Papers by Kai Yin
DisastIR: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark for Disaster Management (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Lipai Huang, Yiming Xiao, Zhewei Liu, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing information retrieval benchmarks focus on general or specialized domains, such as medicine or finance, neglecting the unique linguistic complexity and diverse information needs encountered in disaster management scenarios. |
| Approach: | DisastIR is the first comprehensive IR evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for disaster management. |
| Outcome: | DisastIR covers 48 retrieval tasks derived from six search intents and eight general disaster categories . evaluations show no single model excelling universally . |
DisastQA: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Question Answering in Disaster Management (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhitong Chen, Kai Yin, Xiangjue Dong, Chengkai Liu, Xiangpeng Li, Bo Li, Junwei Ma, Yiming Xiao, Ali Mostafavi, James Caverlee
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for question answering (QA) are lacking in a high-stakes environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a rigorously verified benchmark of 3,000 expert-annotated questions . they propose 'keypoint-based evaluation protocol' emphasizing factual completeness over verbosity . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 20 models reveal substantial divergences from general-purpose models such as MMLU-Pro. |
Low-Resource Generation of Multi-hop Reasoning Questions (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate valid and fluent questions from text are limited and insufficient for training. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate multi-hop reasoning questions from the raw text in a low resource circumstance by deducing over multiple relations on several sentences in the text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be applied to the task of machine reading comprehension and achieve significant performance improvements. |
LLM-REDIAL: A Large-Scale Dataset for Conversational Recommender Systems Created from User Behaviors with LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing CRS datasets suffer from data inextensibility and semantic inconsistency . |
| Approach: | They introduce the LLM-REDIAL dataset to facilitate the research in CRS by leveraging large language models to generate high-quality dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest multi-domain CRS dataset which consists of 47.6k multi-turn dialogues with 482.6k utterances across 4 domains. |
Enhancing Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting in Off-the-Shelf LLMs via Noise Injection Prompting (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work relies on fine-tuning specialized modules to bridge this gap, but a novel approach is proposed to leverage off-the-shelf LLMs without any fine- tuning whatsoever. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to inject noise into the raw time series before tokenization to induce the model to extrapolate based on robust underlying temporal patterns rather than superficial numerical artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes the brittleness of fully frozen models by injecting noise into the raw TS before tokenization. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
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 . |
Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs? (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex L Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
DMRetriever: A Family of Models for Improved Text Retrieval in Disaster Management (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models fail to handle the varied search intents inherent to disaster management scenarios, resulting in inconsistent and unreliable performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new series of dense retrieval models tailored for disaster management that train on a three-stage framework with unsupervised contrastive pre-training and difficulty-aware progressive instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models by 13.3 times and 33 times over baselines with only 7.6% of their parameters. |
T2S-GPT: Dynamic Vector Quantization for Autoregressive Sign Language Production from Text (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels. |
PrismRAG: Boosting RAG Factuality with Distractor Resilience and Strategized Reasoning (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Mohammad Kachuee, Teja Gollapudi, Minseok Kim, Yin Huang, Kai Sun, Xiao Yang, Jiaqi Wang, Nirav Shah, Yue Liu, Aaron Colak, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve factuality of large language models (LLMs) rely on human-engineered instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that trains the model with distractor-aware QA pairs mixing gold evidence with subtle distractor passages and instills reasoning-centric habits that make the LLM plan, rationalize, and synthesize without extensive human engineered instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art solutions across 12 open-book RAG QA benchmarks and is being deployed in production. |
MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments sparse-attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. |
Semformer: Transformer Language Models with Semantic Planning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural language models (LLMs) employ teacher forcing to predict tokens based on preceding ground truth tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for training a Transformer language model that explicitly models the semantic planning of response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits near-perfect performance and mitigates shortcut learning. |