Event Graph Compression via Time-Aware Optimal Transport (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for timeline summarization ignore the events’ intra-structures and inter-structure connections.
Approach: They propose to represent news articles as an event-graph, thus compressing the whole graph to its salient sub-graph.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves on the state-of-the-art on three real-world datasets, including two public benchmarks and a Timeline100 dataset.
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.
Defining a New NLP Playground (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history.
Approach: They propose 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions to define a new NLP playground by combining theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications.
Outcome: The proposed research will cover theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications.
Language-aware Interlingua for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing multilingual neural machine translation models fail to capture diversity and specificity of different languages, resulting in inferior performance against individual models that are sufficiently trained.
Approach: They propose to integrate a language-aware interlingua into an Encoder-Decoder architecture to learn a semantic representation from the semantic spaces of different languages while allowing for language-specific specialization of a particular language pair.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves remarkable improvements over state-of-the-art multilingual NMT models and produces comparable performance with strong individual models.
Reliability-aware Dynamic Feature Composition for Name Tagging (P19-1)

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Challenge: Word embeddings are used to encode semantic information, but their quality is not consistent across the vocabulary due to the long-tail distribution of word frequency.
Approach: They propose a reliability-aware name tagging model that uses word frequency to indicate word quality . they propose to use word frequency-based reliability signals to dynamically select and compose features .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on OntoNotes 5.0 and up to 5% gain on cross-genre data sets.
UniRAG: Unified Query Understanding Method for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing query augmentation methods face knowledge update lag and hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) Existing methods face two key challenges: (1) separation of query augmented and encoding tasks, which hinders information sharing and introduces cumulative errors; (2) difficulty of selecting optimal augmentation strategy for different scenarios.
Approach: They propose a unified framework for query understanding in RAG that integrates internal and external knowledge to enhance query augmentation and encoding tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms traditional query augmentation methods in five knowledge-intensive benchmark tasks in both closed and open domain question answering.
Learning to Generalize to More: Continuous Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation (NMT) tasks require large amounts of parallel data to augment training.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation paradigm that augments each training instance with an adjacency semantic region that could cover adequate variants of literal expression under the same meaning.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm improves on the state-of-the-art in supervised neural machine translation tasks.
Thinking Traps in Long Chain-of-Thought: A Measurable Study and Trap-Aware Adaptive Restart (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
ManCC: A Task-Anchored Benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese Cross-Lingual Modeling (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Mainstream research in natural language processing has focused on high-resource and modern languages.
Approach: They propose a task-anchored benchmark for Manchu–Classical Chinese translation . they use a parallel corpus of 16,627 sentence pairs to evaluate the model .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that linguistic differences influence performance and broader language coverage facilitate low-resource transfer.
Shorten the Long Tail for Rare Entity and Event Extraction (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches for the long-tailed learning problem seek to manipulate the training data by re-balancing, augmentation or introducing extra prior knowledge.
Approach: They propose to transform infrequent candidate mention representation with the average mention representation in the training dataset to handle the generalization challenge.
Outcome: The proposed framework can generalize to rare or unseen expressions of entities or events, especially for rare types without sufficient training examples.
The Law of Knowledge Overshadowing: Towards Understanding, Predicting and Preventing LLM Hallucination (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts.
Approach: They propose a new framework to quantify factual hallucinations by modeling knowledge overshadowing.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model factuality on Overshadow (27.9%), MemoTrap (13.1%) and NQ-Swap (18.3%).
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Code-Switching for Enhancing NMT with Pre-Specified Translation (N19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to constrain NMT use placeholder tags for lexicon words and hard constraints during decoding.
Approach: They propose to use placeholder tags to replace lexicon words with target translations . they use a data augmentation method to make code-switched training data .
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation quality without hurting unconstrained words.
Non-Sequential Graph Script Induction via Multimedia Grounding (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing scripts for everyday tasks are presented in a linear manner, which does not reflect the flexibility displayed by people executing tasks in real life.
Approach: They propose to use loosely aligned videos to train a non-sequential graph script induction task by using a multimodal framework to ground procedural videos to WikiHow textual steps.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the WikiHow linear baseline by 48.76% . it can predict future steps given a partial step sequence and generate explicit graph scripts .
Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition with Noise-Robust Learning and Language Model Augmented Self-Training (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Named entity recognition models require abundant high-quality annotations to train . distant supervision may induce incomplete and noisy labels, making supervised learning ineffective.
Approach: They propose a noise-robust learning scheme for training named entity recognition models using only distantly-labeled data and a self-training method that uses contextualized augmentations created by pre-trained language models.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing supervised NER models on three datasets by significant margins.
Factorized Transformer for Multi-Domain Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multi-domain Neural Machine Translation (MMT) is a challenging task due to the extreme diversity of cross-domain wording and phrasing style, and the imperfections of training data distribution.
Approach: They propose a factorized NMT model that divides domain-shared knowledge into domain-specific ones that are private for each constituent domain.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance and opens up new perspectives for multi-domain and open-domain applications.

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