Papers by Jian Cheng
From the Least to the Most: Building a Plug-and-Play Visual Reasoner via Data Synthesis (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models consisting of multiple steps of visual and language processing are limited in the visual and visual processing community . a visual reasoner is a plug-and-play approach that can be used to improve VLMs' reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a least-to-most visual reasoning paradigm that divides a question into sub-questions and invokes external tools for resolving sub-questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve four VLMs on four VQA benchmarks. |
EAC-MoE: Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has demonstrated promising potential in scaling LLMs . however, it is hindered by two critical challenges: substantial GPU memory consumption and low activated parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose an Expert-Selection Aware Compressor for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) that aligns with the characteristics of MoE from the perspectives of quantization and pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces memory usage and improves inference speed with minimal performance degradation. |
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Leon Derczynski, Xingjian Du, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Gv, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Jiaju Lin, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Johan Wind, Stanisław Woźniak, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
| Challenge: | recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. |
Continual Pretraining on Encrypted Synthetic Data for Privacy-Preserving LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect PII from training on small corpora are difficult to implement in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-based framework that synthesizes encrypted training data to protect PII. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms base models and ensures PII security on limited-scale datasets while exhibiting a modest performance gap compared to models trained on unencrypted synthetic data. |
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework that extracts the medical entities and doctor's dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
Multi-Stage LLM Fine-Tuning with a Continual Learning Setting (2025.findings-naacl)
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Changhao Guan, Chao Huang, Hongliang Li, You Li, Ning Cheng, Zihe Liu, Yufeng Chen, Jinan Xu, Jian Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in knowledge-intensive applications, but they may face a multi-stage continuous learning scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage continuous learning paradigm that includes a preference-based learning bias to identify potential knowledge conflicts and a self-distillation-based data augmentation strategy to expand and enrich the training corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm achieves a significant improvement in accuracy after 7 stages of fine-tuning compared to previous methods while preserving general knowledge. |
EBERT: Efficient BERT Inference with Dynamic Structured Pruning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pruning has been demonstrated as an effective way of reducing computational complexity for deep networks, especially CNNs for computer vision tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic structured pruning algorithm that prunes model weights at run-time . they propose to prune the unimportant heads in multi-head self-attention layers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on different tasks. |
A Survey on Personalized Alignment—The Missing Piece for Large Language Models in Real-World Applications (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, yet their transition to real-world applications reveals a critical limitation: the inability to adapt to individual preferences while maintaining alignment with universal human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLMs to adapt their behavior within ethical boundaries based on individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes implementation approaches and evaluates their effectiveness across various scenarios. |
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision (2025.acl-long)
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YifeiLu YifeiLu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Qiang Gao, Cheng Liu, Haibo Luo, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li, Feiliang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool invocation are often unnecessarily long and require lengthy reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation . they incorporate two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot and the Latent Reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise nature of code. |
XFormParser: A Simple and Effective Multimodal Multilingual Semi-structured Form Parser (2025.coling-main)
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Xianfu Cheng, Hang Zhang, Jian Yang, Xiang Li, Weixiao Zhou, Fei Liu, Kui Wu, Xiangyuan Guan, Tao Sun, Xianjie Wu, Tongliang Li, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Document AI parsing semi-structured image form is a key information extraction task. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal and multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER which integrates SER and relation extraction into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 1.79% improvement on RE tasks in multilingual and zero-shot settings. |
RQT: Hierarchical Residual Quantization for Multi-Model Compression (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for decomposing fine-tuned LLMs are sensitive to the magnitude of delta values. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical quantization framework that shares low-bit integer weights across similar models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average accuracy degradation of approximately 3% on fine-tuned models across mathematics, coding, chatbot, and Chinese LLMs. |
Q-Mamba: Towards more efficient Mamba models via post-training quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Mamba architectures have room for further optimization in linear projections and state caches. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled scale quantization scheme to mitigate outliers in states and channels by applying separate quantization scales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory consumption by 50% across various quantization settings, model sizes, and generation and zero-shot tasks. |
Learning Global Controller in Latent Space for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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Zeqi Tan, Yongliang Shen, Xiaoxia Cheng, Chang Zong, Wenqi Zhang, Jian Shao, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but their training costs are exorbitant. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for exploring optimal solutions within latent space by using latent units to extract input representations from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on a range of natural language processing tasks. |
Weaving Context Across Images: Improving Vision-Language Models through Focus-Centric Visual Chains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models struggle to disentangle information scattered across complex visual inputs, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a focus-centric visual chain paradigm that enhances VLMs’ perception, comprehension, and reasoning abilities in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves average performance gains of 3.16% and 2.24% across two distinct model architectures, without compromising the general vision-language capabilities. |
Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate toxic content in pretrained language models are resource-intensive and require additional components. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enables the PLM itself to achieve "self-detoxification" they identify the toxification direction from the normal generation process to the one prompted with the negative prefix and then steer the generation to the reverse direction by manipulating the information movement within the attention layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance with state-of-the-art methods without any fine-tuning or extra components. |
LoRaDA: Low-Rank Direct Attention Adaptation for Efficient LLM Fine-tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in parameter-efficient fine-tuning techniques allow for adjustments to only a minor fraction of the parameters of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank direct attention adapted method for efficient LLM fine-tuning . they propose LMAM, which can bring negative attention to self-attention modules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the full fine-tuning method by 2.1% on GLUE benchmark. |
M3TQA: Massively Multilingual Multitask Table Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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Daixin Shu, Jian Yang, Zhenhe Wu, Xianjie Wu, Xianfu Cheng, Guan Xiangyuan, Yanghai Wang, Pengfei Wu, Tingyang Yang, Hualei Zhu, Wei Zhang, Ge Zhang, Jiaheng Liu, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual table benchmarks suffer from geolinguistic imbalance - overrepresenting certain languages and lacking sufficient scale for rigorous cross-lingual analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for massively multilingual table question answering that includes tables expanded to 97 languages from Chinese and English sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on state-of-the-art LLMs show that synthetically generated training data significantly boosts performance, especially for low-resource languages. |
Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xingwei He, Yeyun Gong, A-Long Jin, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Sm Yiu, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work on commonsense generation requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from a standard metric to a ranker and transfer it to re-ranking a retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA. |
CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Renxing Chen, Ziwei Xiang, Peisong Wang, Hongjian Fang, Meng Li, Fanhu Zeng, Yanan Zhu, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Jian Cheng
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models have limitations in preserving world knowledge and limiting updates to preserve world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fisher-optimized adaptive low Rank and Singular-VectorSelection framework for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning that allows efficient and task-sensitive updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. |
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Siming Huang, Tianhao Cheng, Jason Klein Liu, Weidi Xu, Jiaran Hao, Liuyihan Song, Yang Xu, Jian Yang, Jiaheng Liu, Chenchen Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Ruifeng Yuan, Xianzhen Luo, Qiufeng Wang, YuanTao Fan, Qingfu Zhu, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Yang Gao, Jie Fu, Qian Liu, Houyi Li, Ge Zhang, Yuan Qi, Xu Yinghui, Wei Chu, Zili Wang
| Challenge: | Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model. |
Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study defines a conversation target from the system side to proactively steer conversations toward predefined targets or accomplish specific system-side goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset curation framework that automatically curations a large-scale personalized dialogue dataset using a role-playing approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is of high quality and could contribute to exploring personalized target-oriented dialogue. |
Training LLMs for Optimization Modeling via Iterative Data Synthesis and Structured Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a promising tool for OR, but they face challenges when dealing with complex problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments existing datasets and generates high-quality fine-tuning data tailored to OR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments existing datasets and generates high-quality fine-tuning data . it prevents error propagation and ensures the quality of the generated dataset . |
Dual Activation-Weight Sparsity: A Training-Free Framework for Efficient Large Language Model Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Luoyang Sun, Guangyan Li, Cheng Deng, Haifeng Zhang, Jian Zhao, Yongqiang Tang, Wensheng Zhang, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at natural language tasks but face deployment bottlenecks due to computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that exploits activation and weight sparsity . they use a three-tier routing strategy that uses magnitude-based pruning . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Llama and Mistral models show that DAWS outperforms activation-weight sparsity pruning methods. |