Papers by Jian Jiao
Task Facet Learning: A Structured Approach To Prompt Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prompt optimization are limited to learning multiple facets of a task from training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize a text prompt by considering different facets of a task and including them in the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can generate long, complex prompts that existing methods are unable to generate. |
CULG: Commercial Universal Language Generation (2022.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved performance for many NLP tasks in finance and healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale commercial universal language generation model which is pre-trained on a corpus drawn from 10 markets across 7 languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models on commercial generation tasks and on other markets, languages, and tasks. |
Is Your Language Model Ready for Monetization Decisions? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on shopping-centric scenarios and user-facing data, overlooking intermediate decision stages and robustness considerations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world monetization contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers intent understanding, commercial matching, and user behavior modeling. |
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. |
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning (2026.acl-long)
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Junjie Wang, Zequn Xie, Dan Yang, Jie Feng, Yue Shen, Duolin Sun, Meixiu Long, Yihan Jiao, Zhehao Tan, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-call rounds by 20% while improving accuracy and efficiency while maintaining the same level of performance as existing models. |
HIRAG: Hierarchical-Thought Instruction-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-depth research on the specific capabilities needed by the RAG generation model is lacking, leading to inconsistent document quality and retrieval system imperfections. |
| Approach: | They propose that RAG models should possess three progressively hierarchical abilities: (1) Filtering: the ability to select relevant information; (2) Combination: the capability to combine semantic information across paragraphs; (3) RAG-specific reasoning: the capacity to further process external knowledge using internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the model’s open-book examination capability on datasets such as RGB, PopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and PubmedQA. |
Mask Attention Networks: Rethinking and Strengthen Transformer (2021.naacl-main)
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Zhihao Fan, Yeyun Gong, Dayiheng Liu, Zhongyu Wei, Siyuan Wang, Jian Jiao, Nan Duan, Ruofei Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research explores to enhance the two sublayers separately to improve the capability of Transformer for text representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine SAN and Feed-Forward Networks to create a dynamic mask attention network with a learnable mask matrix which can model localness adaptively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the original Transformer on translation and text summarization tasks. |
HittER: Hierarchical Transformers for Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods to learn representations of knowledge graphs are conceptually simple and can be applied to tasks like factoid question answering (Saxena et al., 2020) and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer model to jointly learn Entity-relation composition and Relational contextualization based on a source entity’s neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple link prediction datasets and can be integrated into BERT and demonstrate its effectiveness on two Freebase factoid question answering datasets. |
PromptBERT: Improving BERT Sentence Embeddings with Prompts (2022.emnlp-main)
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Ting Jiang, Jian Jiao, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Furu Wei, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research shows that BERT and RoBERTa are poor in sentence embeddings due to static token embeddable bias and ineffective BERT layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel contrastive learning method for better sentence embeddings by using a template denoising technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.29 and 2.58 points of improvement compared to SimCSE and RoBERTa in the unsupervised setting. |
Dual-Alignment Pre-training for Cross-lingual Sentence Embedding (2023.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Zhi-Hong Deng, Qiang Lou, Haizhen Huang, Jian Jiao, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that dual encoder models trained with the sentence-level translation ranking task are effective methods for cross-lingual sentence embedding. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-alignment pre-training framework that incorporates both sentence-level and token-level alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual sentence embedding on three cross-linguistic benchmarks. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
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Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
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. |
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. |
An Enhanced Knowledge Injection Model for Commonsense Generation (2020.coling-main)
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Zhihao Fan, Yeyun Gong, Zhongyu Wei, Siyuan Wang, Yameng Huang, Jian Jiao, Xuanjing Huang, Nan Duan, Ruofei Zhang
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that digging the relationship of concepts from scratch is non-trivial for commonsense generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They use a retrieve-and-edit framework to retrieve a prototype with these concepts . they use qt and qq to generate commonsense questions at scale . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance on commonsense generation tasks. |
KFCNet: Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive Learning for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have led to substantial gains over a broad range of NLP tasks, but have limitations for high-quality tasks such as commonsense generation and ad keyword generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Filtering and Contrastive learning Network which references external knowledge and achieves better generation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state of the art on the CommonGen benchmark by a large margin. |
CAPSTONE: Curriculum Sampling for Dense Retrieval with Document Expansion (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that dense retrieval models are better at obtaining query-informed representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder approach that computes latent representations of query and document independently, but inference replaces the real query with a generated one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous dense retrieval models on in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. |
Can LLMs Estimate Student Struggles? Human-AI Difficulty Alignment with Proficiency Simulation for Item Difficulty Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Accurate estimation of item (question or task) difficulty suffers from the cold start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large-scale empirical analysis to examine human-AI Difficulty Alignment . they find that models struggle to simulate the capability limitations of students . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size is not reliably helpful for human-AI alignment . high performance often impedes accurate difficulty estimation, the authors say . |