Papers by Jing Ren
Sequence Structure Aware Retriever for Procedural Document Retrieval: A New Dataset and Baseline (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods neglect the execution sequence structures inherent in procedural documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval model which integrates procedural graphs with document representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates procedural graphs with document representations to improve document retrieval. |
VIVA+: Human-Centered Situational Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show promising results in complex, human-centered environments, yet evaluating their capacity for nuanced, humanlike reasoning and decision-making remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They introduce VIVA+, a cognitively grounded benchmark for evaluating the reasoning and decision-making of MLLMs in human-centered situations. |
| Outcome: | The VIVA+ model is based on 1,317 real-world situations paired with 6,373 multiple-choice questions . it consists of three core abilities for decision-making: (1) Foundational Situation Comprehension, (2) Context-Driven Action Justification, and (3) Reflective Reasoning. |
VALU: A Benchmark for Video Anomaly Temporal Localization and Understanding at Multiple Semantic Levels (2026.acl-long)
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Yixiao He, Menghao Zhang, Haifeng Sun, Jing Wang, Kangheng Lin, Jinghan Wang, Chenye Xu, Pengfei Ren, Qi Qi, Jingyu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) enhance the ability of VAU models to describe and interpret anomalies. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that explicitly defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed temporal boundaries and detailed textual descriptions for each. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark defines anomalies across five semantic levels and provides detailed descriptions for each. |
TOME: A Two-stage Approach for Model-based Retrieval (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on model-based retrieval, which discards the index in the traditional retrieval model and memorizes the candidate corpora using model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based retrieval approach that discards the index in the traditional retrieval model and memorizes the candidate corpora using model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach eliminates the index in the traditional retrieval model and memorizes the candidate corpora using model parameters. |
Unveiling Internal Reasoning Modes in LLMs: A Deep Dive into Latent Reasoning vs. Factual Shortcuts with Attribute Rate Ratio (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yiran Yang, Haifeng Sun, Jingyu Wang, Qi Qi, Zirui Zhuang, Huazheng Wang, Pengfei Ren, Jing Wang, Jianxin Liao
| Challenge: | Existing research in multi-hop questions has identified two reasoning modes, but has not investigated how these modes differ during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a classification metric that compares latent reasoning and factual shortcuts in multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric achieves 90% accuracy on the proposed datasets and demonstrates effectiveness in RAG conflict scenarios. |
PAIR: Leveraging Passage-Centric Similarity Relation for Improving Dense Passage Retrieval (2021.findings-acl)
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Ruiyang Ren, Shangwen Lv, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu, Wayne Xin Zhao, QiaoQiao She, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent studies only consider query-centric similarity relation when learning the dual-encoder retriever. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-centric and PAssage-centric approach to capture more comprehensive similarity relations for dense passage retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets. |
VIVA: A Benchmark for Vision-Grounded Decision-Making with Human Values (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large vision language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable intelligence and proficiency across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for VIsion-grounded decision-making driven by human VA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make decisions under a vision-depicted situation using human values and human values. |
Reinforced Informativeness Optimization for Long-Form Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning systems lack verifiable reward mechanisms for long-form question answering . current systems lack reliable long-term answers due to lack of factual content . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reinforced verifiable informativeness optimization . it defines informativeness as measurable and externally verifier objective for RL . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RioRAG achieves higher factual recall and faithfulness . the proposed framework is based on a framework that uses nugget-centric verification with cross-source checks . |
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)
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Qibing Ren, Hao Li, Dongrui Liu, Zhanxu Xie, Xiaoya Lu, Yu Qiao, Lei Sha, Junchi Yan, Lizhuang Ma, Jing Shao
| Challenge: | Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs. |
Investigating the Factual Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models with Retrieval Augmentation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive prowess in solving a wide range of tasks with world knowledge, but it remains unclear how well they perceive their factual knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a retrieval augmentation approach to enhance LLMs' awareness of factual knowledge boundaries to analyze factual and factual information in open-domain question answering (QA) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ QA and judgemental capabilities by integrating supporting documents with the questions. |
RocketQAv2: A Joint Training Method for Dense Passage Retrieval and Passage Re-ranking (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that passage retrieval and passage reranking are important for achieving mutual improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified listwise training approach for passage retrieval and passage reranking that incorporates a retrieval procedure and a hybrid data augmentation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions datasets. |
Cultural Bias Matters: A Cross-Cultural Benchmark Dataset and Sentiment-Enriched Model for Understanding Multimodal Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Metaphors are pervasive in communication, making them crucial for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multicultural multimodal metaphor dataset designed for cross-cultural studies of metaphor in Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves metaphor comprehension across cultural backgrounds and cultural domains. |
REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs) lack internal parametric knowledge, resulting in misusing external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented approach that provides LLMs with potentially relevant documents through a module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four open-domain QA tasks. |
CodeAttack: Revealing Safety Generalization Challenges of Large Language Models via Code Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit remarkable generative capabilities but can be misused for harmful purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms natural language inputs into code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bypasses the safety guardrails of all models more than 80% of the time. |
A Thorough Examination on Zero-shot Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruiyang Ren, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu, Xin Zhao, Qifei Wu, Yuchen Ding, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in dense retrieval (DR) models have been shown to be not as competitive as traditional sparse retrieval models in a zero-shot retrieval setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the zero-shot capability of DR models by analyzing key factors related to source training set and potential bias from target dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is not as competitive as sparse retrieval models in a zero-shot retrieval setting. |
Debiasing Large Language Models via Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompting methods for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from excessive token usage and limited generalisability across diverse reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Causal Prompting with Sketch-of-Thought framework that leverages structural causal models to infer the causal effect of a query on its answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing prompting baselines in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency. |
BASES: Large-scale Web Search User Simulation with Large Language Model based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on web search rely on real-user experiments, which can be costly to scale up. |
| Approach: | They propose a user simulation framework with LLM-based agents that can generate unique user profiles at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate unique user profiles at scale, leading to diverse search behaviors. |
Self-Adjust Softmax (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Guoxuan Chen, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Xiaozhe Ren, Chao Huang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Usually, tokens with larger attention scores are important for the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify softmax(z) to z softmax and its normalized variant to improve the Transformer attention mechanism by making minor adjustments to the softmax function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides enhanced gradient properties compared to the vanilla softmax function. |
Evaluating and Mitigating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models: Can They Still See Removed Objects? (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | LVLMs often mistakenly determine objects as present in images where they do not exist . authors propose a new benchmark to evaluate object hallucinations by removing objects from images and asking the model whether it can still see the removed objects. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate object hallucinations by removing objects from images . they propose oDPO, a direct preference optimization objective based on visual objects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the likelihood of object hallucinations by removing objects from images and asking the model whether it can still see the removed objects. |
RocketQA: An Optimized Training Approach to Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.naacl-main)
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Yingqi Qu, Yuchen Ding, Jing Liu, Kai Liu, Ruiyang Ren, Wayne Xin Zhao, Daxiang Dong, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering uses dense passage retrieval to find answers . however, it is difficult to effectively train a dual-encoder due to discrepancy between training and inference . |
| Approach: | They propose an optimized training approach to improve dense passage retrieval using RocketQA . they propose cross-batch negatives, denoised hard negatives and data augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on both MSMARCO and Natural Questions. |
DAPE V2: Process Attention Score as Feature Map for Length Extrapolation (2025.acl-long)
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Chuanyang Zheng, Yihang Gao, Han Shi, Jing Xiong, Jiankai Sun, Jingyao Li, Minbin Huang, Xiaozhe Ren, Michael Ng, Xin Jiang, Zhenguo Li, Yu Li
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that treating attention as a feature map and applying convolution as . a processing method significantly enhances Transformer performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the convolution operator to mimic the processing methods in computer vision to treat attention as a feature map and apply it to neighboring attention scores across different heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adapted to various attention-related models and achieves high performance. |
Cross-Topic Rumor Detection using Topic-Mixtures (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on rumor detection models has explored network structures, propagation paths, user credibility and fusion of heterogeneous data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adapts a rumor detection model trained on source to target topics to make rumour predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline debiasing methods in a cross-topic setting. |