Papers by Kai Shen
Message Passing on Semantic-Anchor-Graphs for Fine-grained Emotion Representation Learning and Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion classification is an important task with applications in education, virtual reality, and robotics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token embeddings to generate a "semantic-anchor graph" using semantic anchors, sentences can be projected onto them to form a graph . |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed system can generate meaningful semantic anchors and discriminative graph patterns for different emotion. |
A Multi-Agent Framework for High-Interaction Terminal Simulation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Terminal simulation is a problem of symbolic language generation in dialogue and interactive systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a terminal command-level Turing test framework that improves realism, consistency and robustness in command-language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks by more than 9% on multi-turn terminal simulation. |
ARM2: Adaptive Reasoning Model with Vision Understanding and Executable Code (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models suffer from the "over-thinking" problem, causing performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model that balances reasoning performance and efficiency across multiple formats through a reinforcement learning framework augmented with length-aware optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces token costs while preserving performance compared to traditional models. |
Mixture of Heterogeneous Grouped Experts for Language Modeling (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enforce uniform expert sizes, creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture of heterogeneous grouped experts (MoHGE) that allows for flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches the performance of existing Mixture-of-Experts architectures while maintaining balanced GPU utilization. |
Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on neural machine translation (NMT) has demonstrated impressive performance improvements and became the de-facto standard. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training using a Transformer-based system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three low-resource machine translation benchmarks and different sized data of WMT’16 En-De. |
X-LeBench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Egocentric Video Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Wenqi Zhou, Kai Cao, Hao Zheng, Yunze Liu, Xinyi Zheng, Miao Liu, Per Ola Kristensson, Walterio W. Mayol-Cuevas, Fan Zhang, Weizhe Lin, Junxiao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark datasets focus on short to moderately long videos, leaving a substantial gap in evaluating extensive, ultra-long egocentric video recordings. |
| Approach: | X-LeBench is a benchmark dataset designed to evaluate long egocentric video recordings . it uses a life-logging pipeline to produce realistic, coherent daily plans . |
| Outcome: | X-LeBench is a new benchmark dataset designed to evaluate long-form egocentric video understanding . the approach produces realistic, coherent daily plans aligned with real-world video data . |
Adaptive Zooming via Relevance-Informed Positional Resource Allocation for Training-free LLM Context Extension (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbo Zhao, Huibin Wang, Bin Tang, Xianming Hu, Yihong Huang, Yijun Shen, Nuoyi Chen, Ping Li, Kai Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing training-free methods for extrapolating beyond training context lengths are semantics-agnostic . Existing methods that focus on relative token distances can indiscriminately blur semantically relevant and irrelevant tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive positional zooming method that uses semantic relevance to extrapolate beyond training context lengths. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RiPRA outperforms existing training-free extrapolation methods . relevant tokens get higher positional resolution, while irrelevant tokens are compressed . |
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection. |
T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vector quantization methods are fixed-length encodings, overlooking the uneven information density in sign language. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage sign language production paradigm that encodes sign language sequences into discrete codes and autoregressively generates sign languages from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can dynamically adjust the encoding length based on the information density in sign language to achieve accurate and compact encoded enccoding. |
LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhiwei Fei, Xiaoyu Shen, Dawei Zhu, Fengzhe Zhou, Zhuo Han, Alan Huang, Songyang Zhang, Kai Chen, Zhixin Yin, Zongwen Shen, Jidong Ge, Vincent Ng
| Challenge: | LegalBench evaluated 20 LLMs in 162 legal tasks in 20 countries and jurisdictions. |
| Approach: | They present a comprehensive evaluation of 21 popular Large Language Models and the first comparative analysis of the empirical results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on the Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and are compared to 21 popular LLMs. |
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yougang Lyu, Jitai Hao, Zihan Wang, Kai Zhao, Shen Gao, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Fang Wang, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting judgment results for multiple defendants are ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict the judgment results for each defendant in multi-defendant cases . they formalize the multi-diffendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict the judgment results for multiple defendants in multi-defendant cases. |
Relabel the Noise: Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations via Cooperative Multiagents (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for entity and relation extraction require light human annotation efforts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to re-label noisy instances with a cooperative group . they use a confidence consensus module to gather the wisdom of all agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets. |
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. |
DAST: Difficulty-Adaptive Slow-Thinking for Large Reasoning Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yi Shen, Jian Zhang, Jieyun Huang, Shuming Shi, Wenjing Zhang, Jiangze Yan, Ning Wang, Kai Wang, Zhaoxiang Liu, Shiguo Lian
| Challenge: | Recent advances in slow-thinking reasoning models have shown exceptional performance in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables models to automatically adjust Chain-of-Thought (CoT) length based on problem difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework penalizes inefficiency on simple problems while incentivizing deep reasoning for complex ones. |
Mask the Correct Tokens: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Error Correction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text error correction methods usually use the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentences through the decoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to correct errors in text sequences by randomly masking out the correct tokens in the source sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on Mandarin and English datasets with autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models. |
Relational Graph Attention Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to determine the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in online reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose a relational graph attention network to encode a tree structure for sentiment prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of the graph attention network (GAT) on the SemEval 2014 and Twitter datasets. |