Papers by Kai Tian
Rethinking Data Selection at Scale: Random Selection is Almost All You Need (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection techniques are designed for small data pools, a study finds . filtering data by token length is an efficient method for improving results . |
| Approach: | They use self-scoring methods that do not rely on external help to perform fine-tuning . they also find that filtering data by token length offers a stable and efficient method . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform random selection on large datasets on large data pools. |
AGD: Adversarial Game Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Wanlong Yu, Zhihua Wen, Xinwang Liu, Kai Lu, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing defenses, including post-training alignment and prompt engineering, struggle with adaptability to out-of-distribution (OOD) attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial game-based defense method that dynamically adjusts LLMs’ internal representations to achieve a balanced trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ safety over all baselines. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers. |
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. |
A Fast and High-quality Text-to-Speech Method with Compressed Auxiliary Corpus and Limited Target Speaker Corpus (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate high-quality speech with limited target speaker corpus require extensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an auxiliary corpus compression algorithm that reduces the training cost while the naturalness of synthesized speech is not significantly degraded. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces training costs while maintaining the naturalness of synthesized speech. |
Self-Improvement in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using data and data, self-improvement for Large Language Models has improved model capabilities without significantly increasing costs. |
| Approach: | This survey provides a comprehensive overview of self-improvement for Large Language Models . it includes commonly used evaluations and downstream applications . |
| Outcome: | The authors provide a comprehensive overview of self-improvement in Multimodal LLMs. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models with human preferences post pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Supervised Fine-Tuning and Preference Optimization (PO) with two sub-processes defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) |
| Outcome: | The proposed process performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. |
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Neural audio codecs have enabled high-fidelity reconstruction of speech, music and sound . however, speech-optimized codec systems suffer degradation on music or sound if they ignore spectral differences . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural audio codec that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that BSCodec achieves better reconstruction quality on music and sound compared to existing codecs. |
Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tian Lan, Wenwei Zhang, Chengqi Lyu, Shuaibin Li, Chen Xu, Heyan Huang, Dahua Lin, Xian-Ling Mao, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | utilizing human annotations can enhance critique ability, but model-generated critiques suffer from inherent flaws due to complexity of critique . a new framework that leverages multi-agent feedback improves critique ability . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages multi-agent feedback to improve critique ability . they propose to use supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning to improve this capability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves critique ability in both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning stages. |
Uni-MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Unified Benchmark (2026.acl-long)
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Kai Zou, Ziqi Huang, Yuhao Dong, Shulin Tian, Dian Zheng, Hongbo Liu, Jingwen He, Bin Liu, Yu Qiao, Ziwei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations treat visual understanding and generation in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that examines the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains. |
League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xiaobing Sun, Tian Xia, Kai Chen, Xiaofeng Wang, Baosheng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
DPGA-TextSyn: Differentially Private Genetic Algorithm for Synthetic Text Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhonghao Sun, Zhiliang Tian, Yiping Song, Yuyi Si, Juhua Zhang, Minlie Huang, Kai Lu, Zeyu Xiong, Xinwang Liu, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune large language models pose privacy risks . researchers have synthesized data with strong generation capabilities closed-source LLMs to alleviate this problem . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine general LLMs with genetic algorithm to produce relevant and diverse synthetic text under differential privacy constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the model in downstream tasks while ensuring privacy. |
Multi-Domain Dialogue Acts and Response Co-Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipeline approaches for task-oriented dialogue systems tend to predict multiple dialogue acts first and use them to assist response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural co-generation model that generates dialogue acts and responses concurrently and preserves semantic structures of multi-domain dialogue acts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over state-of-the-art models in automatic and human evaluations on a large-scale dataset. |