Papers by Hongxia Xu
LIFTED: Multimodal Clinical Trial Outcome Prediction via Large Language Models and Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Clinical trials are costly and pivotal processes that require substantial expenses . a new approach to integrate multimodal data for clinical outcome prediction is needed . |
| Approach: | a proposed framework transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions . a sparse Mixture-of-Experts mechanism then identifies shared patterns across modalities . |
| Outcome: | a proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in predicting clinical trial outcomes . it transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions, encoded via unified encoders . |
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection (2026.eacl-long)
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Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei, Congkai Xie, Xueyu Hu, Xinchen Xu, Shengyu Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing GUI Agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM-based GUI Agent with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline that enhances GUI understanding and grounding. |
| Outcome: | InfiGUIAgent achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. |
Unraveling Babel: Exploring Multilingual Activation Patterns of LLMs and Their Applications (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on how large language models process multiple languages, but internal mechanisms of LLMs remain insufficiently explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert dense LLMs into fine-grained MoE architectures and analyze their activation patterns using expert activation frequency heatmaps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms random expert pruning and exceeds models in some languages. |
From Misleading Queries to Accurate Answers: A Three-Stage Fine-Tuning Method for LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on correcting the output but overlook the ability of LLMs to detect and correct misleading content in the input itself. |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage fine-tuning method that improves LLMs' ability to detect and correct misleading information in input queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and factuality of LLM responses while also reducing hallucinations. |
Reason from Future: Reverse Thought Chain Enhances LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yinlong Xu, Yanzhao Zheng, Shuoshuo Sun, Shuaihan Huang, Baohua Dong, Zhu Hangcheng, Ruohui Huang, Gang Yu, Hongxia Xu, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning paradigms that focus on local optimum reasoning lack global perspective. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional reasoning paradigm that generates reasoning paths by bidirectional planning and bottom-up reasoning accumulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning paradigm outperforms conventional paradigms with higher accuracy and less searching space to solve complex tasks. |
Learning What Matters: Dynamic Dimension Selection and Aggregation for Interpretable Vision-Language Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Chen, Hongsen Huang, Jiahe Chen, Qian Shao, Jintai Chen, Hongxia Xu, Renjie Hua, Ren Chuan, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reward models are interpretable but slow, while discriminative ones are opaque "black boxes." |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically decomposes evaluation into granular, interpretable dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source reward models on benchmarks like VL-RewardBench. |
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks. |
Debate-of-Thoughts: Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in LLMs Through Internal Deliberation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmented generation are based on a simplistic binary choice of relying on external contexts or memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms conflict resolution into an active deliberation process by incorporating contradictions as opportunities for deeper reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while generating transparent debate transcripts that explain its decisions. |
Icon2: Aligning Large Language Models Using Self-Synthetic Preference Data via Inherent Regulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qiyuan Chen, Hongsen Huang, Qian Shao, Jiahe Chen, Jintai Chen, Hongxia Xu, Renjie Hua, Ren Chuan, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require high quality preference datasets to align with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages inherent regulation of LLMs’ representation space for efficient and tailored preference dataset construction, named Icon2. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on benchmarks like AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard while reducing computational costs by up to 48.1%. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
Learning Relation Alignment for Calibrated Cross-modal Retrieval (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal pre-training, cross-modal retrieval remains challenging . lack of relation consistency impairs contextualized representation of image-text pairs . |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to quantify the relation consistency by measuring the semantic distance between linguistic and visual relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the performance of prevailing models on Flickr30k and MS COCO datasets by a considerable margin. |
An Expert is Worth One Token: Synergizing Multiple Expert LLMs as Generalist via Expert Token Routing (2024.acl-long)
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Ziwei Chai, Guoyin Wang, Jing Su, Tianjie Zhang, Xuanwen Huang, Xuwu Wang, Jingjing Xu, Jianbo Yuan, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu, Yang Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide spectrum of tasks, but performance and reliability in certain specialized domains still fall short of expectations. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified generalist framework that facilitates seamless integration of multiple expert LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing multi-LLM collaboration paradigms across six diverse expert domains. |