Papers by Huan Yang
Rethinking Diverse Human Preference Learning through Principal Component Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Decomposed Reward Models extract diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposed reward model that extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts diverse human preferences from binary comparisons without fine-grained annotations. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Juntao Tan, Liangwei Yang, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh R N, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Jianguo Zhang, Weiran Yao, Ming Zhu, Shirley Kokane, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks direct access to such data, making benchmarking difficult due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data pipeline that generates realistic user profiles and private documents and a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to understand personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates realistic user profiles and private documents, enabling PersonaBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to understand personal information. |
DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Li, Shu Yang, Zhen Tan, Jae Baik, Sukwon Yun, Joseph Lee, Aaron Chacko, Bojian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Ying Ding, Huan Liu, Li Shen, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs. |
ETR: Entropy Trend Reward for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to shorten CoTs use length penalties or global entropy reduction . Existing approaches to CoT reasoning have significant practical drawbacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that shortens CoTs by length penalties or global entropy reduction . they integrate ETR into Group Relative Policy Optimization and evaluate it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed objective improves accuracy–efficiency trade-off by +9.9% while reducing CoT length by 67% across four benchmarks. |
Learning to Selectively Learn for Weakly-supervised Paraphrase Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate paraphrases with weak supervision are limited in real-world scenarios due to the lack of coherent and controllable generated paraphrase. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate high-quality paraphrases with weak supervision . they obtain abundant weakly-labeled parallel sentences via retrieval-based pseudo paraphrase expansion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over existing methods and is even comparable in performance with supervised state-of-the-arts. |
WR-One2Set: Towards Well-Calibrated Keyphrase Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that keyphrase generation has serious calibration errors . ONE2SET generates short phrases summarizing an input document . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for keyphrase generation that generates short phrases summarizing an input document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model over-estimates tokens and makes it well-calibrated on common datasets. |
Knowledge Image Matters: Improving Knowledge-Based Visual Reasoning with Multi-Image Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-based visual reasoning (KB-VR) is a challenging task, as it requires machines not only to understand concepts and relationships of visual scenes, but also to associate them with external world knowledge to perform chain of reasoning on open-world questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual knowledge card (VKC) that integrates internal visual knowledge and external world knowledge produced by a knowledge generator into an image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results compared to previous top-performing models on three popular KB-VR benchmarks. |
Internalizing Multi-Agent Reasoning for Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are reshaping recommender systems by leveraging extensive world knowledge and semantic reasoning to interpret user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-agent Trajectory-Aligned Recommender to integrate reasoning capabilities into a model by a multi-agend teacher system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses its teacher by 8.7% to 39.5% while eliminating iterative latency. |
Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning fails . they propose 'data-based' training that trains LLMs from scratch . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables models to generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training. |
CascadeFix: Multi-Location Program Repair via Cascading Planning and Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating program repair face insufficient bug dependency modeling and inadequate global repair planning when addressing semantically complex multi-location bugs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-location automatic repair method via cascading planning and generation . they propose to model dependencies among bugs and cluster them to ensure rationality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method resolves 84 multi-location bugs, achieving a 31% improvement over current methods. |
Bootstrapping Code Translation with Weighted Multilanguage Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve code translation depend on abundant parallel code of high quality, which may not always be available. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method leverages functional invariance and cross-lingual portability of test suites to serve as universal verification oracles for multilingual reinforcement learning (RL) training. |
Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference (2025.coling-main)
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Lanrui Wang, Jiangnan Li, Chenxu Yang, Zheng Lin, Hongyin Tang, Huan Liu, Yanan Cao, Jingang Wang, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on integrating commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enhance their ability to understand and generate dialogue responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates commonsense knowledge into chatbots to enable them to elicit more empathetic responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to uncover the implicit requirements of the conversation, aiming to elicit more empathetic responses. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Bridging the Domain Gaps in Context Representations for k-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhiwei Cao, Baosong Yang, Huan Lin, Suhang Wu, Xiangpeng Wei, Dayiheng Liu, Jun Xie, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve k-Nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) are based on the ability to non-parametrically adapt to new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to boost the datastore retrieval of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the retrieval and translation quality of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference: Multi-Candidate Optimization for Diverse Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing diverse NMT models lack translation diversity due to a discrepancy between training and inference . despite the success of diverse NTM, there is still a lack of translation diversity . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-candidate optimization framework for diverse NMT to deal with this defect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is transparent to basic diverse NMT models, and universally makes better trade-off between diversity and quality. |
How do Visual Attributes Influence Web Agents? A Comprehensive Evaluation of User Interface Design Factors (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the effect of environmental variation on web agents have focused on robustness to adversarial attacks with less attention to agents’ preferences in benign scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled evaluation pipeline to quantify how visual attributes influence web-agent decision-making by comparing variants and browsing interactions. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 8 variant families, 5 real-world websites and 4 representative web agents show that background color contrast, item size, position, and card clarity have a strong influence on agents’ actions, whereas font styling, text color, and item image clarity exhibit minor effects. |
Enhancing LLM Language Adaption through Cross-lingual In-Context Pre-training (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing cross-lingual transfer are limited by parallel resources and lack linguistic and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual in-context pre-training approach that leverages semantically related bilingual Wikipedia documents to enhance cross-linguistic transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves multilingual performance on three models across six target languages. |
EngiBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Engineering Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiyuan Zhou, Xinlei Wang, Yirui He, Ruixi Zou, Yang Wu, Yuheng Cheng, Yulu Xie, Wenxuan Liu, Huan Zhao, Yan Xu, Jinjin Gu, Junhua Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-defined or abstract reasoning and fail to capture real-world engineering problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark to evaluate large language models on engineering problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well under well-defined conditions and is based on three levels of difficulty and covers diverse engineering subfields. |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
Towards User-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a good translation should implicitly mirror user traits rather than translate the original content semantically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures user traits from historical inputs . they propose 'user-driven' NMT to model user behavior under a zero-shot learning fashion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can capture user traits from historical inputs under zero-shot learning fashion. |