Papers by Jie Shao
Are Large Pre-Trained Language Models Leaking Your Personal Information? (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are prone to leaking personal information due to memorization, but the risk of specific personal information being extracted by attackers is low. |
| Approach: | They analyze whether large pre-trained language models are prone to leaking personal information due to memorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is weak at association, so the risk of specific personal information being extracted by attackers is low. |
The Tug of War Within: Mitigating the Fairness-Privacy Conflicts in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance an LLM's privacy awareness with thousands of samples decrease its fairness awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method to Suppress the Privacy and faIrness coupled Neurons (SPIN) which theoretically and empirically decreases the mutual information between fairness and privacy awareness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the mutual information between fairness and privacy awareness without compromising general capabilities. |
Retrieving Sequential Information for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the Reinforce-NAT system surpasses the baseline NAT system by a significant margin on BLEU without decelerating the decoding speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level training method and a Transformer decoder to fuse the target sequential information into the top layer of the decoded Transformer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the baseline NAT system on BLEU without decelerating the decoding speed and achieves comparable translation performance to the autoregressive Transformer model with considerable speedup. |
CoMoL: Efficient Mixture of LoRA Experts via Dynamic Core Space Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Cao, Zhenxuan Fan, Zhuonan Wang, Tianwei Lin, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Feifei Shao, Hongwei Wang, Jun Xiao, Siliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing PEFT methods suffer from limited parameter efficiency and coarse-grained adaptation due to proliferation of LoRA experts and instance-level routing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new MoE-LoRA framework that incorporates expert diversity, parameter efficiency, and fine-grained adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multiple tasks while maintaining parameter efficiency. |
GUI-explorer: Autonomous Exploration and Mining of Transition-aware Knowledge for GUI Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | GUI automation is a key challenge in dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free GUI agent that integrates two mechanisms to explore trajectories in GUIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-explorer shows significant improvements over existing agents. |
MWP-BERT: Numeracy-Augmented Pre-training for Math Word Problem Solving (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on math word problem solvers replace real numbers with symbolic placeholders to focus on logic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject numerical properties into symbolic placeholders with contextualized representation learning schema to solve number representation dilemma. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can solve MWP problems on English and Chinese benchmarks. |
Multi-Level Cross-Modal Alignment for Speech Relation Extraction (2024.emnlp-main)
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Liang Zhang, Zhen Yang, Biao Fu, Ziyao Lu, Liangying Shao, Shiyu Liu, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xiaoli Wang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing studies use synthetic speech to train and evaluate SpeechRE models, hindering their development . modality gap issue limits performance of existing models, limiting future researches . |
| Approach: | They propose to use speech data to train and evaluate SpeechRE models by using real speech . they propose to train a cross-modal alignment model to bridge the modality gap . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can train to bridge the modality gap between speech encoder and text decoder . the proposed model is based on two real SpeechRE datasets . |
Towards Tracing Trustworthiness Dynamics: Revisiting Pre-training Period of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on pre-trained LLMs to better understand and improve their trustworthiness. |
| Approach: | They apply linear probing to LLMs to explore five key dimensions of trustworthiness: reliability, privacy, toxicity, fairness, and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish concepts in each trustworthiness dimension, suggesting that it can be trained in early pre-training. |
Understanding Jargon: Combining Extraction and Generation for Definition Modeling (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating definitions of words/phrases perform poorly on jargon. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine extraction and generation for jargon definition modeling by extracting definitional information from the Web and incorporating extracted definitional data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models significantly on jargon definitions. |
Quantifying Association Capabilities of Large Language Models and Its Implications on Privacy Leakage (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the association capabilities of large language models . as models scale up, their ability to associate entities/information intensifies . however, there is a performance gap when associating commonsense knowledge versus PII, with the latter showing lower accuracy. |
| Approach: | They examine the association capabilities of large language models and identify factors that influence their proficiency in associating information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show a performance gap when associating commonsense knowledge versus PII, with the latter showing lower accuracy. |
Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to language model alignment assume homogeneous human preferences, but actual human preferences vary widely and are hard to satisfy with a single language model. |
| Approach: | They propose an RL-free extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that folds language modeling directly into reward modeling and trains language models as collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or outperforms existing methods in safety alignment and long-form question answering. |
On Orthogonality Constraints for Transformers (2021.acl-short)
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Aston Zhang, Alvin Chan, Yi Tay, Jie Fu, Shuohang Wang, Shuai Zhang, Huajie Shao, Shuochao Yao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee
| Challenge: | a dedicated study on orthogonality constraints for transformers has been lacking . plug-and-play constraints increase the BLEU of transformers . |
| Approach: | They propose to use plug-and-play constraints to encourage matrices to be orthogonal for numerical stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed constraint increases the BLEU on the large-scale WMT’16 EnDe benchmark by a factor of 28.4 to 29.6. |
CMDAG: A Chinese Metaphor Dataset with Annotated Grounds as CoT for Boosting Metaphor Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Metaphors are a prominent linguistic device in human language and literature, as they add color, imagery, and emphasis to enhance effective communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale high quality annotated Chinese Metaphor Corpus . they use a set of guidelines to ensure the accuracy and consistency of their annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus generates metaphors that resonate more with real-world intuition. |
Compositional Mathematical Encoding for Math Word Problems (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing MWP encoders work in a unimodal setting and map problem description to latent representation, then for decoding. |
| Approach: | They propose a Compositional Math Word Problem Solver which maps problem description to latent representation and decodes it in an interactive way. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on public benchmarks. |
Abstract then Play: A Skill-centric Reinforcement Learning Framework for Text-based Games (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning frameworks fail to decompose the task and abstract the action autonomously. |
| Approach: | They propose a skill-centric reinforcement learning framework capable of abstracting the action in an end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | Empirical experiments on the Jericho environment validate the proposed framework against state-of-the-art baselines. |
Understanding and Addressing the Under-Translation Problem from the Perspective of Decoding Objective (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has made remarkable progress over the past years, but under-translation and over-translatation remain challenging obstacles faced by NMT systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to employ the confidence of predicting the end of sentence (EOS) as a detector for under-translation and strengthen the confidence-based penalty to penalize candidates with a high risk of under-translated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect and rectify under-translated outputs, with minor impact on other correct translations. |
Graph-to-Tree Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tree-based neural models do not capture the relationships and order information among the quantities well. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel deep learning architecture that combines the merits of the graph-based encoder and tree-based decoder to generate better solution expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on two available datasets significantly. |
Instruction Position Matters in Sequence Generation with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can perform conditional sequence generation tasks, such as translation or summarization, through instruction fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to shift the position of task instructions after the input sentences to enhance the model's instruction-following capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional settings across various model scales (1B / 7B & 13B) and different sequence generation tasks (translation and summarization) without any additional data or annotation costs. |
Diverse, Controllable, and Keyphrase-Aware: A Corpus and Method for News Multi-Headline Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for news headline generation focus on producing a single short sentence . et al., 2017; Gehrmann e.t., 2018; Zhong ee., 2019) focus on single-headline generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate multiple headlines with keyphrases of user interests . they propose generating multiple keyphrase-relevant headlines using a transformer decoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in terms of quality and diversity. |