Papers by Kai Hui
Attn-GS: Attention-Guided Context Compression for Efficient Personalized LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Tianqi Zheng, Chuan Tian, Dante Everaert, Yau-Shian Wang, Yupin Huang, Michael J. Morais, Rohit Patki, Jinjin Tian, Xinnan Dai, Kai Guo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalize large language models (LLMs) rely on heuristic methods to compress user profiles but they ignore how LLMs process and prioritize different profile components. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention-guided context compression framework that leverages attention feedback from a marking model to mark important personalization sentences and guides a compression model to generate task-relevant compressed user contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across tasks, token limits, and settings while reducing token usage by 50 times. |
NPRF: A Neural Pseudo Relevance Feedback Framework for Ad-hoc Information Retrieval (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural IR models do not have a mechanism for treating expansion terms differently from the original query terms, making it difficult to combine them with existing PRF approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end neural PRF framework that can be used with existing neural IR models by embedding different neural models as building blocks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two standard test collections confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework in improving the performance of two state-of-the-art neural IR models. |
Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing pointwise LLMs provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the LLM prompt . they propose to better differentiate between documents with different levels of relevance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can differentiate between documents with different levels of relevance to the query and derive a more accurate ranking. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
BERT-QE: Contextualized Query Expansion for Document Re-ranking (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand query use pseudo relevance feedback (PRF) but they are under-equipped to evaluate the relevance of information pieces used for expansion. |
| Approach: | They propose a query expansion model that leverages the BERT model to select relevant document chunks for expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing models on the TREC Robust04 and GOV2 test collections. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
Towards Context-Robust LLMs: A Gated Representation Fine-tuning Approach (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with external contexts face challenges in handling imperfect evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can balance internal knowledge with external contexts . they propose gating mechanisms and low-rank representation adapters to adjust hidden representations based on a lightweight intervention function . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can effectively balance internal knowledge with external context, similar to human cognitive processes. |
How Does Generative Retrieval Scale to Millions of Passages? (2023.emnlp-main)
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Ronak Pradeep, Kai Hui, Jai Gupta, Adam Lelkes, Honglei Zhuang, Jimmy Lin, Donald Metzler, Vinh Tran
| Challenge: | generative retrieval is a new paradigm for information retrieval, enabling a sequence-to-sequence model with a single Transformer . generative encoders have been used on small corpora, but only on large ones . |
| Approach: | They propose to encode an entire document corpus within a single Transformer . they find generative retrieval is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is competitive with state-of-the-art dual encoders on small corpora, the study finds . the proposed approach only evaluates on document corporales on the order of 100K in size . |
Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhen Qin, Rolf Jagerman, Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Junru Wu, Le Yan, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Jialu Liu, Donald Metzler, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Existing methods to rank documents using large language models do not understand these challenging ranking formulations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Pairwise Ranking Prompting to improve ranking performance . they propose to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms supervised baselines on benchmark datasets and outperformed other LLM-based solutions by over 10% on average. |
PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Andrew Drozdov, Honglei Zhuang, Zhuyun Dai, Zhen Qin, Razieh Rahimi, Xuanhui Wang, Dana Alon, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum, Donald Metzler, Kai Hui
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models can be instructed to perform zero-shot passage re-ranking . Existing work like UPR demonstrate promising results for zero- shot ranking using LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than semantic similarity . they propose to include only one demonstration in the prompt to improve re-ranking . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLM-based re-ranking by adding one demonstration to the prompt. |
TDNN: A Two-stage Deep Neural Network for Prompt-independent Automated Essay Scoring (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated essay scoring (AES) models rely on rated essays for the target prompt as training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a shallow deep neural network to learn a prompt-dependent rating model using rated essays for non-target prompts as training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the standard ASAP dataset. |
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Tao Chen, Zhen Qin, Jing Lu, Dara Bahri, Ji Ma, Jai Gupta, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Yi Tay, Donald Metzler
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster. |