Papers by Juan Cao
Beyond the Final Actor: Modeling the Dual Roles of Creator and Editor for Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect large language models (LLMs) use binary or ternary classifications, which can only distinguish pure human/LLM text or collaborative text at best. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained method that characterizes distinct signatures of creator and editor by using Rhetorical Structure Theory to construct a logic graph for creator's foundation and extracting Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU)-level features for the editor's style. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 12 baselines in identifying fine-grained types with low false alarms, offering a policy-aligned solution for LLM regulation. |
Article Reranking by Memory-Enhanced Key Sentence Matching for Detecting Previously Fact-Checked Claims (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect false claims ignore the characteristics of FC-articles . claims are often quoted to describe checked events, providing lexical information . sentence templates to introduce or debunk claims are common across articles, providing pattern information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to rerank FC-articles using key sentences and pattern information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on two real-world datasets showing that key sentences can be used to predict if an article fact-checks the given claim. |
Two Heads Are Better Than One: Improving Fake News Video Detection by Correlating with Neighbors (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for detecting fake news videos are limited . a new approach is proposed to integrate neighborhood information of new videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatically detecting fake news videos . it integrates neighborhood relationship of new videos belonging to same event . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of existing detectors and graph aggregation and debunking rectification modules. |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
Zoom Out and Observe: News Environment Perception for Fake News Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection "zoom in" to verify content with knowledge sources or check readers’ replies to posts but neglect information in the external news environment where a fake news post is created and disseminated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture news environment signals and a module to perceive useful signals and assist final prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the performance of basic fake news detectors by capturing the environmental signals of news posts and analyzing the results. |
Learn over Past, Evolve for Future: Forecasting Temporal Trends for Fake News Detection (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on fake news detection does not consider the temporal shift issue caused by the rapidly-evolving nature of news data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to forecast temporal patterns of news data and guide detector to fast adapt to future distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework forecasts temporal distribution patterns and guides detector to fast adapt to future distribution. |
LLM-empowered Dynamic Prompt Routing for Vision-Language Models Tuning under Long-Tailed Distributions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) often suffer from bias in class-imbalanced scenes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional dynamic prompt routing framework that integrates a knowledge base for classes spanning multiple visual-semantic dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable results with current SOTA methods on long-tailed benchmarks, including CIFAR-LT, ImageNet-LT and Places-LT. |
Tailoring Rumor Debunking to You: Diversifying Chinese Rumor-Debunking Passages with an LLM-Driven Simulated Feedback-Enhanced Framework (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-checking lack coherence and context, whereas abstractive methods lack cohesion and context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages . they propose to use a generative AI framework to generate context-sensitive responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages by iteratively refining outputs based on simulated user feedback. |
Forewarned is Forearmed: Pre-Synthesizing Jailbreak-like Instructions to Enhance LLM Safety Guardrail to Potential Attacks (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Despite advances in improving large language model (LLM) to refuse to answer malicious instructions, LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks where attackers generate instructions with distributions differing from safety alignment corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages embedding space distribution analysis to generate jailbreak-like instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant decreases in attack success rate on Qwen2.5, Llama3.1, and Llma3.2 without compromising their utility. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
PAD: A Robustness Enhancement Ensemble Method via Promoting Attention Diversity (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance robustness of deep neural networks focus on perturbation . weak robustness is a problem for many types of adversarial attacks, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework for enhancing robustness by perturbing parameters of a model and diversifying adversarial example distributions among different models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve robustness against adversarial attacks while maintaining accuracy on clean data. |
Integrating Semantic and Structural Information with Graph Convolutional Network for Controversy Detection (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying controversial posts on social media are limited . existing methods fail to incorporate semantic information from content-related posts . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate the information from topics, posts, and comments . they extend their model to Disentangled TPC-GCN to disentangle topic-related features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two real-world datasets. |
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts . |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks . |
Improving Fake News Detection of Influential Domain via Domain- and Instance-Level Transfer (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Social media spreads both real news and fake news in various domains including politics, health, entertainment, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a Domain- and Instance-level Transfer Framework for Fake News Detection which could improve the performance of specific target domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of target domains by hurting other domains, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in the target domain. |