Papers by Jian-Yun Nie
A User-Centric Multi-Intent Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific predefined model abilities, such as world knowledge, reasoning, etc., making it difficult for users to determine which LLM best suits their particular needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate large language models from a user-centric perspective and use real-world use cases to identify their effectiveness under distinct intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks achieve a correlation between human preference and the user-reported scenarios and human intents. |
Inductive Topic Variational Graph Auto-Encoder for Text Classification (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text classification do not assume explicit latent semantic structure of documents, making them less effective and difficult to interpret. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates a topic model into variational graph-auto-encoder to capture hidden semantic information between documents and words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on supervised and semi-supervised text classification and unsupervised representation learning. |
A Multi-Task Embedder For Retrieval Augmented LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods face limitations in terms of knowledge, memory, and action. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval enhancement mechanism that brings in useful information from external sources to augment the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the LLM’s performance in various downstream tasks while introducing superior retrieval augmentation’s effect over both general and task-specifc retrievers. |
ReAttn: Improving Attention-based Re-ranking via Attention Re-weighting (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Attention-based re-ranking methods are highly concentrated a small subset of tokens within a few documents, making others indistinguishable. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-hoc re-weighting strategy that uses attention weights to reduce lexical bias and emphasize distinctive terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces lexical bias and emphasizes distinctive terms across documents, while maintaining a balanced distribution across informative tokens. |
Exploring the Best Practices of Query Expansion with Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational in language technologies, particularly in information retrieval (IR). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models for query expansion . they use LLMs to generate multiple pseudo-references and integrate them with original queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances sparse and dense retrieval methods without pre-indexing. |
Learning Syntactic Dense Embedding with Correlation Graph for Automatic Readability Assessment (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for automatic readability assessment discard linguistic features traditionally used for the task. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate linguistic features into machine learning models by learning syntactic dense embeddings based on linguistic feature extraction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with six data sets of two proficiency levels show that the proposed model can perform better than existing models. |
MoqaGPT : Zero-Shot Multi-modal Open-domain Question Answering with Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 are not able to handle multi-modal open-domain question answering in a zero-shot manner. |
| Approach: | MoqaGPT uses divide-and-conquer strategy to extract answers from each modality separately. |
| Outcome: | MoqaGPT improves on MMCoQA dataset by +37.91 points and EM by +34.07 points. |
Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Rui Qi, Fengran Mo, Yufeng Chen, Xue Zhang, Shuo Wang, Hongliang Li, Xu Jinan, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) use a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization to acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance and is appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. |
A Customized Text Sanitization Mechanism with Differential Privacy (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to sanitize texts subject to differential privacy do not work for non-metric semantic similarity measures. |
| Approach: | They propose a customized text sanitization mechanism based on a metric local differential privacy definition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism achieves better privacy-utility trade-offs than existing mechanisms on benchmark datasets. |
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages. |
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 . |
ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context are expensive and often lead to sub-optimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reformulate conversational queries based on generative pre-trained language models (PLMs) they propose generative knowledge infusion mechanism to optimize query reformulation and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four conversational search datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of ConvGQR. |
DEGAP: Dual Event-Guided Adaptive Prefixes for Templated-Based Event Argument Extraction with Slot Querying (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in event argument extraction (EAE) involve incorporating useful auxiliary information into models during training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses two prefixes to learn from different events and templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets . it can leverage possible connections between different events and capture relevant information from the prefix . |
A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on conditioned dialogue generation, but there is a scarcity of labeled responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to leverage labeled dialogue and text data to generate conditioned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models by leveraging the labeled texts and obtains larger improvement compared to the previous methods to leverage text data. |
Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based method that learns source prompts and transfers them as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to perform text generation tasks in a transferable setting. |
CHIQ: Contextual History Enhancement for Improving Query Rewriting in Conversational Search (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in task-solving capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have motivated researchers to integrate these models into existing conversational search systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the capabilities of large language models to resolve ambiguities in conversation history before query rewriting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method leads to state-of-the-art results across most settings compared with closed-source LLMs. |
HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) are prone to generate hallucinations . a recent study shows that LLMs are able to generate content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by factual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) they propose to use a sample of generated and human-annotated hallucinated samples to evaluate their performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates and annotates hallucinated samples from ChatGPT . the results show that existing LLMs face great challenges in recognizing hallucines . |
UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) uses the extract-then-abstract paradigm, which extracts a relatively short meta-document and then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. |
| Approach: | They propose to use pre-trained language models to calculate document and keyword’s perplexity to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document’s salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. |
An Investigation of Suitability of Pre-Trained Language Models for Dialogue Generation – Avoiding Discrepancies (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely used in open-domain dialogue generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use decoder-only architecture to achieve excellent performance for dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are based on transformer-ED, transformer-Dec, transformer MLM and transformer-AR. |
The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models encode a large amount of knowledge, but knowledge is frozen at the time of training, and the models become static and limited by training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive search engine assisted learning method that can self-evaluate the confidence level of PLM’s predictions and adaptively determine when to refer to the web for more data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms retrieval-augmented methods on 16 knowledge-intensive tasks on a wide range of knowledge-related tasks. |
Improving Few-Shot Relation Classification by Prototypical Representation Learning with Definition Text (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot relation classification have limited labeled examples . a prototype encoder from definition and an instance is needed to learn relation instance classification . |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a prototype encoder from relation definition in a way that is useful for relation instance classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several datasets. |
History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches for conversational dense retrieval rely on fine-tuning a pre-trained ad-hoc retriever, which can be lengthy and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-denoised query reformulation and automatic mining of supervision signals based on historical turns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on two public conversational search datasets. |
ScriptWriter: Narrative-Guided Script Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that generate scripts from a storyline are not available for this purpose. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates a story from a narrative and a tool that keeps track of what is said and what is to be said. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines that use the narrative as a kind of context. |
ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text generation use auto-regressive (AR) methods, but inefficient inference is a problem. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and effective PLM to explicitly model the token dependency during NAR text generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three text generation tasks while achieving 10 times faster inference speedup. |