Papers by Junho Kim
Enhancing Effectiveness and Robustness in a Low-Resource Regime via Decision-Boundary-aware Data Augmentation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment textual data are limited due to the discrete characteristics of the textual dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-boundary-aware data augmentation strategy to enhance robustness using pretrained language models by shifting latent features closer to the decision boundary and reconstruction to generate an ambiguous version with a soft label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than existing methods and is extensible with curriculum data augmentation. |
SMoP: Towards Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning with Sparse Mixture-of-Prompts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has emerged as a successful parameter-efficient alternative to the full fine-tuning of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning method that utilizes short soft prompts for efficient training and inference while maintaining performance gains typically induced by longer soft prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while preserving memory usage. |
CoBA: Counterbias Text Augmentation for Mitigating Various Spurious Correlations via Semantic Triples (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Spurious correlations are patterns that appear in datasets but do not represent genuine relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a more general form of counterfactual data augmentation that tackles multiple biases . they propose 'CoBA' that decomposes text into subject-predicate-object triples and modifies them to disrupt spurious correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces biases and strengthens out-of-distribution resilience. |
Towards Robust and Generalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Noisy Label Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has enabled efficient optimization of cumbersome language models in real-world environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a routing-based PEFT approach that adaptively activates PEFT modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more sensitive to noise interference than other methods. |
PRISP: Privacy-Safe Few-Shot Personalization via Lightweight Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model personalization are limited by data-rich settings and privacy risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and privacy-safe personalization framework tailored to constraints in large language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a few-shot variant of the LaMP benchmark show that PRISP achieves strong overall performance compared to prior approaches. |
Mentor-KD: Making Small Language Models Better Multi-step Reasoners (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive emergent capabilities by leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Distillation approach which transfers multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to smaller LMs by fine-tuning language models of multi- step rationales generated by LLM teachers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to transfer multi-step reasoning ability of LLMs to smaller LMs while addressing data quality and soft label provision. |
RECIPE4U: Student-ChatGPT Interaction Dataset in EFL Writing Education (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | generative AI is expanding in education, yet empirical analyses of large-scale and real-world interactions between students and AI systems remain limited. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset based on a semester-long experiment with 212 college students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) writing courses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes conversation logs, students’ intent, students' self-rated satisfaction, and students’ essay edit histories. |
User Guide for KOTE: Korean Online That-gul Emotions Dataset (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | sentiment analysis is used to identify emotional aspects of texts but is limited by its small size and limited range of emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Korean sentiment analysis corpus that is limited by its small size and narrow range of emotions . they propose to fine-tune the KOTE dataset and analyze the results for social discrimination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 50,000 Korean online comments, each manually labeled for 43 emotions and NO EMOTION. |
CAPA: Contribution-Aware Pruning and FFN Approximation for Efficient Large Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Efficient inference in Large Vision Language Models is constrained by the high cost of processing thousands of visual tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prunes visual tokens using attention contribution at critical functional transitions and reduces computations using efficient linear approximations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competent efficiency–performance trade-offs with improved robustness. |
Coconut: Contextualized Commonsense Unified Transformers for Graph-Based Commonsense Augmentation of Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that pre-trained language models lack commonsense knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a contextualized knowledge prompting scheme to guide the contextualization of structured commonsense knowledge based on large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art technique by an average of 5.8%. |
Leap-of-Thought: Accelerating Transformers via Dynamic Token Routing (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Inefficient transformers have been a challenge for many years, requiring computational costs that scale quadratically with the length of the input sequence. |
| Approach: | They propose a token reduction approach that dynamically routes tokens within layers to ensure that all tokens remain accessible in subsequent layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves up to 25x faster inference time without significant loss in accuracy. |
Incorporating Domain Knowledge into Materials Tokenization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have expanded their applications in materials science, but they often produce excessive fragmentation and semantic loss. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-centric tokenization approach that integrates material knowledge into tokenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tokenization approach outperforms existing tokenization methods and achieves an average performance gain of 4% and 2% in the generation and classification tasks. |
What if...?: Thinking Counterfactual Keywords Helps to Mitigate Hallucination in Large Multi-modal Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce hallucination in large multi-modal models are lacking in addressing this problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that implants counterfactual thinking into Large Multi-modal Models using self-generated counterfact keywords into the models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the reliability of large multi-modal models in addressing hallucination. |
Tutoring Helps Students Learn Better: Improving Knowledge Distillation for BERT with Tutor Network (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation approaches for language models have overlooked the difficulty of training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that controls difficulty of training examples during pre-training by a tutor network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art KD methods with student models on the GLUE benchmark. |
Exploring Cross-Cultural Differences in English Hate Speech Annotations: From Dataset Construction to Analysis (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for hate speech detection neglect the cultural diversity within a single language. |
| Approach: | They propose a CR**oss-cultural **E**nglish **Hate* speech dataset that uses culturally hateful keywords to identify posts from four countries plus the United States. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that only 56.2% of the posts in CREHate achieve consensus among all countries, with the highest pairwise label difference rate of 26%. |
Client-Customized Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient Federated Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have a large memory footprint and are difficult to use in federated learning (FL) |
| Approach: | They propose a hypernetwork-based FL framework that generates client-specific adapters by conditioning the client information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maximizes the utility of shared model parameters while minimizing divergence caused by client heterogeneity. |
Learning from Missing Relations: Contrastive Learning with Commonsense Knowledge Graphs for Commonsense Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to commonsense inference lack coverage and expressive diversity of commonsensense knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that contrasts sets of semantically similar and dissimilar events . they propose 'solar' framework that can be used to learn commonsense inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art commonsense transformer on commonsensense inference by 1.84% on average among 8 metrics. |
MELT: Materials-aware Continued Pre-training for Language Model Adaptation to Materials Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on constructing domain-specific corpus focus on a limited and scarce nature of datasets in materials science poses significant challenges for developing models that generalize well across a broad range of materials entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to adapt pre-trained language models for materials science by continuously pre-training them on a materials science corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to adapt pre-trained language models for materials science tasks. |
ConvX: A Lightweight Converter to Bridge Indexed Dense Representations and Large Language Models for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG pipelines suffer from critical efficiency limitations due to their complexity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based RAG framework that directly leverages indexed dense representations produced by a retriever, substituting to long text contexts. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves competitive performances compared to the state-of-the-art model that uses a large ad-hoc context compressor while offering substantially improved inference efficiency. |
“Going to a trap house” conveys more fear than “Going to a mall”: Benchmarking Emotion Context Sensitivity for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark evaluates whether large language models can understand emotion context sensitivity of humans. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates whether large language models can understand emotion context sensitivity of humans. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark evaluates whether large language models can understand emotion context sensitivity of humans. |
Efficient Pre-training of Masked Language Model via Concept-based Curriculum Masking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling (MLM) has been widely used for pre-training effective bidirectional representations but comes at a substantial training cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based curriculum masking method that evaluates the MLM difficulty of each token based on a carefully-designed linguistic difficulty criterion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves pre-training efficiency with the original BERT model at half the training cost. |
Connecting the Knowledge Dots: Retrieval-augmented Knowledge Connection for Commonsense Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large language models exhibit a limited understanding of commonsense reasoning due to the necessity of implicit knowledge that is rarely expressed in text. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented knowledge connection framework that transforms indirectly relevant documents into a direct explanation to answer a given question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks and achieves +2.0% and +4.6% average accuracy on in-domain (ID) and out-of domain (OOD) benchmark. |
AutoAugment Is What You Need: Enhancing Rule-based Augmentation Methods in Low-resource Regimes (2024.eacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text data augmentation suffer from potential semantic damage due to the discrete nature of sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt AutoAugment to solve this problem by using softEDA to increase text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost existing augmentation methods and enhance cutting-edge pretrained language models. |