Papers by Hua Wei
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Yining Hua, Zimu Wang, Tao Shen, Beibei Yu, Lilin Wang, Wei Wang, John Torous, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle extensive context and multi-turn reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy dividing psychotherapy into stages of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment to examine LLM advancements and challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy reveals imbalances in current research, such as a focus on common disorders, linguistic biases, fragmented methods, and limited theoretical integration. |
Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Prompting (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect mental manipulations are limited due to complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to detect mental manipulations using large language models using intent-aware prompting by capturing the intents of participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. |
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. |
SDBench: A Survey-based Domain-specific LLM Benchmarking and Optimization Framework (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | acquiring domain-specific knowledge often requires professional expert manpower. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic framework for generating evaluation datasets for domain-specific LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the reliance on expert manpower while ensuring that the collected data is uniformly distributed. |
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. |
A Multi-Agent Framework for High-Interaction Terminal Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Terminal simulation is a problem of symbolic language generation in dialogue and interactive systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a terminal command-level Turing test framework that improves realism, consistency and robustness in command-language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks by more than 9% on multi-turn terminal simulation. |
UNIMO: Towards Unified-Modal Understanding and Generation via Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods focus on single-modal tasks or multi-modal ones . large-scale pre- training has drawn much attention in both the community of Compute Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a UNIfied-MOdal pre-training architecture which can adapt to both single-modal and multi-modal understanding and generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn more generalizable representations with rich non-paired single-modal data. |
Every Response Counts: Quantifying Uncertainty of LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems through Tensor Decomposition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for MAS fail to address the unique complexities of multi-step reasoning . Existing uncertainty quantification methods struggle with cascading uncertainty . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that quantifies uncertainty through tensor decomposition . they show that MATU effectively estimates holistic and robust uncertainty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles and quantifies distinct sources of uncertainty . it is generalizable across different agent structures and can be used for scientific discovery, education, healthcare and transportation. |
FRSUM: Towards Faithful Abstractive Summarization via Enhancing Factual Robustness (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of abstractive summarization are able to generate fluent and coherent summaries, but they still suffer from the unfaithful generation problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the faithfulness of existing models by enhancing their factual robustness by using a novel training strategy, namely FRSUM, which teaches the model to defend against both explicit adversarial samples and implicit factual adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves faithfulness of various models, such as T5, BART, and T5 . |
Zer0-Jack: A memory-efficient gradient-based jailbreaking method for black box Multi-modal Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models are highly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks due to their additional modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box jailbreak framework based on zeroth-order optimization . they propose generating malicious images and patch-wise block coordinate descent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 98.2% success on MiniGPT-4 and 95% on the Harmful Behaviors Multi-modal dataset while jailbreaking commercial models such as GPT-4o. |
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. |
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Privacy risks in text-only Large Language Models are well-documented, especially their tendency to memorize and leak sensitive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to assess privacy risks across multi-modal tasks and scenarios . they demonstrate how models leak sensitive data across various tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leak sensitive data embedded in images or stored in memory, exposing privacy risks. |
Don’t Click That: Teaching Web Agents to Resist Deceptive Interfaces (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deception detection and defenses are inadequate . Existing methods do not integrate with agent decision-making . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates hybrid-reward learning with asymmetric penalties and experience summarization to distill failure patterns into transferable guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces deception susceptibility by 53.8% while maintaining task performance, establishing an effective foundation for robust web agent deployment. |
TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are primarily used for simple text-related tasks, but LLM-based agents can undertake more complex tasks that require planning and interaction with the physical world and humans. |
| Approach: | They propose an Agent-Constitution-based agent framework with a particular focus on improving the LLM-based agents' safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance an LLM agent’s safety across multiple domains by identifying and mitigating potential dangers during the planning process. |
SgSum:Transforming Multi-document Summarization into Sub-graph Selection (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive multi-document summarization methods score each sentence individually and extract salient sentences one by one. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel framework for extractive multi-document summarization that selects a sub-graph as the summary instead of selecting salient sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods on multi-document datasets and human evaluations show it produces more coherent and informative summaries. |
Lost in Execution: On the Multilingual Robustness of Tool Calling in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents that invoke external tools through structured function calls. |
| Approach: | They introduce a diagnostic benchmark and conduct a systematic evaluation of multilingual tool calling across Chinese, Hindi, and the low-resource language Igbo. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that multilingual tool calling fails despite correct intent understanding and tool selection. |
LEAF: Large Language Diffusion Model for Time Series Forecasting (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has applied large language models (LLMs) into time series forecasting, but they lack an understanding of holistic temporal patterns with potential error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that marries Larg e Langu age Diffusion Model with time series forecasting (LEAF) they propose converting time series into tokens and adopting language diffusion models to capture temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates future predictions with a diffusion model from a holistic view. |
Vision Language Model Helps Private Information De-Identification in Vision Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained popularity due to their ability to solve imagerelated tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance privacy awareness of visual language models . they use a specialized instruction-tuning dataset and a tailored training methodology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in handling private information. |
Multi-Passage Machine Reading Comprehension with Cross-Passage Answer Verification (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen rapid growth in the MRC community . MRC is believed to be a crucial step in building a general intelligent agent . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural model that enables multiple passages to verify each other based on their content representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline on the English MS-MARCO dataset and the Chinese DuReader dataset, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets. |
UNIMO-2: End-to-End Unified Vision-Language Grounded Learning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training can only learn from aligned image-caption data and rely heavily on expensive regional features. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end unified-modal pre-training framework for joint learning . they propose to conduct grounded learning on both images and texts via a sharing grounded space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves visual and visual semantic alignment on images and texts. |
BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for Seq2Seq as it does not analyze long-distance relations in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of context and conveys rich relations between phrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure. |
Uncertainty Quantification of Large Language Models through Multiple Uncertainty Sources (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for uncertainty quantification fail to capture multifaceted nature of natural language generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-resource Uncertainty Quantification framework that integrates heterogeneous uncertainty signals into a unified measure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on CoQA, NQ_Open, and HotpotQA. |
ARNOR: Attention Regularization based Noise Reduction for Distant Supervision Relation Classification (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision is used for relation classification but it introduces noisy labels . a novel approach to distant supervision relation classification is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distant supervision relation classification using attention regularization and attention regularizing . they assume that a trustable relation label should be explained by the neural attention model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the NYT data and noise reduction effect over state-of-the-art methods. |
Conformal Feedback Alignment: Quantifying Answer-Level Reliability for Robust LLM Alignment (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing uncertainty-aware approaches weight preferences, but ignore reliability of the answers being compared. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that grounds preference weighting in Conformal Predictions to address this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves alignment robustness and data efficiency across different datasets. |
Instructional Agents: Reducing Teaching Faculty Workload through Multi-Agent Instructional Design (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing AI-assisted educational tools focus on isolated tasks, but lack end-to-end workflows for instructional design. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent large language model framework to automate end-to-end course material generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces development time and human workload while reducing human involvement. |