Papers by Huan Yu
Mask-then-Fill: A Flexible and Effective Data Augmentation Framework for Event Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods for event extraction are costly and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that randomly masks out an adjunct sentence fragment and infills a variable-length text span with a fine-tuned infilling model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate more diverse data while keeping the original structure unchanged . it can replace a fragment of arbitrary length in the text with another fragment of variable length . |
ReasonBERT: Pre-trained to Reason with Distant Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods only harvest learning signals from local contexts of naturally occurring texts . ReasonBert provides a method for reasoning over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments language models with the ability to reason over long-range relations and multiple, possibly hybrid contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves sample efficiency over strong baselines. |
Transfer-Aware Data Selection for Domain Adaptation in Text Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve domain adaptation do not guarantee improved adaptability, but may negatively impact model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can effectively improve model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model adaptability by selecting beneficial data without evaluating all source data. |
ℛ3: Advertisement Compliance ℛectification via Group-ℛelative Experience Extractor and Curriculum ℛeinforcement (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of content moderation are infeasible due to over-editing and compromise the advertiser’s original semantic intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to harmonize compliance with original intent preservation that integrates a data-driven framework and a curriculum to enforce compliance while maximizing semantic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on industrial datasets and on online A/B testing on industrial video. |
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
| Challenge: | Persuasive dialogue models rely on utterance semantic matching and a key aspect has been ignored . compared with utterrance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model conversation semantics and strategies to match them using a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves state-of-the-art by 5% on a small and 37% on 'large' datasets. |
DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI (2024.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Jianguo Zhang, Kun Qian, Zhiwei Liu, Shelby Heinecke, Rui Meng, Ye Liu, Zhou Yu, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . existing datasets lack diversity and comprehensiveness, authors say . |
| Approach: | They introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . DialogStuio aggregates more than 80 diverse dialogue dataset . |
| Outcome: | a new dataset is created to improve the quality and diversity of dialogue datasets . DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue data . |
Internalizing Multi-Agent Reasoning for Accurate and Efficient LLM-based Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
When is Tree Search Useful for LLM Planning? It Depends on the Discriminator (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to build language agents that can plan efficiently and accurately have not met the needs of advanced planning methods to achieve such improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative correction and tree search to solve multi-step problems in a language agent framework with three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a planning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on two tasks, text-to-SQL parsing and mathematical reasoning, while using discriminators with 90% accuracy. |
Tooling or Not Tooling? The Impact of Tools on Language Agents for Chemistry Problem Solving (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Botao Yu, Frazier N. Baker, Ziru Chen, Garrett Herb, Boyu Gou, Daniel Adu-Ampratwum, Xia Ning, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) with tools are limited and qualitative . existing evaluations have been limited and only focus on 14 tasks focusing on compound synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop an enhanced chemistry agent over ChemCrow to improve chemistry problem solving by integrating tools into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent does not consistently outperform its base LLMs without tools on specialized chemistry tasks and general chemistry questions. |
Federated Learning for Semantic Parsing: Task Formulation, Evaluation Setup, New Algorithms (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural semantic parsers have achieved remarkable performance in recent years, but they are data-hungry and require annotators to have intimate knowledge of formal programs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where multiple clients collaboratively train one global model without sharing their semantic parsing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on three widely adopted FL algorithms (FedAvg, FedOPT and FedProx) and clients with smaller datasets enjoy faster performance. |
MMMU-Pro: A More Robust Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Yue, Tianyu Zheng, Yuansheng Ni, Yubo Wang, Kai Zhang, Shengbang Tong, Yuxuan Sun, Botao Yu, Ge Zhang, Huan Sun, Yu Su, Wenhu Chen, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models have led to progress in tackling complex reasoning tasks that combine textual and visual information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs lower on MMMU-Pro than on the previous benchmark, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9%. |
An Imitation Game for Learning Semantic Parsers from User Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning semantic parsers are expensive and tedious . despite the widespread applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning is tedious a task . |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative method for learning semantic parsers directly from users . they propose an annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm that iteratively collects new datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective and shows promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code (2023.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Michael White, Raymond Mooney, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Yu Su, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers are not accurate enough for use in text-to-SQL parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to build clause-level edit models to correct SQL queries instead of token-level ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines. |
WebOlympus: An Open Platform for Web Agents on Live Websites (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Web agents are emerging as powerful tools for automating tasks in cyberspace . however, there is a lack of standardized and user-friendly tools for research and development . |
| Approach: | They propose an open platform for web agents operating on live websites with a Chrome extension and a safety monitor module to ensure their trustworthiness. |
| Outcome: | WebOlympus is an open platform for web agents operating on live websites. |
Thinking about GPT-3 In-Context Learning for Biomedical IE? Think Again (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) such as GPT-3 have shown strong in-context learning capabilities, which are appealing for domains such as biomedicine that feature high and diverse demands of language technologies but also high data annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the few-shot performance of GPT-3 in-context learning with fine-tuning smaller (i.e., BERT-sized) PLMs on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks: named entity recognition and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model underperforms on two representative biomedical information extraction tasks. |
Automatic Evaluation of Attribution by Large Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Generative large language models (LLMs) incorporate external references to generate and support claims. however, evaluating the attribution remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They investigate automatic evaluation of attribution given by large language models . they define different types of attributed errors and then explore two approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods highlight promising signals and challenges. |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
How do Visual Attributes Influence Web Agents? A Comprehensive Evaluation of User Interface Design Factors (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Global Relation Embedding for Relation Extraction (N18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract textual relations with distant supervision are limited by their reliance on supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed relations with global statistics of relations to combat the wrong labeling problem of distant supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust to training noise introduced by distant supervision and improves relation extraction models. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing technologies are not well-suited for use in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based intelligent agent that generates a clarification question in natural language . they propose 'interactive semantic parsing' with a human user in the loop . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both parsing accuracy and user confidence . it is demonstrated on two text-to-SQL datasets with different state-of-the-art parsers . |
HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | specialized large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in materials science but often struggle with the distinct complexities of materials science tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based agent system specifically designed for materials science that leverages a reliable materials science knowledge base and a sophisticated tool hub. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baseline models across tasks in materials science while ensuring accuracy and relevance. |
SSR-A: Spatial- and Semantic-Aware Instructions and Curriculum Reinforcement for Advertisement Compliant Rectification (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to fix non-compliant images suffer from over-editing, destroying original intent and perceptual similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for the minimalist rectification of non-compliant image ads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both compliance and preservation of visual and commercial consistency. |
Improving Event Representation via Simultaneous Weakly Supervised Contrastive Learning and Clustering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work exploits easily accessible co-occurrence information of events to learn event representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised contrastive learning method and a prototype-based clustering method for event representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on Hard Similarity and Transitive Sentence Similarity tasks. |
ARGUS: Policy-Adaptive Ad Governance via Evolving Reinforcement with Adversarial Umpiring (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Deyi Ji, Junyu Lu, Xuanyi Liu, Liqun Liu, Hailong Zhang, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang, Tianrun Chen, Lanyun Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing regulatory policies create label inconsistencies and reasoning ambiguities in historical datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a policy-adaptive governance system that enables evolving reinforcement through multi-agent adversarial umpiring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms fine-tuning baselines on industrial and public datasets . it enables evolving reinforcement through multi-agent adversarial umpiring . |
LogToP: Logic Tree-of-Program with Table Instruction-tuned LLMs for Controlled Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yupian Lin, Guangya Yu, Cheng Yuan, Huan Du, Hui Luo, Yuang Bian, Jingping Liu, Zhidong He, Wen Du, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are difficult to achieve satisfactory results in table-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a specialized logical table-to-text generation model that can be used for table-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a Logic2Text dataset. |
Error Detection for Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsers are often over-confident, thus casting doubt on their trustworthiness when deployed for real use. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent error detection model for text-to-SQL semantic parsing . they use a language model of code as its bedrock and graph neural networks to learn structural features of queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms parser-dependent uncertainty metrics on three strong parsers . it could improve the performance and usability of text-to-SQL semantic parsing, it is shown . |
HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LLaMa-based language model for materials science is first of its kind in the world . |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct) they then apply this process to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing language models on materials science tasks and improves in successive stages of refinement. |