Papers by Hongyin Luo
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to incorporate retriever’s preference during the training of query rewriting models rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting their generalization and adaptation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. |
Entailment as Robust Self-Learner (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that entailment pretraining benefits weakly supervised fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompting strategy that formulates different NLU tasks as contextual entailment and propose an algorithm for better pseudo-labeling quality in self-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the zero-shot adaptation performance on downstream tasks. |
Search Augmented Instruction Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyin Luo, Tianhua Zhang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-augmented instruction learning model which grounds the language generation and instruction following abilities on complex search results generated by in-house and external search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms plain LLMs on zero-shot language tasks and can generate both natural and programming languages following natural language guidance and requests. |
Self-Specialization: Uncovering Latent Expertise within Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Junmo Kang, Hongyin Luo, Yada Zhu, Jacob Hansen, James Glass, David Cox, Alan Ritter, Rogerio Feris, Leonid Karlinsky
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-alignment in which a large language model is aligned to follow general instructions using instructional data generated from the model itself. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-written seeds to align large language models to follow general instructions to achieve cross-task generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms base models and models that are generally instruction-tuned or have been adapted to the target domain by a large margin. |
Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Kun Li, Tianhua Zhang, Yunxiang Li, Hongyin Luo, Abdalla Mohamed Salama Sayed Moustafa, Xixin Wu, James R. Glass, Helen M. Meng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve context faithfulness in large language models are either inadequate or overlook the potential for self-improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ASQA and ConFiQA datasets show that GenDiE surpasses baselines in faithfulness and correctness and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation. |
RAG-Zeval: Enhancing RAG Responses Evaluator through End-to-End Reasoning and Ranking-Based Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks rely on direct prompting of resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, introducing significant computational cost and underutilizing models’ reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains evaluators with reinforcement learning to generate comprehensive and sound assessments with detailed explanation in one-pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline evaluation frameworks that rely on LLMs with 10-100 more parameters and achieves the strongest correlation with human judgments. |
Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Tianhua Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Hongyin Luo, Yung-Sung Chuang, Mingye Gao, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Existing methods for surfacing symbolic reasoning capabilities are limited to narrow tasks . arithmetic computations are unnatural to perform in pure language space, and hence present difficulties for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language embedded program framework for solving symbolic reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on strong baselines across math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following tasks. |
Logic Against Bias: Textual Entailment Mitigates Stereotypical Sentence Reasoning (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that textual entailment learning reduces social biases in pretrained sentence encoders. |
| Approach: | They compare pretrained sentence encoders with textual entailment models that learn language logic for downstream language understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform models with lower bias without debiasing processes on stereotype, profession, and emotion bias tests. |
DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings (2022.naacl-main)
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Yung-Sung Chuang, Rumen Dangovski, Hongyin Luo, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Marin Soljacic, Shang-Wen Li, Scott Yih, Yoon Kim, James Glass
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that finetuning pretrained models with contrastive learning makes it possible to learn good sentence embeddings without labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised contrastive learning framework for learning sentence embeddings . they use a masked language model to mask out the edited sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SimCSE on semantic textual similarity tasks by 2.3 absolute points. |
Decoding on Graphs: Faithful and Sound Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs through Generation of Well-Formed Chains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on the utilization of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for large language models (LLMs) relies on subgraph retriever or iterative prompting, overlooking the potential synergy of LLMs’ step-wise reasoning capabilities and KGs’ structural nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-aware constrained decoding framework that facilitates a deep synergy between LLMs and KGs by constraint derived from the topology of the KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can provide faithful and sound reasoning for KGQA. |
THREAD: Thinking Deeper with Recursive Spawning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse settings, but their performance degrades as context length and complexity increases. |
| Approach: | They propose to frame model generation as a thread of execution that, based on the context, can run to completion or dynamically spawn new threads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing frameworks by 10% to 50% on diverse benchmarks. |
Learning Word Representations with Cross-Sentence Dependency for End-to-End Co-reference Resolution (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embedding models generate word representations by running long short-term memory recurrent neural networks on each sentence of an input article or conversation separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a word embedding model that learns cross-sentence dependency . they use linear sentence linking and attentional sentence linking to learn cross-entry dependency based on context sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves end-to-end co-reference resolution by taking knowledge from context sentences and the entire document. |
Cooperative Self-training of Machine Reading Comprehension (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models provide high-quality contextualized word embeddings, but training question answering models requires large amounts of annotated data for specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatically generating more non-trivial question-answer pairs to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) pretrained language models and transfer learning approaches on standard question-answering benchmarks. |
Improving Neural Language Models by Segmenting, Attending, and Predicting the Future (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Common language models typically predict the next word given a past context. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns the given context and the following phrase . they define syntactic heights and phrase segmentation rules to enable it to learn . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baseline models on Wikitext-103 dataset. |