Papers by Jing Xiao
Infusing Hierarchical Guidance into Prompt Tuning: A Parameter-Efficient Framework for Multi-level Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-level implicit discourse relation recognition (MIDRR) aims at identifying hierarchical discourse relations among arguments. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based multi-level implicit discourse relation recognition framework that leverages parameter-efficient prompt tuning to drive inputted arguments to match the pre-trained space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable results on PDTB 2.0 and 3.0 using about 0.1% trainable parameters compared with baselines. |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
KARL: Reinforcement Learning for LLM Agents on Multi-Turn Knowledge-Intensive Agentic Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqiao Sun, Xiao Liu, Bowen Lv, Hanchen Zhang, Bohao Jing, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown remarkable potential as autonomous agents, but their effectiveness in knowledge-intensive tasks remains limited by passive knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables LLM agents to dynamically explore structured knowledge sources through multi-turn interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing retrieval-augmented approaches on knowledge graph and database tasks while maximizing tool-use behaviors end-to-end. |
Dynamic Attention-Guided Context Decoding for Mitigating Context Faithfulness Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods, such as a n-terminal coding, do not provide accurate data for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that leverages attention distributions and uncertainty signals in a single-pass decoding. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on open-book QA datasets show that DAGCD improves faithfulness and robustness while preserving computational efficiency. |
Reasoning-Augmented Conversation for Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zonghao Ying, Deyue Zhang, Zonglei Jing, Yisong Xiao, Quanchen Zou, Aishan Liu, Siyuan Liang, Xiangzheng Zhang, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for implementing multi-turn jailbreaks struggle to balance semantic coherence with attack effectiveness, resulting in benign semantic drift or ineffective detection evasion. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates harmful queries into benign reasoning tasks and leverages LLMs’ strong reasoning capabilities to compromise safety alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art attack effectiveness in complex conversational scenarios, with average ASRs increasing by up to 96%. |
An Augmented Benchmark Dataset for Geometric Question Answering through Dual Parallel Text Encoding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for solving geometric problems are limited due to lack of high-quality datasets and efficient neural solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate 2,518 geometric problems with richer types and greater difficulty using a benchmark dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of automatic geometric problem solving to 66.09%. |
Better Simultaneous Translation with Monotonic Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train offline MT models require generating target tokens before source sentence is fully consumed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages traditional translation models as teachers to generate monotonic yet accurate reference translations for sequence-level knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on strong baselines and on a monotonic version of the WMT15 De-En test set. |
Reframe Your Life Story: Interactive Narrative Therapist and Innovative Moment Assessment with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Feng, Jiaqi Wang, Wenxuan Zhang, Zhuang Chen, Shen Yutong, Xiyao Xiao, Minlie Huang, Liping Jing, Jian Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mental health support lack realism and capture therapeutic progression over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that simulates expert narrative therapists by planning therapeutic stages, guiding reflection levels, and generating contextually appropriate responses through retrieval-augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard methods in quality and depth on 260 simulated clients and 230 human participants. |
Leveraging Web-Crawled Data for High-Quality Fine-Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large language models are fine-tuned using expensive human-annotated data or GPT-4 generated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use web-crawled data to train a language model on a smaller set of data . their results show that the model can convert web data with irregular formats into high-quality ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models larger than 32B and outperformed open-sourced models such as GPT-3.5. |
SceneGenAgent: Precise Industrial Scene Generation with Coding Agent (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on scene generation focuses on generating 3D scenes from textual descriptions . however, the task of generating industrial scenes with LLMs is complex and requires precise measurements and positioning . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent for generating industrial scenes through C# code. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLMs powered by SceneGenAgent exceed their original performance . the agent achieves 81.0% success rate in real-world industrial scene generation tasks . |
Boosting Text-to-SQL through Multi-grained Error Identification (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for error identification often overlook validation of generated results . text-to-SQL is a technology that converts natural language questions into executable SQL queries . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a multi-grained error identification method into existing methods to detect SQL errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated as a plugin into various methods, providing effective error identification and correction capabilities. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning to Defend Word-level Adversarial Text Attack (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks . previous word-based search methods assume important words influence prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for similarizing the influence of words with contrast learning that encourages model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with various training methods and improves model robustness against various adversarial attacks. |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated texts rely on static benchmarks that neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the generalization of LLM-generated text detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures generalization of 14 detection methods across LLMs. |
Importance Estimation from Multiple Perspectives for Keyphrase Extraction (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods focus on the part of phrase that is important . experimental results show that KIEMP outperforms existing keyphrase extracting methods . |
| Approach: | They propose to estimate the importance of keyphrase from multiple perspectives using a chunking module, ranking module and matching module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction methods on six benchmark datasets. |
TranSFormer: Slow-Fast Transformer for Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has focused on treating subwords as basic units in developing such systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-fast two-stream learning model that uses a “slow” branch to deal with subword sequences and a "fast" branch to cope with longer character sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows consistent BLEU improvements (larger than 1 BLUE point) on several machine translation benchmarks. |
From Quantity to Quality: Boosting LLM Performance with Self-Guided Data Selection for Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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Ming Li, Yong Zhang, Zhitao Li, Jiuhai Chen, Lichang Chen, Ning Cheng, Jianzong Wang, Tianyi Zhou, Jing Xiao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the landscape of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided method to identify and select cherry samples from open-source datasets, minimizing manual curation and potential cost for instruction tuning an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables LLMs to identify discrepancies between expected responses and intrinsic generation capability, and a marked uptick in model training efficiency. |
PHMOSpell: Phonological and Morphological Knowledge Guided Chinese Spelling Check (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | False gram and phonological errors make Chinese spelling check difficult . a novel end-to-end trainable model outperforms existing methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a trainable Chinese spelling check model that integrates phonological and visual information into a pre-trained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Empirical Studies of Institutional Federated Learning For Natural Language Processing (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | federated learning is a promising ideology to unite isolated datasets for machine learning problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use federated natural language processing networks to train a popular NLP model with applications in sentence intent classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is sensitive to imbalanced data load and tested against a federated model under imbalanced datasets. |
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods. |
Astra: Activation-Space Tail-Eigenvector Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained models are limited due to suboptimal activation subspaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages tail eigenvectors of model output activations to construct low-rank adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods across 16 benchmarks and surpasses full fine-tuning in certain scenarios. |
Hyperbolic Capsule Networks for Multi-Label Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification of labels are limited by feature aggregation and encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hyperbolic capsule networks to capture fine-grained label information . they also propose a new routing method to adaptively adjust capsule number during routing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of multi-label classification on tail labels. |
Self-supervised Cross-modal Pretraining for Speech Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal speech emotion recognition and sentiment analysis have not improved results due to their relatively simple fusion mechanisms and lack of proper cross-modal pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep-fused audio-text bi-modal transformer with carefully designed cross-modal fusion mechanism and stage-wise cross-mod pretraining scheme to facilitate cross-modulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds benchmarks on public IEMOCAP emotion and CMU-MOSEI sentiment datasets by a large margin. |
DREAM: Disentangling Risks to Enhance Safety Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Jianyu Liu, Hangyu Guo, Ranjie Duan, Xingyuan Bu, Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Hui Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Yucheng Wang, Chenchen Jing, Xingwei Qu, Xiao Zhang, Pei Wang, Yanan Wu, Jihao Gu, Yangguang Li, Jianke Zhu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to disentangle risks through step-by-step reasoning within multimodal inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves safety alignment in MLLMs by fine-tuning and iterative Reinforcement Learning from AI feedback. |
GRASP: Replace Redundant Layers with Adaptive Singular Parameters for Efficient Model Compression (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that many layers are functionally redundant in large language models (LLMs), enabling model compression by removing these layers to reduce inference cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that removes redundant layers to reduce inference cost by preserving sensitivity-aware singular values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in 90% of the original model under a 20% compression ratio. |
Hybrid Inverted Index Is a Robust Accelerator for Dense Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Inverted file structure is a common technique for accelerating dense retrieval, but its lossy nature degrades it. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid index where embedding clusters and salient terms work collaboratively to accelerate dense retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves lossless retrieval quality with competitive efficiency across index settings. |
Enhancing Multimodal Named Entity Recognition through Adaptive Mixup Image Augmentation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Current named entity recognition methods struggle with text-image mismatch problem due to a lack of visual context. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive mixup image augmentation method that generates augmented images based on matching score between text and image . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be integrated into existing models and demonstrate consistent performance improvements. |
Prior Relational Schema Assists Effective Contrastive Learning for Inductive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack robustness and incompleteness to provide link prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture prior schema-level interactions related to relations by leveraging entity type information and introduce schema-guided negatives to bolster the efficiency of normal contrastive representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple established metrics across multiple datasets for link prediction. |
An Alignment-Agnostic Model for Chinese Text Error Correction (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for Chinese text error correction can correct mistaken, missing and redundant characters, but they cannot handle missing or redundant characters. |
| Approach: | They propose an alignment-agnostic framework to correct Chinese text errors . framework detects missing and redundant characters and can be used as a cold start model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can handle both text aligned and non-aligned situations and can serve as a cold start model when no annotation data are provided. |
Label-Specific Document Representation for Multi-Label Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify documents using labels only assign one label to document . multi-label text classification is a challenging task because of the huge amount of documents, words and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a Label-Specific Attention Network (LSAN) to learn a label-specific document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets . it can predict low-frequency labels, and it can be used in sentimental analysis . |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
Find Your Optimal Teacher: Personalized Data Synthesis via Router-Guided Multi-Teacher Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Shiping Yang, Xiao Liang, Chenming Shang, Yuxuan Jiang, Chaofan Tao, Jing Xiong, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Ruobing Xie, Angel X. Chang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that stronger models are not always optimal teachers, suggesting a mismatch between the teacher’s output and the student’s learning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that routes each prompt to its optimal teacher via a query-level router that jointly considers the student models’ learnability and teacher models’ response quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on six benchmarks including instruct tuning and math reasoning settings. |
Enhancing Dual-Encoders with Question and Answer Cross-Embeddings for Answer Retrieval (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve question answering (QA) problems are limited by the need for text generation and answer retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce QA interaction features in scoring function but at the cost of low efficiency in inference stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art method on multiple answer retrieval datasets. |
A Neural Transition-based Joint Model for Disease Named Entity Recognition and Normalization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for disease recognition and normalization ignore text surface form of each candidate concept, causing boundary inconsistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural transition-based joint model to normalize disease entities from biomedical text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two publicly available datasets. |
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective (2023.eacl-main)
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Zijian Zhang, Chang Shu, Ya Xiao, Yuan Shen, Di Zhu, Youxin Chen, Jing Xiao, Jey Han Lau, Qian Zhang, Zheng Lu
| Challenge: | Recent VSE models combine simple pooling methods with hard triplet loss to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive pooling strategy that allows the model to learn how to aggregate features through a combination of simple pooling methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on image-to-text and text-toimage retrieval. |
IDEAW: Robust Neural Audio Watermarking with Invertible Dual-Embedding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods for embedding watermarks into audio have low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-embedding wa- termarking model for efficient locating and a model that can withstand attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can withstand attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods. |
Contrastive Learning with Adversarial Examples for Alleviating Pathology of Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods fail to obtain faithful attributions on these models, thereby failing to reveal potential flaws and biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive learning regularization method which calibrates the sentence representation of out-of-distribution examples and utilizes adversarial examples to introduce direction information in regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the model pathology while impacting generalization ability on in-distribution examples and thus helps interpretation methods obtain more faithful results. |
Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture for Document Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) aims to generate answers by understanding textual, layout, and visual elements within document images. |
| Approach: | They propose a Flow-Based Page Unique Semantic Mapping Architecture to solve the distinguishability problem among semantically similar pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in evidence localization and answer generation. |