Papers by Junxian He
Automatic Model Selection with Large Language Models for Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought and Program-Aided Language Models offer different strengths and weaknesses. |
| Approach: | They propose a model selection method that uses a large language model to select between two different reasoning methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant performance improvements across eight reasoning datasets with Codex, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. |
On the Universal Truthfulness Hyperplane Inside LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored hallucinations through the lens of internal representations, proposing mechanisms to decipher LLMs’ adherence to facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a universal truthfulness hyperplane that distinguishes the model’s factually correct and incorrect outputs on a diverse collection of over 40 datasets and examine its cross-task, cross-domain, and in-domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to distinguish factual outputs from incorrect outputs on a diverse collection of over 40 datasets. |
Unsupervised Learning of Syntactic Structure with Invertible Neural Projections (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised learning of syntactic structure is typically performed using generative models with discrete latent variables and multinomial parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative model that jointly learns discrete syntactic structure and continuous word representations in an unsupervised fashion by cascading an invertible neural network with a structured generative prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on part-of speech (POS) induction and unsupervised dependency parsing without gold POS annotation. |
On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained contextual representations like BERT have been widely used for NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform anisotropic sentence embedding distribution to smooth and isotropic Gaussian distribution by normalizing flows that are learned with an unsupervised objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art embeddings on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
A Unified One-Step Solution for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing ASQP datasets are small and low-density, hindering technical advancement . et al. (2017): aspect sentiment quad prediction provides a complete aspect-level sentiment structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-step solution for Aspect sentiment quad prediction that can detect aspect categories and identify aspectopinion-sentiment triplets simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution can detect aspect categories and identify aspectopinion-sentiment triplets simultaneously. |
StructVAE: Tree-structured Latent Variable Models for Semi-supervised Semantic Parsing (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Semantic parsing is the task of transducing natural language (NL) utterances into formal meaning representations (MRs), commonly represented as tree structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational auto-encoding model for semi-supervised semantic parsing which learns from limited amounts of parallel data and readily-available unlabeled NL utterances. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ATIS domain and Python show that with extra unlabeled data, StructVAE outperforms strong supervised models. |
A Surprisingly Effective Fix for Deep Latent Variable Modeling of Text (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders are powerful language models and effective representation learning frameworks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fix for posterior collapse which improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction and latent representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed fix significantly improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction, and latent representation learning compared with previous state-of-the-art methods. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
InstructCoder: Instruction Tuning Large Language Models for Code Editing (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | InstructCoder is the first instruction-tuning dataset designed to adapt LLMs for general-purpose code editing. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large Language Models to edit code based on user instructions . they use a dataset to adapt LLMs to general-purpose code editing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly improve code editing performance compared to proprietary models . the proposed model is based on a human-written execution-based benchmark . |
On the Perception Bottleneck of VLMs for Chart Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a perception bottleneck in large vision-language models is critical for chart understanding . instruction tuning improves the extraction capability of LVLMs, but the vision encoder remains a bottleneck . |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the perception bottleneck into two components . the vision encoder bottleneck is where visual representation fails to encapsulate the correct information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly mitigates the vision encoder bottleneck and improves the ability of LVLMs to comprehend charts. |
Prompt Optimization via Adversarial In-Context Learning (2024.acl-long)
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Do Long, Yiran Zhao, Hannah Brown, Yuxi Xie, James Zhao, Nancy Chen, Kenji Kawaguchi, Michael Shieh, Junxian He
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize prompts for in-context learning are based on adversarial learning and are computationally efficient and extensible to other LLMs and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize prompts for in-context learning by a generator and a discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques on 13 generation and classification tasks including summarization, arithmetic reasoning, machine translation, data-to-text generation, and the MMLU and big-bench hard benchmarks. |
Genius: A Generalizable and Purely Unsupervised Self-Training Framework For Advanced Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Fangzhi Xu, Hang Yan, Chang Ma, Haiteng Zhao, Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Junxian He, Jun Liu, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reasoning rely on supervisory signals . current methods rely heavily on outcome supervision and auxiliary reward models . |
| Approach: | They propose a gen-eralizable and purely unsupervised self-training framework to enhance LLM reasoning without supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM reasoning without supervision without external supervision. |
Revisiting Scaling Laws for Language Models: The Role of Data Quality and Training Strategies (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws suggest augmenting model size and training data results in enhanced performance, but recent studies reveal deviations, particularly in large language models, where performance improvements decelerate—a phenomenon known as sub-scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a sub-optimal scaling law that better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes by examining data quality and training strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling law better predicts performance in sub-scaling regimes, highlighting the importance of data quality and diversity. |
Efficient Nearest Neighbor Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-parametric neural language models (NLMs) learn text distributions by memorizing training data points. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an external datastore to learn from a non-parametric language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve up to a 6x speed-up in inference speed while retaining comparable performance. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
Cross-Lingual Syntactic Transfer through Unsupervised Adaptation of Invertible Projections (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current systems for syntactic analysis tasks rely heavily on large scale annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a generative model with a structured prior that uses labeled source and unlabeled target data jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing tasks on English as the only source corpus and on a wide range of target languages. |
Belief Revision: The Adaptability of Large Language Models Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations assume language models operate with consistent information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to test LMs' belief revision ability when presented with new evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves language models’ adaptiveness to changing information, highlighting a critical trade-off. |
Simple Temporal Adaptation to Changing Label Sets: Hashtag Prediction via Dense KNN (2023.emnlp-main)
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Niloofar Mireshghallah, Nikolai Vogler, Junxian He, Omar Florez, Ahmed El-Kishky, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt to temporal change of user-generated social media data are stale without retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric dense retrieval technique to adapt to temporal change . they use a Twitter dataset to study temporal distribution shift in tweet-hashtag prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over the best static parametric baseline on a year-long Twitter dataset while avoiding costly re-training. |
The Source-Target Domain Mismatch Problem in Machine Translation (2021.eacl-main)
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Jiajun Shen, Peng-Jen Chen, Matthew Le, Junxian He, Jiatao Gu, Myle Ott, Michael Auli, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
| Challenge: | Despite the interconnected world we live in, people in different places talk about different things in different parts of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to quantify the effect of local context in machine translation and propose measurable results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric can be used to quantify the effect of local context on the use of language in machine translation systems on low resource languages. |
Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings from Scratch (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learn sentence embeddings with unlabeled data are limited due to copyright restrictions, data distribution issues, and messy formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning framework that trains sentence embeddings with synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces positive and negative annotations given unlabeled sentences and generates sentences along with their corresponding annotations from scratch. |
Prompt Consistency for Zero-Shot Task Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that pre-trained language models can perform zero-shot generalization to new tasks without annotated examples. |
| Approach: | They propose to regularize prompt consistency to encourage consistent predictions over a diverse set of prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot learner, T0, on 9 out of 11 datasets across 4 NLP tasks by 10.6 absolute points in terms of accuracy. |
How Can Synthetic Data Improve Multilingual Language Model Pretraining? A Data Quality Perspective (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource languages are a long-tail problem for multilingual LLMs due to limited high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that translates high-quality, knowledge-rich English data into low-resource languages . they propose SynRank, which leverages synthetic data as positive samples to train a classifier . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches handcrafted rule-based filtering by human experts and significantly improves knowledge-intensive tasks with less data. |
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Wenxuan Ding, Weiqi Wang, Sze Kwok, Minghao Liu, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Junxian He, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms. |
Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning (P19-1)
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Yu-Hsiang Lin, Chian-Yu Chen, Jean Lee, Zirui Li, Yuyan Zhang, Mengzhou Xia, Shruti Rijhwani, Junxian He, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Patrick Littell, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Cross-lingual transfer is a useful tool for improving performance of natural language processing (NLP) on low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual transfer to improve accuracy of low-resource languages . they build models that consider features to perform prediction on such languages based on ranking problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts good transfer languages much better than baselines considering single features in isolation. |
CTRLsum: Towards Generic Controllable Text Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization systems produce generic summaries that are disconnected from users’ preferences and expectations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic framework to control generated summaries through a set of keywords. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is comparable or better than strong pretrained systems on three domains of summarization datasets and five control tasks. |
E3-TIR: Enhanced Experience Exploitation for Tool-Integrated Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms for Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from inefficient exploration and mode degradation due to a lack of prior guidance, while SFT-then-RL is limited by high data costs and capability plateaus caused by low-entropy collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose an Enhanced Experience Exploitation paradigm that integrates expert prefixes, expert guided, and self-exploration to improve agent training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 6% performance improvement over traditional paradigms on tool-use tasks while requiring less than 10% of the synthetic data. |