Papers by Hua Lu
Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors. |
Neo-Classic: A Benchmark for Evaluating Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning in Classical Chinese Poetry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high accuracy on established Classical Chinese Poetry benchmarks, but it remains challenging to distinguish transferable Linguistic-Aesthetic Reasoning from reliance on familiar pre-training patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that combines a constructionist Out-of-Sample dataset with reverse understanding probes to evaluate large-scale large-format models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on classical Chinese poetry benchmarks, but a performance gap persists . the model can complete famous couplets and can be used to understand a variety of texts. |
Unified Structure Generation for Universal Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information extraction suffers from its varying targets, heterogeneous structures, and demand-specific schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified text-to-structure generation framework, namely UIE, which can universally model different IE tasks, adaptively generate targeted structures, and collaboratively learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model different IE tasks, generate targeted structures, and learn general IE abilities from different knowledge sources. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
D-Artemis: A Deliberative Cognitive Framework for Mobile GUI Multi-Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, WenJie Lu, Yuqi Wang, Jinyuan Li, Song Cao, He Cui, Tengfei Tian, Xuelin Zhang, Haotian Luo, Di Sun, Jun Fang, Hua Chai, Naiqiang Tan, Gang Pan
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents aim to automate a wide spectrum of human tasks by emulating user interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative framework that leverages a fine-grained tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves SOTA among open-source general models on AndroidWorld and ScreenSpot-V2 . it leverages a fine-grained, app-specific tip retrieval mechanism to inform its decision-making process . |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
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Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Zhihua Wu, Zhen Guo, Hua Lu, Xinxian Huang, Xin Tian, Xinchao Xu, Yingzhan Lin, Zheng-Yu Niu
| Challenge: | Experimental results show PLATO-XL achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLATO-XL models with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on Chinese and English social media conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI. |
Diagnosing Hidden Instabilities in Model Editing via Uncertainty Quantification (2026.acl-long)
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Zihan Gu, TianYi Zhang, Xinyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Han Zhang, Yuhao Wei, Jiacheng Lu, Tianyi Ma, Xingsheng Zhang, Hua Zhang, Yue Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to update large language models (LLMs) without expensive retraining are fragile under single-edit evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that characterizes activation-based editing as a constrained intervention on intermediate representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals local knowledge conflicts invisible to existing benchmarks. |
Syntactic and Semantic-driven Learning for Open Information Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach significantly outperforms the supervised counterparts, and can even achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art (SoA) model. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactic and semantic-driven learning approach that can learn open IE models without human-labelled data by leveraging syntakic and semantic knowledge as noisier, higher-level supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms supervised counterparts and can achieve competitive performance to supervised state-of-the-art models. |
Towards Boosting the Open-Domain Chatbot with Human Feedback (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for pre-training open-domain dialogue models with social media comments generate coherent replies but have difficulties producing engaging responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to boost the open-domain chatbot by leveraging human feedback and annotating the model's candidate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the open-domain chatbot by leveraging human demonstrated responses and leveraging the implicit preference in the data collection process. |
Argument Generation with Retrieval, Planning, and Realization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel argument generation framework is used to generate counter-arguments . CANDELA uses a text planning decoder to retrieve arguments of different perspectives . |
| Approach: | They propose a powerful retrieval system and a novel two-step argument generation framework . they use a retrieval-based retrieval platform indexed with 12 million articles from Wikipedia . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields higher BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR scores than state-of-the-art models. |
PAIR: Planning and Iterative Refinement in Pre-trained Transformers for Long Text Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | We present a content-controlled text generation framework for pre-trained Transformers . large pre-train models are the cornerstone of many state-of-the-art models in natural language understanding and generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a content-controlled text generation framework that adds content planning to large pre-trained Transformers without modifying model architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the quality of the outputs on three domains. |
TurboRAG: Accelerating Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Precomputed KV Caches for Chunked Text (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current RAG systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill . this leads to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT) Experimental results demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG system. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid offline-online paradigm that precomputes chunk-level key-value caches and stitches them together at inference time using independent–attention and reorderedRoPE techniques. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems . long concatenated contexts consume disproportionate GPU memory, limiting throughput . |
DYPLOC: Dynamic Planning of Content Using Mixed Language Models for Text Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural generation models fall short of coherence, thus requiring efficient content planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a generation framework that conducts dynamic planning of content while generating the output based on a novel design of mixed language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models on argument generation and writing articles using New York Times’ Opinion section. |
Argument Mining for Understanding Peer Reviews (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | In 2015 alone, approximately 63.4 million hours were spent on peer reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically detect argumentative propositions put forward by reviewers and their types by automatically detecting their types and types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects (1) the argumentative propositions put forward by reviewers, and (2) their types (e.g., evaluating the work or making suggestions for improvement). |
MDACE: MIMIC Documents Annotated with Code Evidence (2023.acl-long)
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Hua Cheng, Rana Jafari, April Russell, Russell Klopfer, Edmond Lu, Benjamin Striner, Matthew Gormley
| Challenge: | Computer-Assisted Coding (CAC) systems are required to provide supporting textual evidence to justify billing codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for evidence/rationale extraction on an extreme multi-label classification task over long medical documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate evidence extraction methods for CAC systems, as well as the accuracy and interpretability of deep learning models for multi-label classification. |
Efficient Argument Structure Extraction with Transfer Learning and Active Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and understanding the argumentative discourse structure in text has been a critical task in argument mining. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware Transformer-based argument structure prediction model that outperforms models that rely on features or only encode limited contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models that rely on features or encode limited contexts on five domains and on peer reviews on five different domains. |
Sentence-Level Content Planning and Style Specification for Neural Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in text generation systems often produce incoherent and unfaithful outputs . a novel automated text generation system takes into account content selection, text planning, and surface realization. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end trained two-step text generation model that considers sentence-level content planners and language styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models in three domains with diverse topics and varying language styles. |
Neural Argument Generation Augmented with Externally Retrieved Evidence (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating arguments are limited to retrieval-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder-based argument generation model enriched with externally retrieved evidence from Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates arguments with more topic-relevant content than current models based on automatic evaluation and human assessments on a large-scale dataset from reddit. |