Papers by Jiao Xu
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity (2026.findings-acl)
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Zheyuan Yang, Liqiang Shang, Junjie Chen, Xun Yang, Chenglong Xu, Bo Yuan, Chenyuan Jiao, Yaoru Sun, Yilun Zhao
| Challenge: | TableVista evaluates multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity . current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combined with visually integrated presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on visual and structural complexity. |
ROSE: A Reward-Oriented Data Selection Framework for LLM Task-Specific Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yang Wu, Huayi Zhang, Yizheng Jiao, Lin Ma, Xiaozhong Liu, Jinhong Yu, Dongyu Zhang, Dezhi Yu, Wei Xu
| Challenge: | Prevailing methods for task-specific instruction tuning use similarity metrics to select training data . but instruction tuning loss often fails to exhibit a monotonic relationship with actual task performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-specific instruction tuning method that leverages pairwise preference loss as a reward signal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods for task-specific instruction tuning. |
Refuse Whenever You Feel Unsafe: Improving Safety in LLMs via Decoupled Refusal Training (2025.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Wenxiang Jiao, Wenxuan Wang, Jen-tse Huang, Jiahao Xu, Tian Liang, Pinjia He, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit a level of intelligence that is both impressive and everevolving, but their ability to refuse generating unsafe content is a double-edged sword. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to tackle a refusal position bias within safety tuning data that compromises the models’ ability to appropriately refuse generating unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves model safety without compromising performance and surpasses baseline methods in defending against attacks. |
Meta-Rewarding Language Models: Self-Improving Alignment with LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tianhao Wu, Weizhe Yuan, Olga Golovneva, Jing Xu, Yuandong Tian, Jiantao Jiao, Jason E Weston, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for improving large language models have focused on improving model responses rather than judgment capabilities, resulting in rapid saturation during iterative training. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative Meta-Rewarding step where the model judges its own judgements and uses that feedback to refine its judgment skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves Llama-3-8B-Instruct from 22.9% to 39.4% on AlpacaEval 2 and 20.6% to 29.1% on Arena-Hard. |
ADAM: Dense Retrieval Distillation with Adaptive Dark Examples (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve data from multiple encoders are too trivial for the teacher to distinguish, preventing the teacher from transferring abundant dark knowledge to the student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework that can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with adaptive dark examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can better transfer the dark knowledge held in the teacher with adaptive dark examples. |
A Self-Training Method for Machine Reading Comprehension with Soft Evidence Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension lack evidence labels for training models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three MRC tasks on seven datasets. |
Bridging the Granularity Gap for Acoustic Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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Chen Xu, Yuhao Zhang, Chengbo Jiao, Xiaoqian Liu, Chi Hu, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Huizhen Wang, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Despite the success of speech recognition, how to encode the speech features effectively remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Progressive Down-Sampling technique which compresses acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable or better results on the speech recognition task and inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kechen Jiao, Zhirui Fang, Jiahao Liu, Bei Li, Qifan Wang, Xinyu Liu, Junhao Ruan, Zhongjian Qiao, Yifan Zhu, Yaxin Xu, Jingang Wang, Xiu Li
| Challenge: | Existing post-SFT methods for embodied AI are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) into embodied decision-making by transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an average success rate of 26.67% in the ALFWorld environment, and a 6% improvement over RL4VLM. |
Are You Copying My Model? Protecting the Copyright of Large Language Models for EaaS via Backdoor Watermark (2023.acl-long)
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Wenjun Peng, Jingwei Yi, Fangzhao Wu, Shangxi Wu, Bin Bin Zhu, Lingjuan Lyu, Binxing Jiao, Tong Xu, Guangzhong Sun, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in both text understanding and generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an Embedding Watermark method that implants backdoors on embeddings to protect copyright of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method protects the copyright of large language models without compromising service quality while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings’ utility. |
Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma
| Challenge: | Recent studies have looked into the ability of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc. However, few studies investigate the controllability of large languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare large language models with state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models to find that large language model controls are comparable to smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can meet hard constraints and perform better than state-of-the-art models. |
Recall and Learn: A Memory-augmented Solver for Math Word Problems (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving math word problems are based on template-based generation which results in limited generalization capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-like analogical learning method for the math word problem . it uses modules of memory, representation, analogy, and reasoning to make a new exercise . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on two well-known datasets. |
Curing Miracle Steps in LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Rubric Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Youliang Yuan, Qiuyang Mang, Jingbang Chen, Hong Wan, Xiaoyuan Liu, Junjielong Xu, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxuan Wang, Wenxiang Jiao, Pinjia He
| Challenge: | Existing models are susceptible to reward hacking, leading to a substantial overestimation of a model's reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rubric Reward Model that rewards the entire reasoning trajectory against problem-specific rubrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms outcome-only supervision on four math benchmarks and boosts Verified Pass@1024 from 26.7% to 62.6% and reduces the incidence of Miracle Steps by 71%. |
SAMem: State-Aware Memory as a Fine-Grained Memory for LLM Agents in Decision-Making (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing experiential memory approaches rely on task-level memory, but this lacks the situational alignment required for complex multi-step decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a new fine-grained memory paradigm that aligns memory retrieval with the current state instead of storing and reusing globally shared experiences. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on complex decision-making benchmarks show that the proposed state-aware memory outperforms existing experiential memory approaches and significantly improves task-solving efficiency. |
Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network for Video Question Answering (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA show our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale progressive attention network to fuse visual and text information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA. |
Unsupervised Sign Language Translation and Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhengsheng Guo, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Rui Wang, Kehai Chen, Zhaopeng Tu, Yong Xu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results on the BBC-Oxford Sign Language dataset reveal that USLNet achieves competitive results compared to supervised baseline models. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised sign language translation and generation network that learns from abundant single-modality data without parallel sign language data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results compared to baseline models on the BBC-Oxford Sign Language dataset and Open-Domain American Sign Language data. |
Understanding the Thinking Process of Reasoning Models: A Perspective from Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ming Li, Nan Zhang, Chenrui Fan, Hong Jiao, Yanbin Fu, Sydney Peters, Qingshu Xu, Robert Lissitz, Tianyi Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate extensive chain-of-thought reasoning, but we lack a principled framework for understanding how these thoughts are structured. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to analyze the reasoning traces of Large Reasoning Models using Schoenfeld’s Episode Theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a theoretically grounded methodology for interpreting LRM cognition and enables future work on more controllable and transparent reasoning systems. |
Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to problem-solving for large language models fail to provide accurate reasoning and factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide reasoning and retrieval processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on domain-knowledge-intensive tasks . it can be used to iterate retrieval and reasoning, and improve retrieval relevance . |
Towards Robust Ranker for Text Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text retrieval are based on a 'retrieval & rerank' pipeline, which uses a fast retriever to fetch a set of top document candidates, while a robust ranker is based upon a weak negative mining during contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-adversarial training strategy that leverages multiple retrievers as generators to challenge a ranker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing de facto ranker training paradigms on the passage retrieval benchmarks using BM25-reranking, full-ranking and retriever distillation. |
Unsupervised Multi-Granularity Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Ming Zhong, Yang Liu, Suyu Ge, Yuning Mao, Yizhu Jiao, Xingxing Zhang, Yichong Xu, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Experimental results confirm the substantial superiority of GranuSum on multi-granularity summarization over strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to rank events by their salience and annotate a benchmark for GranuSum that contains multiple summaries at different granularities for each document cluster. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is capable of producing multi-granular summaries in unsupervised manner over strong baselines. |