Papers by Ke Sun
A Self-verified Method for Exploring Simile Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have succeeded in natural language processing because they learn generic knowledge from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows pre-trained language models to explore simile knowledge from PLMs . they enhance PLM models with a multi-level simile recognition task that evaluates similes aplenty . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can explore more accurate simile knowledge for PLMs. |
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. |
Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) is a crucial phase in building large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge intervention framework to decouple the potential underlying factors of IFT and enable individual analysis of different factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples the potential underlying factors of IFT, enabling individual analysis of different factors. |
Dual-Stage Multi-Task Syntax-Oriented Pre-Training for Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Syntactically controlled paraphrase generation (SCPG) aims to generate sentences with syntactic structures resembling given exemplars. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage multi-task pre-training scheme that uses a series of structure-oriented and syntax-oriented tasks to generate sentences with syntactic structures resembling given exemplars. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on all possible variants of SCPG tasks and significantly outperformed the popular T5 model. |
Few-Shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition Based on Mutlimodal Causal Intervention Graph (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal named entity recognition are limited due to limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-shot Multimodal Named Entity Recognition task to address these relation types by constructing a multimodal graph and a new multimodal causal intervention strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two multimodal named entity recognition datasets. |
FPE2M2: Approaching Lossless and Efficient Quantization with Native Floating Point (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Yi, Jianwei Zhang, Zhiying Xu, Xinlong Yang, Yang Zhou, Minmin Sun, Zengke Liu, Tong Zhang, Junyang Lin, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Auto-regressive decoding is a memory-bound job, meaning decoding performance is limited by the bandwidth rather than the computational capabilities of the GPU. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that supports lossless weight-only quantization inference and validate it on Qwen and LLaMA Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest efficiency with lossless accuracy on Qwen and LLaMA Models across various modalities. |
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. |
Persona-DB: Efficient Large Language Model Personalization for Response Prediction with Collaborative Data Refinement (2025.coling-main)
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Chenkai Sun, Ke Yang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Yi Fung, Hou Pong Chan, Kevin Small, ChengXiang Zhai, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on enhancing the retrieval stage and optimizing the representation of the database. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization across task contexts and collaborative refinement to bridge knowledge gaps among users. |
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. |
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianshu Yu, Chao Xiang, Mingchuan Yang, Pei Ke, Bosi Wen, Cunxiang Wang, Jiale Cheng, Li Zhang, Xinyu Mu, Chuxiong Sun, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
Breaking the Evaluation Paradox: Evaluating High-Entropy Search with Computationally Irreducible Constraints (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for evaluation of exhaustive search capabilities is needed . high-entropy enumeration tasks make such ground truth impossible for humans to create . VERITAS is a framework built on the principle of computationally irreducible constraints . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses non-optimizable constraints to create verifiable searches . VERITAS can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation framework for large language models is based on non-optimizable constraints . the framework can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)
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Shukai Liu, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Jiajun Shi, He Zhu, Liran Wang, Jin Ke, Wei Zhang, Hualei Zhu, Shuyue Guo, Tao Sun, Jiaheng Liu, Yunlong Duan, Yu Hao, Liqun Yang, Guanglin Niu, Ge Zhang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Pre-training with Meta Learning for Chinese Word Segmentation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained models are beneficial to Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS). However, these models lack task-specific prior segmentation knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained Chinese word segmentation model MetaSeg which incorporates meta learning into a multi-criteria pre-training task. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MetaSeg can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on twelve widely-used CWS datasets and significantly improve model performance in low-resource settings. |
Dynamic Open-book Prompt for Conversational Recommender System (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt learning use only training samples for parameter training, limiting the performance of existing methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Open-book Prompt approach where the open book stores user's experiences in historical data and dynamically constructs the prompt to memorize the user' s current utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the existing methods on the ReDial dataset and shows that it can be used to learn contextually relevant recommendations. |
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a study of sign language translation without gloss annotations focuses on the problem of gloss annotation . gloss annotation is hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, and limits the domain coverage of translation datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose a gloss-free end-to-end sign language translation framework to solve this problem . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves sign language translation performance on large-scale datasets . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities . |
Adaption-of-Thought: Learning Question Difficulty Improves Large Language Models for Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods do not differentiate question difficulty when designing prompting methods for them. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive method to improve large language models for reasoning problems by measuring question difficulty and tailoring demonstration set construction and difficulty-adapted retrieval strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows an absolute improvement of up to 5.5% on arithmetic reasoning, 7.4% on symbolic reasoning, and 2.3% on commonsense reasoning. |
TopWORDS-Seg: Simultaneous Text Segmentation and Word Discovery for Open-Domain Chinese Texts via Bayesian Inference (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | No existing methods can achieve effective text segmentation and word discovery in open domain Chinese texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based method that can achieve effective text segmentation and word discovery in open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enjoys robust performance and transparent interpretation when no training corpus and domain vocabulary are available. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
Unveiling the Implicit Toxicity in Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on probing toxic outputs that can be easily detected with existing toxicity classifiers, but LLMs can generate diverse implicit toxic output that are difficult to detect via simply zero-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning based attacking method to induce the implicit toxic outputs in large language models by fine-tuning toxicity classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates implicit toxic outputs that are difficult to detect via zero-shot prompting on five widely-adopted toxicity classifiers. |
Skip-Thinking: Chunk-wise Chain-of-Thought Distillation Enable Smaller Language Models to Reason Better and Faster (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods train small language models to learn long rationales in one iteration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a heuristic search to divide rationale into internal chunks . they propose CWT, which uses CWt to focus SLM on learning from only one chunk per iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can guide a large language model (LLM) in reasoning tasks. |
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task . |
| Approach: | They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs. |
HPSS: Heuristic Prompting Strategy Search for LLM Evaluators (2025.findings-acl)
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Bosi Wen, Pei Ke, Yufei Sun, Cunxiang Wang, Xiaotao Gu, Jinfeng Zhou, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to optimize text evaluation prompts neglect the combinatorial impact of multiple factors, leading to insufficient optimization of the evaluation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate 8 key factors for evaluation prompts and integrate them into an algorithm that searches for well-behaved prompting strategies for LLM evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and human-designed evaluation prompts on four evaluation tasks. |
EviReport: From Reasoned Outlines to Evidence Tracked Long-Form Reports (2026.findings-acl)
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Zihan Liu, Jianhui li, Zexin Wang, Fei Sun, Jingjing LI, Zheyuan Li, Ke Xiang, Hang Cui, Houhua Gong, Changhua Pei, Gaogang Xie
| Challenge: | Evidence-intensive reports often produce fluent but under-supported drafts . eviReport is an evidence-grounded workflow for automated long-form report generation . |
| Approach: | They propose an evidence-tracked workflow that organizes corpus evidence into compact, traceable units and retrieves query-relevant subgraphs into retrieval-ready packages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow outperforms baselines in factual coverage, factual accuracy and visual evidence integration. |
I run as fast as a rabbit, can you? A Multilingual Simile Dialogues Datasets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | A simile is a figure of speech that compares two different things via shared properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual simile dialogue dataset that can be used to study similes in real-life scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the largest manually annotated simile dataset and contains both English and Chinese data. |