Papers by Jifan Chen
Subgraph Retrieval Enhanced Model for Multi-hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods for knowledge base question answering are either heuristic or interwoven with the reasoning, causing reasoning on the partial subgraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph retrieval framework that decouples the retrieval from the subsequent reasoning process and trains subgraphs for easier reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval and QA performance over existing methods. |
Robust Question Answering Through Sub-part Alignment (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current textual question answering models fail to generalize to out-of-domain settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose question and context into smaller units and align them to find the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust than the standard BERT QA model on adversarial and out-of-domain datasets. |
Complex Claim Verification with Evidence Retrieved in the Wild (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work makes simplifying assumptions in retrieval that depart from real-world use cases: no access to evidence, access to curated evidence, or access to published evidence after a claim was made. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to check claims using raw evidence from the web . they restrict their retriever to only search documents available prior to the claim's making . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a political claim dataset and shows that the evidence summary produced by the system is reliable and relevant to answering key questions. |
Understanding Dataset Design Choices for Multi-hop Reasoning (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets that explicitly focus on multi-hop reasoning are lacking in learning multi-tasking. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentence-factored models to solve multi-hop question answering tasks . they find spurious correlations in unmasked versions of WikiHop and HotpotQA . |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets are used to test models on multi-hop question answering tasks. |
Generating Literal and Implied Subquestions to Fact-check Complex Claims (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking systems are not reliable because it is unclear which parts of a claim are true and which are not. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose a political claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can decompose a complex claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. |
Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations (2023.findings-acl)
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Jifan Chen, Yuhao Zhang, Lan Liu, Rui Dong, Xinchi Chen, Patrick Ng, William Yang Wang, Zhiheng Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multitask learning typically use a dataset name as input prefix, which limits the effectiveness of multitask training. |
| Approach: | They propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings. |
Benchmarking Query-Conditioned Natural Language Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Query-conditioned natural language inference (QC-NLI) is a new approach to detect inconsistencies in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Query-Conditioned Natural Language Inference to determine the semantic relationship between two documents conditioned on a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a query-conditioned natural language inference (QC-NLI) it is used to determine the relationship between the premise and hypothesis given a given query. |
An Experimental Design Framework for Label-Efficient Supervised Finetuning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Gantavya Bhatt, Yifang Chen, Arnav Das, Jifan Zhang, Sang Truong, Stephen Mussmann, Yinglun Zhu, Jeff Bilmes, Simon Du, Kevin Jamieson, Jordan Ash, Robert Nowak
| Challenge: | Supervised finetuning (SFT) on instruction datasets has shown immense potential in improving the zero-shot generalization capabilities observed in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use experimental design to minimize the computational cost of active learning by identifying useful subsets of samples to annotate from an unlabeled pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods save 50% of the annotation cost compared to random sampling on generative tasks. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
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Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
Can NLI Models Verify QA Systems’ Predictions? (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent question answering systems perform well on benchmark datasets, but are not always well-calibrated to spot spurious answers under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language inference to verify whether answers are correct . they leverage large pre-trained models and recent prior datasets to construct powerful question conversion and decontextualization modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the confidence estimation of a QA model across different domains, evaluated in a selective QA setting. |
Dancing in Chains: Reconciling Instruction Following and Faithfulness in Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhengxuan Wu, Yuhao Zhang, Peng Qi, Yumo Xu, Rujun Han, Yian Zhang, Jifan Chen, Bonan Min, Zhiheng Huang
| Challenge: | Modern language models fail to follow human instructions while being faithful . a trade-off exists between instruction following and faithfulness when training LMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on Reject-sampling by Self-instruct with Continued Fine-tuning to train LMs to follow human instructions while being faithful. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla MTL with high-quality data, but with significantly smaller data. |
Bridging the Creativity Understanding Gap: Small-Scale Human Alignment Enables Expert-Level Humor Ranking in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kuan Lok Zhou, Jiayi Chen, Siddharth Suresh, Reuben Narad, Timothy T. Rogers, Lalit K Jain, Robert D Nowak, Bob Mankoff, Jifan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant limitations in understanding creative content, as demonstrated by Hessel et al. (2023)’s influential work on the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose humor understanding into three components and improve each by enhancing visual understanding through improved annotation and utilizing LLM-generated humor reasoning and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 82.4% accuracy in caption ranking, significantly better than the previous 67% benchmark and matches the performance of world-renowned human experts in this domain. |
CiteEval: Principle-Driven Citation Evaluation for Source Attribution (2025.acl-long)
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Yumo Xu, Peng Qi, Jifan Chen, Kunlun Liu, Rujun Han, Lan Liu, Bonan Min, Vittorio Castelli, Arshit Gupta, Zhiguo Wang
| Challenge: | Current evaluation frameworks rely on NLI to assess binary or ternary support from cited sources, which is suboptimal for citation evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a citation evaluation framework based on fine-grained citation ratings within a broad context and construct a multi-domain benchmark with high-quality human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a high-quality human annotation benchmark and a suite of model-based metrics that exhibit strong correlation with human judgments. |