Papers by Jian Hu
C2DLM: Causal Concept-Guided Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kairong Han, Nuanqiao Shan, Ziyu Zhao, Zijing Hu, Xinpeng Dong, Ye Jun Jian, Lujia Pan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) and diffusion language models (DLMs) suffer from insufficient reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully connected Diffusion Language Model that uses a concept-level causal graph to guide attention to learn causal relationships between concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 12% improvement and 3.2 training speedup on the COT-OrderPerturb task, along with an average gain of 1.31% across six downstream reasoning tasks. |
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Yujing Wang, Jian Miao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fei Xu, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models only produce pedantic responses, which lacks emotion and attraction compared with the responses with polite style, positive and negative sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates and content templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on evaluation metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Task Oriented In-Domain Data Augmentation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models suffer from two major issues: in-domain data are scarce compared with general domain-agnostic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework that uses in- domain data selection and task-orientated synthetic passage generation to adapt LLMs to two domains: advertisement and math. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM performance by 8% in the advertisement domain and 7.5% in the math domain. |
A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sub-Slot based task-oriented dialogs provide slot values segment by segment over multiple turns. |
| Approach: | They define a task called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) they build a Chinese dialog dataset SSD for boosting research on SSTOD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) it includes 40K dialogs and 500K utterances from Chinese names, phone numbers, ID numbers and license plate numbers . the dataset is well annotated with sub-slot values, slot values, dialog states and actions . |
Linguistic Neuron Overlap Patterns to Facilitate Cross-lingual Transfer on Low-resource Languages (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on data-efficient methods, particularly Cross-lingual In-Context Learning (X-ICL) |
| Approach: | They propose a method to improve cross-lingual in-context learning for low-resource languages by using language-specific neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual performance on low-resource languages by ensuring full activation of language overlap neurons. |
VPL: Visual Proxy Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Medical Image Diagnosis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Insufficient medical text precision and the modal disparity between text and vision spaces pose challenges for vision-language models like CLIP. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual proxy learning framework that combines a text refinement module and a stable Sinkhorn algorithm to enhance the diagnostic performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art CLIP inference by 1.69% to 15.31% on five datasets covering various diseases. |
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. |
Token-level Inference-Time Alignment for Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kejia Chen, Junjun Zheng, Jiawen Zhang, Manxi Lin, Xiao Pan, Jiacong Hu, Jian Lou, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often prioritize linguistic fluency over visual fidelity . despite widespread adoption, VLMs often exhibit a critical failure mode: hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Token-level Inference-Time Alignment that steers the decoding process without updating the base model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on 13 benchmarks across architectures . it boosts LLaVA-1.5-7B by 8.6% on MMVet and achieves a 74.0 MMStar score . |
Unraveling Babel: Exploring Multilingual Activation Patterns of LLMs and Their Applications (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on how large language models process multiple languages, but internal mechanisms of LLMs remain insufficiently explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to convert dense LLMs into fine-grained MoE architectures and analyze their activation patterns using expert activation frequency heatmaps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms random expert pruning and exceeds models in some languages. |
LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhendong Chu, Shen Wang, Jian Xie, Tinghui Zhu, Yibo Yan, Jingheng Ye, Aoxiao Zhong, Xuming Hu, Jing Liang, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes. |
| Approach: | This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems . |
| Outcome: | The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings. |
PMSS: Pretrained Matrices Skeleton Selection for LLM Fine-tuning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation and its variants have been popular due to their ability to avoid excessive inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that enables high-rank updates with low costs while leveraging semantic and linguistic information inherent in pre-trained weight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms LoRA and other fine-tuning methods across tasks with less trainable parameters. |
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan
| Challenge: | NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
InfiMM-WebMath-40B: Advancing Multimodal Pre-Training for Enhanced Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaotian Han, Yiren Jian, Xuefeng Hu, Haogeng Liu, Yiqi Wang, Qihang Fan, Yuang Ai, Huaibo Huang, Ran He, Zhenheng Yang, Quanzeng You
| Challenge: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it consists of 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
| Approach: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a high-quality dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it contains 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
| Outcome: | InfiMM-WebMath-40B is a high-quality dataset of interleaved image-text documents . it consists of 24 million web pages, 85 million image URLs, and 40 billion text tokens . |
Beyond Modality Collapse: Taming Guided Modality Entropy for Omni-modal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoOmni is a data paradigm for omni-modal large language models that can be used for emotion reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data paradigm that interleaves guided tokens into reasoning traces to enforce structured evidence extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm over-relys on a dominant modality while neglecting complementary cues. |
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. |
GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup. |
Mind’s Mirror: Distilling Self-Evaluation Capability and Comprehensive Thinking from Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in natural language processing, but their scale and computational demands pose challenges to their practical application. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for distilling the self-evaluation capability from LLMs into SLMs and advocate for more comprehensive thinking by incorporating multiple distinct CoTs and self-estimation outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of distilled SLMs on three NLP benchmarks. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Large Language Models Badly Generalize across Option Length, Problem Types, and Irrelevant Noun Replacements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have exposed patterns and may not truly assess generalization ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a “Generalization Stress Test” to assess Large Language Models’ generalization ability under slight and controlled perturbations, including option length, problem types, and irrelevant noun replacements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test shows that LLMs exhibit severe accuracy drops and unexpected biases when faced with minor but content-preserving modifications. |
Debate-of-Thoughts: Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in LLMs Through Internal Deliberation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmented generation are based on a simplistic binary choice of relying on external contexts or memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms conflict resolution into an active deliberation process by incorporating contradictions as opportunities for deeper reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DoT outperforms state-of-the-art methods while generating transparent debate transcripts that explain its decisions. |
Explicit and Implicit Data Augmentation for Social Event Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Social event detection relies on labeled data, but annotation is costly and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play dual augmentation framework that combines explicit text-based and implicit feature-space augmentation to enhance data diversity and model robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the best baseline model by 17.67% on the Twitter2012 dataset and 15.57% on the twitter2018 dataset in terms of the average F1 score. |
MR-ALIGN: Meta-Reasoning Informed Factuality Alignment for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinming Wang, Jian Xu, Bin Yu, Sheng Lian, yi Chen, Boran Wang, Yingjian Zhu, Hongzhu Yi, Hong-Ming Yang, Han Hu, Cheng-Lin Liu, Xu-Yao Zhang
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that quantifies state-transition probabilities along the model’s thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations of four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning. |
A Multi-modal Debiasing Model with Dynamical Constraint for Robust Visual Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that many well-developed Visual Question Answering systems suffer from bias problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to mitigate bias problem by subtracting bias score from standard VQA base score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the VQA v2.0 and VQA-CP V2,0 datasets. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
DOS: Dependency-Oriented Sampler for Masked Diffusion Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies for pre-trained MDLMs rely on token-level uncertainty criteria, while largely overlooking sequence-level information and inter-token dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free decoding strategy that leverages inter-token dependencies to inform token updates during generation. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach consistently achieves superior performance on both code generation and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
Knowledge Association with Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graphs (KGs) depend on high embedding dimensions and hierarchical structures to achieve expressiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperbolic relational graph neural network for KG embedding and capture knowledge associations with a high-dimensional transformation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on entity alignment and type inference show the proposed method is effective and efficient. |
Learning Neural Templates for Recommender Dialogue System (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Jian Miao, Yingying He, Yining Chen, Xiubo Geng, Fan Liang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural models have shown promising progress on this task, but key challenges remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can decouple dialogue generation from item recommendation . they use a response template generator and item selector to generate a responses template . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ReDial. |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RLHF frameworks face inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers restricting their accessibility for newcomers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source RLHF framework that can be used to train large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training efficiency with speedups ranging from 1.22 to 1.68 across different model sizes compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while requiring significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. |