Papers by Hong Lu
Partner Personas Generation for Dialogue Response Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks that focus on self personas ignore the value of partner persona . experimental results show that our framework generates relevant, interesting, coherent and informative partner personages even compared to ground truth partner personagers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages automatic partner personas generation to enhance dialogue response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates relevant, interesting, coherent and informative partner personas even compared to ground truth partner person . it surpasses baselines that condition on ground truth persona . |
CREAD: Combined Resolution of Ellipses and Anaphora in Dialogues (2021.naacl-main)
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Bo-Hsiang Tseng, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Lin Li, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Traditionally, anaphora resolution and ellipses resolution are limited in dialogues . despite rapid progress in dialogue systems, several difficulties remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for modeling coreference resolution and query rewriting for complex, multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on a rewritten dialogue dataset. |
Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science (2025.findings-acl)
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Sirui Hong, Yizhang Lin, Bang Liu, Bangbang Liu, Binhao Wu, Ceyao Zhang, Danyang Li, Jiaqi Chen, Jiayi Zhang, Jinlin Wang, Li Zhang, Lingyao Zhang, Min Yang, Mingchen Zhuge, Taicheng Guo, Tuo Zhou, Wei Tao, Robert Tang, Xiangtao Lu, Xiawu Zheng, Xinbing Liang, Yaying Fei, Yuheng Cheng, Yongxin Ni, Zhibin Gou, Zongze Xu, Yuyu Luo, Chenglin Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but face challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph-based agent that represents complexity and a progressive strategy for step-by-step verification, refinement, and consistent context management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on the MATH dataset and performs better on InfiAgent-DABench. |
Can Large Language Models Understand Context? (2024.findings-eacl)
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Yilun Zhu, Joel Moniz, Shruti Bhargava, Jiarui Lu, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Site Li, Yuan Zhang, Hong Yu, Bo-Hsiang Tseng
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for Large Language Models (LLMs) have been inadequate to evaluate their ability to understand contextual features. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess large language models' ability to understand context by adapting existing datasets to suit their evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better under the in-context learning pretraining scenario than state-of-the-art models. |
PreCo: A Large-scale Dataset in Preschool Vocabulary for Coreference Resolution (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for coreference resolution are based on word2vec-like representations of entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale English dataset for coreference resolution . they use 38K documents and 12.5M words from English-speaking preschoolers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is more efficient with higher training-test overlap than OntoNotes . the study also shows that mention detection and clustering are more efficient on PreCo . |
DialogGen: Multi-modal Interactive Dialogue System with Multi-turn Text-Image Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Minbin Huang, Yanxin Long, Xinchi Deng, Ruihang Chu, Jiangfeng Xiong, Xiaodan Liang, Hong Cheng, Qinglin Lu, Wei Liu
| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) generation models have advanced in recent years, but effective interaction with these models is challenging for average users due to the need for specialized prompt engineering knowledge and the inability to perform multi-turn image generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf MLLMs and T2I models to build a multi-modal interactive dialogue system (MIDS) that can generate correct output modalities and coherence of output images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate correct output modalities and coherent multi-modal outputs compared with other state-of-the-art models. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
MIME: MIMicking Emotions for Empathetic Response Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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Navonil Majumder, Pengfei Hong, Shanshan Peng, Jiankun Lu, Deepanway Ghosal, Alexander Gelbukh, Rada Mihalcea, Soujanya Poria
| Challenge: | Empathy is a fundamental human trait that reflects our ability to understand and reflect the thoughts and feelings of the people we interact with. |
| Approach: | They propose to use polarity-based emotion clusters to generate empathetic responses . they also introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied responses compared to the previous work . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve empathy and contextual relevance of the response, and introduce stochasticity into the emotion mixture that yields emotionally more varied responses than the previous work. |
Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing focus on prompts and localized feedback. |
| Approach: | They build a controlled multi-agent sandbox that instantiates a small standup comedy community and allows it to manipu-late whether public reception is generated, logged, and fed back into later rounds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves craft/clarity and social response with occasional increases in aggressive humor. |
STEER: Semantic Turn Extension-Expansion Recognition for Voice Assistants (2023.emnlp-industry)
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Leon Zhang, Jiarui Lu, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Aditya Kulkarni, Dhivya Piraviperumal, Tien Dung Tran, Nick Tzou, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing training datasets for steering use cases are limited due to the cold-start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a steering detection model that predicts whether a follow-up turn is a user’s attempt to steer the previous command. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on human-graded evaluation sets and shows that it can identify steering intent with over 95% accuracy. |
RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye, Hong Gu, Xu Lu, Ruixuan Xiao, Bowen Bao, Yijing He, Liangyu Zha, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on simple, flat table structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the performance of both Large Language Models and Multimodal LLMs across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of LLMs and Multimodal LLM models across a variety of input formats for complex tabular data, including LaTeX, HTML, and PNG. |
Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Haolei Xu, Haiwen Hong, Hongxing Li, Rui Zhou, Yang Zhang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks. |
Is the Attention Matrix Really the Key to Self-Attention in Multivariate Long-Term Time Series Forecasting? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In multivariate long-term time series forecasting, it is widely believed that the effectiveness of self-attention arises from its attention matrix. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch MLP that isolates the ‘multi-brain mapping with element-wise operation’ structure from the Transformer and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms three classic and three latest Transformer models and shows that it achieves competitive performance. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Culture-Aware Machine Translation in Large Language Models: Benchmarking and Investigation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models focus on literal-level translation quality, such as adequacy and fluency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Culture-Aware Novel-Driven Parallel Dataset for Machine Translation and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for assessing cultural translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves evaluation reliability in LLM-as-a-judge scenarios under culture-aware constraints. |
Multiple Text Style Transfer by using Word-level Conditional Generative Adversarial Network with Two-Phase Training (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Generative adversarial network (GAN) is a popular model for text style transfer . but, training GAN often suffers from mode collapse problem, which causes that the transferred text is little related to the original text. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parallel text style transfer model with a word-level conditional architecture and a two-phase training procedure to maintain style-unrelated words while changing others. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three real-world datasets in transfer accuracy and fluency. |
On Controlling Fallback Responses for Grounded Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge grounded dialogue frameworks assume that the user intention is always answerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically generates a control token with the generator to bias the succeeding response towards informativeness for answerable contexts and fallback for unanswerable context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates fallback responses to respond to unanswerable contexts in an informative manner while retaining informativeness for answerable context. |
User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)
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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity. |
Versatile Framework for Song Generation with Prompt-based Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Zhang, Wenxiang Guo, Changhao Pan, Zhiyuan Zhu, Ruiqi Li, Jingyu Lu, Rongjie Huang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Zhiqing Hong, Ziyue Jiang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for song generation fail to generate vocals with prompt-based control and proper alignment. |
| Approach: | VersBand is a multi-task song generation framework for synthesizing high-quality songs with prompt-based control. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that VersBand performs better than baseline models across multiple song generation tasks. |
x1: Learning to Think Adaptively Across Languages and Cultures (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng, Yichong Huang, Zekun Yuan, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Qichen Hong, Yunfei Lu, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) ignore this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of reasoning models that can adaptively reason in an advantageous language on a per-instance basis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can reason in a single dominant language on a per-instance basis. |
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Senjie Jin, Lu Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Yuhui Wang, Sirui Song, Yuhao Zhou, Xinbo Zhang, Peng Sun, Hong Lu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline. |
Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities by Instruction Learning and Chain-of-Thoughts for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for implicit discourse relation recognition are based on generative models, but some studies suggest they do not perform as well as generic encoder-only models for NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification method that is solely based on generative models and utilize Chain-of-Thoughts to partition the inference process into a sequence of three successive stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a natural language understanding task. |