Papers by Jiawei Sun
Enhance Robustness of Language Models against Variation Attack through Graph Integration (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are used in many NLP applications but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks can lead to false or misleading information being distributed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate a Chinese character variation graph into pre-trained language models to increase their robustness against character variation attacks in Chinese content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing language models in combating adversarial attacks in Chinese content. |
Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Kexin Huang, Xiangyang Liu, Qianyu Guo, Tianxiang Sun, Jiawei Sun, Yaru Wang, Zeyang Zhou, Yixu Wang, Yan Teng, Xipeng Qiu, Yingchun Wang, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) do not accurately uncover safety vulnerabilities in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a value alignment benchmark called Flames that encompasses both harmlessness principles and a unique morality dimension that integrates specific Chinese values such as harmony. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on Flames, particularly in safety and fairness dimensions. |
Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jie Lou, Wei Jia, Dai Dai, Hua Wu, Boxi Cao, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods to recognize entities in text are limited by the diversity of entity types and the lack of high-quality annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context learning-based NER approach that can inject in-const NER ability into PLMs and recognize entities of novel types on-the-fly using only a few demonstrative instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the PLMs+fine-tuning counterparts on 4 few-shot NER datasets and significantly outperformed the Plms+initialized extractors. |
MemSearcher: Iterative Memory Integration for Search Agent via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Qianhao Yuan, Jie Lou, Zichao Li, Jiawei Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Debing Zhang, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based search agents often concatenate the full interaction history into the context, producing long and noisy inputs and increasing compute cost and memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent framework that maintains a compact memory during multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong history-concatenation (ReAct-style) baselines on a range of public datasets while maintaining nearly constant token counts across multi-turn interactions. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition via Superposition Concept Discrimination (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify entities of target types with limited number of illustrative instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a superposition concept discriminator which solves the intrinsic generalization problem by an active learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves few-shot named entity recognition (FS-NER) with minimal additional efforts. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
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Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
s3: You Don’t Need That Much Data to Train a Search Agent via RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize retrieval using search-only metrics ignore downstream utility and fine-tune entire LLM to jointly reason and retrieve limit retrieval utility and compatibility with frozen or proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, model-agnostic framework that decouples the searcher from the generator and trains the search user using a Gain Beyond RAG reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines trained on over 70 more data with 2.4k training samples. |
Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Self-describing Networks (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot named entity recognition (NER) models capture information from limited instances while transferring useful knowledge from external resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-describing mechanism for few-shot NER which can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can universally describe mentions using concepts and automatically map novel entity types to concepts and adaptively recognize entities on-demand. |
ConsistentChat: Building Skeleton-Guided Consistent Multi-Turn Dialogues for Large Language Models from Scratch (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Chen, Xinyan Guan, Qianhao Yuan, Mo Guozhao, Weixiang Zhou, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing instruction data synthesis methods focus on single-turn instructions and neglect cross-turn coherence, resulting in context drift and reduced task completion rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constrains multi-turn instruction synthesis by explicitly modeling human conversational intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models trained on single-turn and multi-turn instruction datasets. |
Text Augmented Open Knowledge Graph Completion via Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment knowledge graph completion require factual triples or manual prompts to extract knowledge from a pre-trained language model. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool that generates quality query prompts and retrieves support information from large text corpora to probe knowledge from a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms embedding-based, graph-based and PLM-based methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Think Better, Not Longer: Token-Level Marginal Utility for Efficient Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate explicit Chain-of-Thought rationales, but often suffer from "overthinking". |
| Approach: | They propose a unified training framework to synthesize concise reasoning chains by identifying tokens that reduce the model’s likelihood of the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on deepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen backbones show that MUTO yields better efficiency-accuracy Pareto frontier. |
HALP: Detecting Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models without Generating a Single Token (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detection of hallucinations operate after text generation, making intervention costly and untimely. |
| Approach: | They examine whether hallucination risk can instead be predicted before any token is generated by probing a model's internal representations in a single forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect hallucinations before token generation, while query-token representations can be more accurate. |
Open-Domain Question Answering with Pre-Constructed Question Spaces (2021.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering aims at locating answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm with a novel reader-retriever design that differs from both families of algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms retrieval-based methods with two large-scale datasets and is state-of-the-art. |
TriSum: Learning Summarization Ability from Large Language Models with Structured Rationale (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced tasks like text summarization, but their size and computational demands limit their use in resource-constrained and privacy-centric settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distilling LLMs’ text summarization abilities into a compact, local model using a curriculum learning strategy that evolves from simple to complex tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on CNN/DailyMail, XSum, and ClinicalTrial, and improves interpretability by providing insights into the summarization rationale. |
Honey or Poison? Solving the Trigger Curse in Few-shot Event Detection via Causal Intervention (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent supervised ED approaches have achieved promising performance but require large number of manually annotated event data. |
| Approach: | They propose to overfit the trigger confounder of the context and the result . they propose to intervene on the context via backdoor adjustment during training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the FSED on ACE05 and MAVEN datasets. |
Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Boxi Cao, Qiaoyu Tang, Hongyu Lin, Shanshan Jiang, Bin Dong, Xianpei Han, Jiawei Chen, Tianshu Wang, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memory formation, but vanilla networks without pre-training suffer catastrophic forgetting problem. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments to investigate the retentive-forgetful contradiction between vanilla and pre-trained language models by controlling the target knowledge types, learning strategies and learning schedules. |
| Outcome: | The results show that pre-trained language models are forgetful and pre-training leads to retentive models . |
Reverse Modeling in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using pre-trained LLMs with reversed text inputs can improve their performance across multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to determine whether LLMs can understand reversed text inputs by reversing entire paragraphs or documents at the token level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve understanding across multiple languages. |
GenRES: Rethinking Evaluation for Generative Relation Extraction in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing relation extraction methods rely on exact matching with human-annotated reference relations, while GRE methods produce diverse and semantically accurate relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional assessment of relation extraction methods using human-annotated reference relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is consistent with human preferences for RE quality. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
Inner Thinking Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Depth Scaling to Foster Adaptive Internal Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yanxi Xie, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints . challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient spikes across layers, exposing stress points . |
| Approach: | They propose an inner thinking transformer that reimagines layer computations as implicit thinking steps. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that ITT outperforms Transformer/Loop variants in 11 benchmarks. |
CoCoNUTS: Concentrating on Content while Neglecting Uninformative Textual Styles for AI-Generated Peer Review Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors rely on stylistic cues to distinguish between surface-level language refinement and genuine content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a content-based detection paradigm to detect substantive AI-generation . they propose 'CoCoDet' detector that can detect surface-level language refinement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector achieves a macro F1 score of 98.24% on permissible machine-polished reviews and maintains 3.89% false positive rate on real-world reviews. |
VReST: Enhancing Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models through Tree Search and Self-Reward Mechanism (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown exceptional performance in multimodal tasks, but their effectiveness in complex visual reasoning is constrained. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that enhances Reasoning in Large Vision-Language Models . they propose integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search and Self-Reward mechanisms into the reasoning tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses current prompting methods and secures state-of-the-art performance across three multimodal reasoning benchmarks. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
ProMind-LLM: Proactive Mental Health Care via Causal Reasoning with Sensor Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for mental health risk assessment rely on subjective textual records . however, these uncertainties can cause inconsistent and unreliable predictions . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates objective behavior data alongside subjective mental records for robust mental health risk assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over general LLMs. |
A Role-Selected Sharing Network for Joint Machine-Human Chatting Handoff and Service Satisfaction Analysis (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jiawei Liu, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Guoxiu He, Zhuoren Jiang, Changlong Sun, Wei Lu, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to predict chatbot failure hatches vital apprehensions due to complexity of human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates dialogue satisfaction estimation and handoff prediction in one multi-task learning framework. |
PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer text style focus on sentence-level data, limiting performance . current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to transform official texts into public-speaking styles by analyzing real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to transform public speaking texts into public-speaking styles . the proposed framework analyzes characteristics and identifies problems of stylized texts . |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
Unveiling and Addressing Pseudo Forgetting in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning have not been studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-guided replay framework that allows models to leverage their capabilities and provide partial external correct rationales to the original instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates pseudo forgetting while maintaining model plasticity. |