Papers by Jiahuan Li
Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown excellent performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, but pretraining data tends to contain misleading and conflicting information. |
| Approach: | They systematically analyze LLMs’ learning preferences for data with conflicting knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human-level models on knowledge-intensive tasks by analyzing pretraining data. |
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
Explicit Semantic Decomposition for Definition Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing definition generation methods rely on decoding to extract semantic components of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which explicitly decomposes meaning of words into semantic components and models them with discrete latent variables for definition generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on WordNet and Oxford benchmarks. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
PreAlign: Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer by Early Establishment of Multilingual Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes multilingual alignment prior to language model pretraining and preserves this alignment using a code-switching strategy during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | Experiments in a synthetic English to English-Clone setting show that PreAlign outperforms standard multilingual joint training in language modeling, zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, and cross-linguistic knowledge application. |
Hard Sample Aware Prompt-Tuning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-tuning based few-shot learning has garnered increasing attention in recent years due to its efficiency and promising capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to distinguish informative hard samples from misleading ones in model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA results on a series of NLP tasks pushing the SST-5 accuracy to 49.5% (1.1% point absolute improvement), QNLI accuracy to 74.6% (1.9% absolute improvement) |
Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique that encourages individuals to change behaviors through emphatic conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate more controllable dialogues with explainability by prompting LLMs to predict appropriate strategies as reasoning and utilizing these strategies to guide dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more controllable and explainable dialogues with a set of MI skills. |
Open-Set Living Need Prediction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaochong Lan, Jie Feng, Yizhou Sun, Chen Gao, Jiahuan Lei, Xinleishi Xinleishi, Hengliang Luo, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to living need prediction treat it as a closed-set classification problem, severely limiting their ability to capture diversity and complexity of living needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system leveraging large language models for unrestricted need prediction that leverages Maslow's hierarchy of needs to align predictions with human living needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-set approaches on need-based life service recall by an average of 19.37% on real-world datasets. |
VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhaowei Liu, Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Lingfeng Zeng, Fangqi Lou, Jinyi Niu, Mengping Li, Qi Qi, Jiahuan Li, Wei Zhang, Yinglong Wang, Weige Cai, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on text comprehension, but MLLMs lack the ability to integrate visual data over financial visuals. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 21 state-of-the-art multimodal large language models in a zero-shot setting . they use an annotated question–answer pair from eight common financial image modalities . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing models but trailed financial experts by 14 percentage points. |
Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be used to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions, but acquiring diverse and realistic multi-step tool-use data remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based data synthesis pipeline that generates multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora using relevance filtering, workflow tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 14.9% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark while significantly reducing inference latency and costs. |
When is Char Better Than Subword: A Systematic Study of Segmentation Algorithms for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Subword segmentation algorithms can produce sub-optimal segmentation when the target language is rich in morphological changes or there is not enough data for learning compact composition rules. |
| Approach: | They compare character-based and subword-based neural machine translation systems . they find character-driven models are better at handling morphological phenomena . |
| Outcome: | The character-based models are better at handling morphological phenomena, generating rare and unknown words, and more suitable for transferring to unseen domains. |
MT-PATCHER: Selective and Extendable Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Machine Translation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their strong ability in the field of machine translation, yet they suffer from high computational cost and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which transfers knowledge from LLMs to existing MT models in a selective, comprehensive and proactive manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transfers knowledge from LLMs to existing MT models in a selective, comprehensive and proactive manner. |