Papers by Hui Lin
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on automated essay scoring has focused on holistic scoring, but there is limited annotated corpus of essays with thesis strength scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a scoring rubric for persuasive essay quality and annotate corpus of essays with thesis strength scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scoring rubric could provide feedback to students on why essay gets thesis strength score . the rubric can be used to score persuasive essay quality, thesis strength, and organization . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have revolutionized complex problem-solving capability by enabling agent collaboration through message-based communications. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that exploits communication mechanisms in Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) by intercepting and manipulating inter-agent messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack exploits communication mechanisms in large language model-based multi-agent systems by intercepting and manipulating inter-agencies. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Off-topic spoken response detection is crucial for an automated speaking assessment system. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for off-topic spoken response detection with high off-top recall on both seen and unseen prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant improvements in detecting off-topic responses with extremely high on-topic recall on both seen and unseen prompts. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Code large language models (codeLLMs) focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark code-based on 40 categories and 44 programming languages to emulate real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that open-source code LLMs perform better than open-sourced ones. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge and tend to prioritize external information over internal knowledge learned during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM representation behaviors and demonstrate the significance of using representations in knowledge checking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifiers improve performance even when dealing with noisy knowledge databases. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for adapting LLMs to streaming rely on expensive re-encoding or limited scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a group position encoding paradigm built on batch architectures to enhance consistency between streaming and batch modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on cross-lingual and cross-modal tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Code large language models (LLMs) enhance programming by understanding and generating code across languages. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates code understanding and generation in repositories using code large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves code understanding and generation in repositories by evaluating 1,888 test cases across 6 programming languages. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that the test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept of Temporal Scaling Law to study test loss of LLMs . they break down test loss into fine-grained token positions and develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the test loss of LLMs as the training steps scale up. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been attracting much attention due to their impressive performance in all kinds of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a mix-of-experts model that allows the model size to grow without raising training costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in perplexity and robustness tests. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing decoding-based approaches do not explicitly decouple visual evidence from mixed vision–language representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple visual evidence from mixed vision–language representations by dynamically identifying layers enriched with visual information and performing intra-layer decoupling to extract aggregated visual evidence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DiVE achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has developed frameworks to understand human-to-human CSE attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular defense pipeline that improves detection at both the message and conversation levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be exploited to facilitate chat-based social engineering attacks and generate high-quality CSE content, but their detection capabilities are suboptimal, leading to increased operational costs for defense. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Long-context processing ability has emerged as a significant challenge for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for synthesizing faithful long-context reasoning instruction datasets . they integrate ground truth and citation-based reasoning prompts integrating them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline eliminates distractions and improves reasoning chains. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing solutions to alleviate hallucination have considered utilizing LLMs’ inherent reasoning abilities to alleviating hallucinism, such as self-correction and diverse sampling methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual multi-agent debate framework that predetermines LLMs' stances to override their inherent biases for answer inspection. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four datasets of three tasks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework over existing methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled them to process increasingly longer sequences, ranging from 2K to 2M tokens and even beyond. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic dataset in the financial domain that integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning into LLMs in a supervised manner to facilitate effective long-context understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard GPT-4o-mini on the Loong benchmark and fine tunes LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct on the model, achieving a 28.0% gain on the financial subset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extractive Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is a challenging field in the field of Natural Language Processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Question-Attended Span Extraction module to address the limitations of generative approaches for extractive machine reading comprehension (MRC) . module significantly enhances performance of pre-trained generative language models, enabling them to surpass the extractive capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) |
| Outcome: | The QASE module surpasses state-of-the-art models in few-shot settings. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is effective for aligning Large Language Models with human preferences, but its complex process limits its ability to continually learn human feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-RL offline method to convert historical optimal policies into optimization constraints when continually learning new preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong CL baselines in terms of reward-based evaluations and human assessment. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through long chain-of-thought, yet they struggle with precise computations and algorithmic operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that activates LRMs’ latent tool-use capabilities through artificial hints and a framework that enables models to learn effective tool utilization through diverse hint patterns and rejection-based data synthesis. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that START significantly improves state-of-the-art LRMs across challenging benchmarks, including competition-level mathematics (AMC23: 95.0%, AIME24: 75.6%) and graduate-level science questions (GPQA: 64.6%). |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) generate plausible but incorrect content, resulting in hallucinations . recent advances in MLLM technology have demonstrated their outstanding performance in a variety of visual tasks, such as object detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method which leverages MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations by analyzing input and output tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits MLLMs’ internal representations to mitigate hallucinations. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models exhibit human-like behaviors such as exploration, verification, reflection, and correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning framework for long chain-of-thoughts reasoning . they leverage a difficulty-aware reward model to estimate the learning value of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs fine-tuning on large reasoning models on 10% of the data selected. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing long-context training data is scarce and requires substantial GPU resources for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free plug-and-play method to enhance long-context understanding in existing large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing LLMs on various tasks and surpasses baseline methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a capability gap exists between open-source and closed-source large language models (LLMs) . the adoption of closed-sourced LLMs introduces concerns pertaining to openness, privacy, and substantial costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data approach that combines strong and weak models for error information . they demonstrate the effectiveness of SENSE, a specialized text-to-SQL model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enhances the domain generalization of text-to-SQL models and explores the potential of error data supervision through preference learning. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on propaganda detection does not capture the motives behind the content or its broader impact. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dissects propaganda into techniques, arousal appeals, and underlying intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in a wide range of scenarios and can be used to identify and categorize propaganda techniques. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multimodal large language models extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature fusion method that strategically incorporates shallower layers . they propose MLLMs that extract visual features from the final layers of a pretrained Vision Transformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms deep layers on fine-grained visual tasks . it is the first comprehensive study of visual layer selection for MLLMs . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance across a range of tasks, but further gains require more than scaling up model sizes or training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that gradually reduces the number of thought tokens . this method allows models to internalize more abstract reasoning processes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the benefits of token-level reasoning while reducing computational cost. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage hidden representations into existing jailbreak targets to move the attacks along the acceptance direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are validated using the objective of existing jailbreak attacks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | generative retrieval is a new paradigm for information retrieval, enabling a sequence-to-sequence model with a single Transformer . generative encoders have been used on small corpora, but only on large ones . |
| Approach: | They propose to encode an entire document corpus within a single Transformer . they find generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, the study finds . the proposed approach only evaluates on document corporales on the order of 100K in size . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors. |
| Outcome: | The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large language models struggle with handling long token sequences due to limited training context size. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-stage continual pretraining method to equip LLMs with long context modeling capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on 4 language modeling benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train code LLMs view each programming language in isolation . experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can bridge the gap between different programming languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to collaborate to enhance multilingual instruction tuning for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can transfer knowledge efficiently and effectively between languages. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing sparsification methods like pruning can lose model knowledge through parameter removal. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that achieves sparsification by partitioning pre-trained FFN layers into computational blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior performance across language modeling and downstream tasks under equivalent computational constraints. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing generative language models neglect an inherent challenge in text corpus during training, i.e., the imbalance between frequent tokens and infrequent ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a function to mitigate the imbalance between frequent and infrequent tokens . authors propose 'MiLe Loss' function to assess learning difficulty of tokens during training . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that models with proposed model can improve on downstream benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional coding capabilities, but their debugging capabilities remain relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a debugging benchmark consisting of 4,253 LLMs with four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers four major bug categories and 18 minor types in C++, Java, and Python. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained models have not been used to outperform other deep learning models such as CNN in Automated Essay Scoring (AES). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-scale essay representation for BERT that can be jointly learned . they employ multiple losses and transfer learning from out-of-domain essays to further improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in the area of automated essay scoring . the proposed model generalizes well to the CommonLit Readability Prize data set . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current frontier models sometimes generate false outputs or answers that are not substantiated by evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose Chinese SimpleQA, a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' factuality . they focus on Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics . |
| Outcome: | The Chinese SimpleQA benchmark evaluates the factuality ability of LLMs . the questions and answers are short and easy-to-evaluate . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a holistic review systematically integrating psychology across the LLM lifecycle remains missing. |
| Approach: | They examine how psychological theories can inform stages of LLM development . they highlight current trends and gaps in how psychological theory is applied . |
| Outcome: | The authors highlight current trends and gaps in how psychological theories are applied . they argue that psychological insights have shaped pivotal NLP breakthroughs . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing memory-augmented methods often incorporate full dialog histories without filtering, resulting in information redundancy and inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that abstracts conversational context into Episodic Memory Units (EMUs) they propose EMA, MemDecider and a filtering decision module to reduce noise and improve overall performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token consumption by 11.48% while improving performance on two widely-used benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-document relation extraction (RE) focus on identifying relations between head and tail entities from single sentence or document. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical relation tree-based LLM-based hierarchic classification model for cross-document relation extraction (HCRE) based on predefined relations, the model can perform hierarchically classification level by level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing baselines and validates its effectiveness. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Biomedical data-to-text generation is a branch of Natural Language Generation, aiming at generating textual natural language descriptions that can fluently and precisely describe the structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM framework that can be used to generate textual natural language descriptions using in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides good interpretability and superior performance on the BioLeaflets dataset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Fill-in-the-Middle (FIM) models suffer from performance degradation and prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-and-replace infilling framework that integrates agentic verification and editing into a single-pass inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework harmonizes completion tasks with the instruction-following priors of Chat LLMs, extending the paradigm from static infilling to dynamic context-aware editing. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing product summarization methods lack end-to-end product summaries and multi-grained multi-modal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method that jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods on a large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit intrinsic limitations such as knowledge cutoff, single-threaded reasoning that hinders finer-grained branch and aggregation, and rigid collaboration mechanisms that struggle to coordinate specialized capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy spanning *Graph-Assisted Knowledge Augmentation*, *Graph Assisted Reasoning and Planning*, and *Graphed LLM Collaboration*. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that graphs can augment and correct LLMs and support dynamic coordination among experts and agents in collaborative settings. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |