Papers by Jian Peng
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. |
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinkui Lin, Yuhui Zhang, Yongxiu Xu, Kun Huang, Hongzhang Mu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou, Li Qian, Li Peng, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets. |
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. |
Question Generation from SQL Queries Improves Neural Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using question generation, we learn a semantic parser with 30% of the supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question generation to learn a semantic parser with less supervised training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art model with less training data. |
Efficient Contextualized Representation: Language Model Pruning for Sequence Labeling (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to train pre-trained language models have brought significant improvements to various NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress bulky LMs while preserving useful information for a specific task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detach any layer without affecting others, and stretch shallow and wide LMs to be deep and narrow. |
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. |
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Jie Fu, Jian Lan, Mei Li, Baosong Yang, Jun Xie, Yidan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised paraphrase generation methods require large-scale, manually annotated paraphrase datasets, which are labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pseudo-data construction method that generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
From Imitation to Discrimination: Progressive Curriculum Learning for Robust Web Navigation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-based web agents offer computational efficiency for autonomous web navigation, yet they lack discrimination capabilities to reject plausible but incorrect elements in densely populated pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a text-based web agent to learn to discriminate against incorrect elements in densely populated HTML and a training curriculum to synthesize diverse cross-domain tasks with strict verification. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the model performs better than open-source models with 58.7% step success rate. |
emrQA: A Large Corpus for Question Answering on Electronic Medical Records (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing annotations for other NLP tasks are used to generate domain-specific large-scale question answering (QA) datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to re-purpose existing annotations for other NLP tasks by generating a large-scale question answering corpus using 1 million questions-logical form and 400,000+ question-answer evidence pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained to learn domain-specific large-scale question answering (QA) datasets. |
Improving Semantic Matching through Dependency-Enhanced Pre-trained Model with Adaptive Fusion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on dependency prior structure integration into pre-trained models is still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based fusion attention paradigm which explicitly introduces dependency prior structure into pre-trained models and adaptively fuses it with semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 10 public datasets, demonstrating the benefits of adaptively fusing dependency structure in semantic matching task. |
Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced non-factual outputs . however, current LLMs suffer from the hallucination issue . |
| Approach: | They propose to use instruction-tuned LLMs to generate factual outputs . they find that FLAN-T5-11B performs best as a fact verifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms more capable LLMs like GPT3.5 and ChatGPT in the human evaluation. |
A Survey on LLM-powered Agents for Recommender Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and generation. |
| Approach: | They present a comprehensive synthesis of large language models and their applications . they dissect a four-module agent architecture and review representative designs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models address fundamental challenges in traditional recommender systems . they include limited comprehension of complex user intents, insufficient interaction capabilities . |
Context Tracking Network: Graph-based Context Modeling for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to fully utilize contextual information which plays an important role in interpreting sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based Context Tracking Network to model the discourse context for IDRR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate sentence-level and token-level contextual semantics better than existing models. |
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. |
Qwen2.5-xCoder: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Multilingual Code Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Yibo Miao, Shanghaoran Quan, Zhenhe Wu, Qiyao Peng, Liqun Yang, Tianyu Liu, Zeyu Cui, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train code LLMs view each programming language in isolation . experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can bridge the gap between different programming languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to collaborate to enhance multilingual instruction tuning for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Qwen2.5-xCoder can transfer knowledge efficiently and effectively between languages. |
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Noah Wang, Z.y. Peng, Haoran Que, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuhan Wu, Hongcheng Guo, Ruitong Gan, Zehao Ni, Jian Yang, Man Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Ke Xu, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Junran Peng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves role-playing abilities with 168,093 samples. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
Towards Multi-Relational Multi-Hop Reasoning over Dense Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graph reasoning is a crucial task for answering time-dependent questions within a knowledge graph (KG). |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal KG reasoning benchmark with over 200k entities and 960k questions that facilitate complex, multi-relational and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to conduct pattern-aware and time-sensitive reasoning across temporal KGs and is scalable to a wide range of data conditions. |
SemRegex: A Semantics-Based Approach for Generating Regular Expressions from Natural Language Specifications (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate programs from natural language do not address program aliasing . semantically equivalent programs may have many syntactically different forms . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-based approach to generate regular expressions from natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three public datasets. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
ToolRerank: Adaptive and Hierarchy-Aware Reranking for Tool Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have proposed tool learning, which augments LLMs with external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive and hierarchy-aware reranking method to refine retrieval results by truncating the retrieval result related to seen and unseen tools at different positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval results, leading to better execution results generated by the LLM. |
M2RC-EVAL: Massively Multilingual Repository-level Code Completion Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaheng Liu, Ken Deng, Congnan Liu, Jian Yang, Shukai Liu, He Zhu, Peng Zhao, Linzheng Chai, Yanan Wu, JinKe JinKe, Ge Zhang, Zekun Moore Wang, Guoan Zhang, Yingshui Tan, Bangyu Xiang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing repository-level code completion benchmarks focus on a limited number of languages . existing benchmarks report overall average scores of different languages ignoring fine-grained abilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to use repository-level code completion benchmarks to evaluate general code intelligence abilities across languages for existing code Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks improve the code completion abilities of existing LLMs by using two types of annotations on the parsed syntax tree. |
Beyond the Panorama: Training-Free Hierarchical Perception-Reasoning for Fine-Grained Vision in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face challenges in fine-grained visual tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free hierarchical perception-reasoning framework that enhances fine-grained visual understanding by simulating human perception mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances fine-grained visual understanding by simulating human perception mechanisms. |
Natural Language Processing Meets Quantum Physics: A Survey and Categorization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on quantum-inspired algorithms for NLP and quantum-based algorithms for cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize quantum-inspired algorithms according to quantum theory, linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized according to the use of quantum theory, the linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |