Papers by Hongjin Qian
CORAL: Benchmarking Multi-turn Conversational Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yiruo Cheng, Kelong Mao, Ziliang Zhao, Guanting Dong, Hongjin Qian, Yongkang Wu, Tetsuya Sakai, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on single-turn RAG, leaving a gap in addressing multi-turn conversations . a new benchmark is designed to assess RAG systems in realistic multi-turned conversations based on Wikipedia . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark to assess RAG systems in multi-turn contexts . CORAL includes diverse information-seeking conversations automatically derived from Wikipedia . authors propose unified framework to standardize various conversational RAG methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports three core tasks of conversational RAG: passage retrieval, response generation, and citation labeling. |
RAG-Studio: Towards In-Domain Adaptation of Retrieval Augmented Generation Through Self-Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems that use pre-trained LLMs and retrievers often fail in specialized domains and applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-aligned training framework that adapts general RAG models to specific domains solely through synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on specialized domain corpus, general LLM, and general retriever show that the self-aligned training framework outperforms human-annotated training data in specialized fields. |
MemoBrain: Executive Memory as an Agentic Brain for Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are inherently long-horizon, causing reasoning traces and tool artifacts to accumulate and strain the working context of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that constructs a dependency-aware memory over reasoning steps and captures salient intermediate states and their logical relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model prunes invalid steps, folds completed sub-trajectories, and preserves a compact, high-salience reasoning backbone under a fixed context budget. |
AWARE: Agentic Knowledge Warehousing for Contextual Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in information seeking tasks, but their knowledge is limited in coverage and timeliness. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic knowledge warehousing framework that transforms unstructured data into minimal, task-conditioned knowledge representations consumable by LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GAIA, WebWalker, and BrowseComp-Plus show improvements over baselines. |
AgentFactory: A Self-Evolving Framework Through Executable Subagent Accumulation and Reuse (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for building LLM-based agents treat agent behavior as static-knowledge gained during execution is not preserved for future use. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that preserves successful task solutions as executable subagent code rather than textual experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-based agent-driven paradigm preserves successful tasks as executable subagent code rather than textual experience. |
FinSight: Towards Real-World Financial Deep Research (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | FinSight is the first multi-agent framework for automating end-to-end professional, multimodal financial reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a code agent with variable memory architecture that unifies data, tools, and agents into a programmable variable space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms leading deep research systems in factual accuracy, analytical depth, and presentation quality. |
Explicit Query Rewriting for Conversational Dense Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In a conversational search scenario, a query might be context-dependent because some words are referred to previous expressions or omitted. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that performs query rewriting and context modelling in a unified framework by highlighting relevant terms in the query context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of quality of query rewriting and quality of contextualized query embedding. |
EvoR: Evolving Retrieval for Code Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelines for retrieval-augmented code generation (RACG) use static knowledge bases with a single source, limiting adaptation capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) Extensive experiments demonstrate that EVOR achieves two to four times of execution accuracy compared to other methods such as Reflexion. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented code generation pipeline that employs the synchronous evolution of queries and diverse knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves two to four times of execution accuracy compared to other methods. |
Speaker or Listener? The Role of a Dialog Agent (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | chitchat bots are designed as a passive listener to answer what people ask . however, this passive and relatively simple response mechanism consumes the interest of human beings rapidly. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to transform a passive dialogue agent into a speaker by using external knowledge to express proactivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains competitive results on the automatic and manual metrics and improves fluency and engagement of the chatbot significantly. |
Grounding Language Model with Chunking-Free In-Context Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | CFIC retrieval approach eliminates the need for document chunking and provides a more efficient and efficient method for RAG systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chunking-Free In-Context retrieval approach specifically tailored for RAG systems . they employ auto-aggressive decoding to accurately identify specific evidence text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is better than traditional methods on open question answering datasets. |
Web Sitemap Knowledge Can Enhance Autonomous Browsing (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuyao Zhang, Hongyu Lu, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Shiyu Li, Zhao Yang, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Existing web agents suffer from limited robustness, efficiency and task success due to lack of structural understanding of websites and lack of browsing priors in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-oriented sitemap protocol that integrates structured website knowledge into web agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-oriented sitemap improves robustness, efficiency and effectiveness without extra training. |
LiveLongBench: Tackling Long-Context Understanding for Spoken Texts from Live Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that spoken text exhibits unique linguistic properties, such as high redundancy and repetitive phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-text dataset that better handles redundancy in spoken text . their results highlight key limitations of current methods and suggest future directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves existing methods and improves on redundancy in spoken text. |
Single LLM, Multiple Roles: A Unified Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Using Role-Specific Token Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have optimized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) across sub-tasks, but integrating these optimizations into a unified framework remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified retrieval-augmented generation framework that optimizes role-specific tokens for multi-task processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves efficient multi-task processing through role-specific token optimization. |
Large Language Models Know Your Contextual Search Intent: A Prompting Framework for Conversational Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding users’ contextual search intent show unsatisfactory effectiveness and robustness to handle real conversational search scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses and to aggregate them into an integrated representation that can robustly represent the user’s real contextual search intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate multiple query rewrites and hypothetical responses and can be used to represent the user’s real contextual search intent. |
Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue systems extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to refine the user dialogue history on a large scale to obtain more persona information from the dialogue history and leverage other similar users' data to enhance personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle more dialogue history and obtain more abundant and accurate persona information. |
Reinforcing Agentic Search Via Reward Density Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing agentic search, but its performance is often hindered by reward sparsity . |
| Approach: | They propose a new research problem to improve the reward obtained per unit of exploration cost by using a system that decomposes long-horizon tasks into intermediate objectives and assigns process-level rewards to provide denser learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on several agentic search benchmarks and achieves comparable performance to that of advanced proprietary models. |
ConvTrans: Transforming Web Search Sessions for Conversational Dense Retrieval (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that conversational dense retrieval is a promising technique for realizing conversational search, but its implementation is severely hindered by the lack of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transforms easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions to alleviate the data scarcity problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transform easily-accessible web search sessions into conversational search sessions. |
Boosting Long-Context Information Seeking via Query-Guided Activation Refilling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for processing long contexts are ineffective due to their inherent context window limitations and the computational burden of extensive key-value activations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for processing long context information-seeking tasks via query-guided ACtivation REfilling (ACRE) a bi-layer KV Cache is constructed where the layer-1 cache compactly captures global information and the layer-2 cache provides detailed, localized information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in both performance and efficiency on a variety of long-context information-seeking datasets. |
Search-Oriented Conversational Query Editing (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing CQR models are not learned toward improving the downstream search performance . existing models generate the rewrite token-by-token from scratch . |
| Approach: | They propose a text editing-based CQR model tailored for conversational search . they propose rewrite tokens are selected from the dialogue in a non-autoregressive fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on three conversational search benchmarks while having low rewriting latency. |