Papers by Junbo Qi
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangyang Zhong, Yanmei Gu, Zhengqing Zang, Xiaomeng Li, Yuqi Ding, Xibei Jia, Yuting Shen, Zhenzhong Lan, Liwang Zhu, Weiping Liu, Junlin Zhou, Haisheng Liu, Zhong Xin Yu, Pengxin Luo, Donglian Qi, Yunfeng Yan, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding. |
| Approach: | They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss. |
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)
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Lirong Gao, Zewei Yu, Zhongrui Yin, Qi Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Sheng Guo
| Challenge: | Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. |
RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning is proposed to reduce the training data size. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve instruction tuning by integrating external knowledge into a single pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results with only 1% of the full dataset. |
D.Va: Validate Your Demonstration First Before You Use It (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) heavily relies on selecting effective demonstrations to achieve outputs that better align with the expected results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates a demonstration validation perspective into this field and integrates it into the learning paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses all retrieval-based in-context learning techniques across both natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) tasks. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Hao Chen, Haoze Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Lirong Gao, Qi Zhang, Xiaomeng Hu, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |