Papers by Jinhao Duan
IUQ: Interrogative Uncertainty Quantification for Long-Form Large Language Model Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to quantify uncertainty in LLMs produce short or constrained answer sets, but many real-world applications require long-form and free-form text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages inter-sample consistency and intra-sampled faithfulness to quantify the uncertainty in long-form LLM outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides reliable measures of claim-level uncertainty and the model’s faithfulness over two widely used long-form generation datasets. |
Shifting Attention to Relevance: Towards the Predictive Uncertainty Quantification of Free-Form Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Hao Cheng, Shiqi Wang, Alex Zavalny, Chenan Wang, Renjing Xu, Bhavya Kailkhura, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) show promising results in language generation but often “hallucinate”, making their outputs less reliable. |
| Approach: | They propose to shift attention to more relevant components at token- and sentence-levels for better UQ. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of a range of popular “off-the-shelf” LLMs with model sizes extending up to 33B parameters. |
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zijie Liu, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Qingyu Chen, Kaidi Xu, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks. |
ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guarantees (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiyuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Lu Cheng, Yue Zhang, Qingni Wang, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu, Heng Tao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu
| Challenge: | Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in natural language generation tasks remains an open challenge . however, black-box uncertainty measures require investigating with the proliferation of LLMs served via APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal uncertainty measure and a method to transform heuristic uncertainty notions into rigorous prediction sets. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and can provide reliable guarantees for open-ended NLG tasks. |
ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Recursively Thinking-Ahead agent that analyzes the opponents’ future moves/actions and assigns reward signals for these situations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent is based on two scenarios: Online Racing and Offline Probing. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
Sparse Neurons Carry Strong Signals of Question Ambiguity in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Ambiguity is pervasive in real-world questions, yet large language models often respond with confident answers rather than seeking clarification. |
| Approach: | They show that question ambiguity is linearly encoded in the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) by training linear probes, they identify sparse sets of Ambiguity-Encoding Neurons (AENs) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prompting-based and representation-based baselines on ambiguity detection and generalization. |
DynaCode: A Dynamic Complexity-Aware Code Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing code benchmarks for large language models remain static, resulting in data contamination and unreliable evaluation results. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic, complexity-aware benchmark that overcomes the limitations of static datasets and provides a memorization-advantaged benchmark. |
| Outcome: | DynaCode generates 189 million unique nested code problems across 4 units of code complexity and 16 types of call graphs. |