Papers by Jie Tan
Semantics of the Unwritten: The Effect of End of Paragraph and Sequence Tokens on Text Generation with GPT2 (2021.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments on an English essay dataset using Chinese-GPT2 . they find that the model can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
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. |
Are Intermediate Layers and Labels Really Necessary? A General Language Model Distillation Method (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods rely on intermediate layer features and golden labels, which require aligned model architecture and labeled data respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a general language model distillation method that performs two-stage word prediction distillation and vocabulary compression, which is simple and shows extremely strong performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 25 state-of-the-art methods on the SuperGLUE benchmark, achieving an average score that surpasses the best method by 3%. |
Towards Fine-grained Text Sentiment Transfer (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained text sentiment transfer only reverse the sentiment polarity of text, but they lack a robust and parallel learning algorithm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-grained text sentiment transfer task that revises a sequence to satisfy a given sentiment intensity while preserving the original semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a large margin in automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
LongRAG: A Dual-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with the “lost in the middle” issue. |
| Approach: | They propose a general, dual-perspective, and robust LLM-based RAG system paradigm for LCQA to enhance RAG’s understanding of complex long-context knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms long-context LLMs, advanced RAG, and vanilla RAG on three multi-hop datasets. |
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. |
Repulsive Attention: Rethinking Multi-head Attention as Bayesian Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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Bang An, Jie Lyu, Zhenyi Wang, Chunyuan Li, Changwei Hu, Fei Tan, Ruiyi Zhang, Yifan Hu, Changyou Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-head attention is an effective module in deep neural networks, but there are no explicit mechanisms guaranteeing this property. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric approach that explicitly improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and consequently strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the repulsiveness in multi-head attention and strengthens model’s expressiveness. |
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB surpasses standard CoT in accuracy and reduces token usage, achieving stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than baselines. |
Unsupervised Dependency Graph Network (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has identified properties of pretrained self-attention models that mirror those of dependency parse structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encourages attention heads to model different dependency relations from raw corpora and a masked language modeling task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can induce dependency structures from raw corpora and the masked language modeling task without gold POS tags and any external information. |
Unveiling the Lexical Sensitivity of LLMs: Combinatorial Optimization for Prompt Enhancement (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional instruct-following ability to complete downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box combinatorial optimization framework that iteratively improves lexical choices in prompts by a search strategy related to word influence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers the model's ability to instruct-follow and solve downstream tasks even when the variations are imperceptible to humans. |
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. |
Rejection-to-Acceptance Transition: Model Editing-Based Jailbreak Backdoor Injection Not Limited to Few Output Tokens (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiji Yang, Min Cai, Hao Xiong, Congyao Mei, Haodong Zou, Shicheng Tan, Jie Chen, Fulan Qian, Shu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreaking LLMs are implemented by binding backdoors to predefined phrases as first few output tokens, inducing the LLM’s next-token prediction to produce continuous responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a model editing-based jailbreak backdoor attack that hijacks LLM representations into a acceptance domain rather than binding to a few output tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing method outperforms existing methods, showing stronger jailbreak capabilities across LLMs and datasets. |
ONSEP: A Novel Online Neural-Symbolic Framework for Event Prediction Based on Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | TKGF is a technique that requires experience during testing and relying on a single short-term history. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates dynamic causal rule mining and dual history augmented generation to enhance event prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant performance improvements across diverse datasets and significantly improves Hit@k. |
GKD: A General Knowledge Distillation Framework for Large-scale Pre-trained Language Model (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation frameworks for language models are limited by memory and the use of complex distillation methods on larger-scale PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a general knowledge distillation framework that supports distillation on larger-scale PLMs using various distillation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can support distillation on larger-scale PLMs and 25 mainstream methods on 8 NVIDIA A100 (40GB) GPUs. |
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Wei Du, Jie Wang, Wenze Zhou, Xiangfeng Meng, Zhengyang Wang, Suping Sun, Ziwei Du, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Yongbin Liu, Shicheng Tan, Jiahao Ying, Shu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions. |
Neural-DINF: A Neural Network based Framework for Measuring Document Influence (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure scholarly impact of documents without citations only consider word frequency change. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network framework that measures document influence without citations by using word frequency changes and word semantic shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on document influence evaluation without citations. |
TiMem: Temporal-Hierarchical Memory Consolidation for Long-Horizon Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Kai Li, Xuanqing Yu, Ziyi Ni, Yi Zeng, Yao Xu, Zheqing Zhang, Xin Li, Jitao Sang, Xiaogang Duan, Xuelei Wang, Chengbao Liu, Jie Tan
| Challenge: | Existing memory frameworks provide limited support for temporally structured information across hierarchical levels, leading to fragmented memories and unstable long-horizon personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal–hierarchical memory framework that organizes conversations through a Temporal Memory Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines while reducing the recalled memory length by 52.20%. |
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Attention-based Span-specific and Contextual Semantic Representations (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods treat each span token equally important, ignoring significant features. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based joint extraction framework with attention-based semantic representations that utilizes span-specific and contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ACE2005, CoNLL2004 and ADE. |