Papers by Ke Lei
Sparse-RL: Breaking the Memory Wall in LLM Reinforcement Learning via Stable Sparse Rollouts (2026.acl-long)
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Sijia Luo, Xiaokang Zhang, Yuxuan Hu, Bohan Zhang, Ke Wang, Jinbo Su, Mengshu Sun, Lei Liang, Jing Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for storing key-value caches during long-horizon rollouts cause performance collapses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm that empowers stable RL training under sparse rollouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces rollout overhead while maintaining the performance. |
CodeArena: Evaluating and Aligning CodeLLMs on Human Preference (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jian Yang, Jiaxi Yang, Wei Zhang, Jin Ke, Yibo Miao, Lei Zhang, Liqun Yang, Zeyu Cui, Yichang Zhang, Zhoujun Li, Binyuan Hui, Junyang Lin
| Challenge: | Code large language models (codeLLMs) focus on synthesizing the correct code snippet, ignoring the alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark code-based on 40 categories and 44 programming languages to emulate real-world coding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that open-source code LLMs perform better than open-sourced ones. |
ShieldLM: Empowering LLMs as Aligned, Customizable and Explainable Safety Detectors (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhexin Zhang, Yida Lu, Jingyuan Ma, Di Zhang, Rui Li, Pei Ke, Hao Sun, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing tools for detecting safety issues in LLMs are expensive and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based safety detector which annotates the safety of queries and provides explanations for its decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed detector outperforms baselines on four sets of query-response pairs and is effective as a safety evaluator for advanced LLMs. |
Continual Training of Language Models for Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on applying large language models (LMs) achieves impressive performance in many NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously post-train an LM with unlabeled domains to expand its knowledge without forgetting previous skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves few-shot end-task learning in these domains. |
RACQC: Advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chinese Query Correction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jinbo Su, Lingzhe Gao, Wei Li, Shihao Liu, Haojie Lei, Xinyi Wang, Yuanzhao Guo, Ke Wang, Daiting Shi, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across many tasks, but face critical challenges in the CSC scenario: (1) poor generalization to rare entities in open-domain searches; and (2) failure to adapt to temporal entity variations due to static parameters, resulting in serious over-correction issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Spelling Check system with RAG and multi-task learning that integrates dynamic knowledge retrieval and entity-centric RAG to address rare entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing baselines in the CSC task and achieves a maximum improvement of +9.92% on the search scenario benchmark and +3.2% on the general-domain dataset. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
CLASSIC: Continual and Contrastive Learning of Aspect Sentiment Classification Tasks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on continual learning of aspect sentiment classification (ASC) tasks in domain incremental learning (DIL) |
| Approach: | They propose a continual learning method that learns a sequence of tasks incrementally . they propose CLASSIC, which uses a domain incremental learning setting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is highly effective in a domain incremental learning setting. |
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Changhao Pan, Rui Yang, Han Wang, Zhuan Zhou, Xuming He, Wenxiang Guo, Ziyue Jiang, Ruiqi Li, Yu Zhang, Chenyuhao Wen, Ke Lei, Xiang Yin, Jingyu Lu, Zhiyuan Zhu, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions. |
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Zehan Wang, Ke Lei, Chen Zhu, Jiawei Huang, Sashuai Zhou, Luping Liu, Xize Cheng, Shengpeng Ji, Zhenhui Ye, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning. |
Typos Correction Training against Misspellings from Text-to-Text Transformers (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval systems suffer from typoed queries due to mistyping or phonetic typing errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates the spelling correction objective into the DR model and a prompt-based augmentation technique to enhance the alignment of the typoed query and its original query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing typos-aware training approaches and sophisticated training advanced retrievers. |
PAMN: Multi-phase Correlation Modeling for Contrast-Enhanced 3D Medical Image Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D medical imaging models focus on spatial features, neglecting phase-specific progression detailed in clinical reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fuses imaging phases with clinical text to enhance 3D medical image retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a phase-series dataset of 12,230 hospital CT scans. |
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu, Ke Lei, Jieming Zhu, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Ruiming Tang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for addressing item-level user interests are lacking in cross-domain generalization . RecBase model is domain-agnostic and can be used to enhance recommender systems' effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective that leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross- domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks on eight real-world datasets. |
CritiqueLLM: Towards an Informative Critique Generation Model for Evaluation of Large Language Model Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Andrew Feng, Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Jiale Cheng, Shengyuan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading. |
Adapting a Language Model While Preserving its General Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing DA-training methods do not explicitly identify what knowledge should be preserved and what should be changed by the domain corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an unlabeled corpus of aparticular domain to train a pre-trained general-purpose language model to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the domain can give improved performances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of pre-trained general-purpose language models by contrasting the representations of the general and the full (both general and domain knowledge) to learn an integrated representation with both general and specific knowledge. |
At Your Own PACE: A Causal Framework for Evaluating EQ in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Quotient (EQ) has emerged as a competency for seamless human-AI integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a closed-loop EQ evaluation using a PACE taxonomy to define four dimensions of LLM EQ. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high alignment of 89.31% with human preferences while maintaining robust consistency of 83.6%. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |