Papers by Kun He
Enhancing Adversarial Transferability in Visual-Language Pre-training Models via Local Shuffle and Sample-based Attack (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Visual-Language Pre-training (VLP) models are vulnerable to adversarial examples . previous studies have focused on improving adversariality of models . |
| Approach: | They propose a local shuffle and sample-based attack that randomly shufts one of the local image blocks and generates adversarial images and samples around them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms other advanced attacks on Large Vision-Language Models and outperformed previous attacks on Visual-Langue Pre-training models. |
Semantics of the Unwritten: The Effect of End of Paragraph and Sequence Tokens on Text Generation with GPT2 (2021.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They conduct experiments on an English essay dataset using Chinese-GPT2 . they find that the model can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The pre-trained language model GPT2 can generate better continuations by learning to generate the in the fine-tuning stage. |
Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking (2022.emnlp-main)
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Hongyan Xie, Haoxiang Su, Shuangyong Song, Hao Huang, Bo Zou, Kun Deng, Jianghua Lin, Zhihui Zhang, Xiaodong He
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue state tracking approaches predict the dialogue state of a target turn sequentially based on the ground-truth previous dialogue state. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that predicts dialogue state sequentially based on previous dialogue state . they propose generating a previously “predicted” dialogue state using ground-truth previous dialogue states . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 67.51%, 68.24%, 70.30%, 71.38%, and 81.27% joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4 datasets. |
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets. |
CR-GIS: Improving Conversational Recommendation via Goal-aware Interest Sequence Modeling (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a goal item by sequentially tracking users’ interests ignore the rich goal-aware implicit interest sequence patterns in a dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose to model goal-aware implicit user interest sequence patterns in a dialog and a hierarchical Star Transformer to guide multi-turn utterances generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more accurate recommendations with more fluent and coherent dialog utterances. |
Sparse Black-Box Multimodal Attack for Vision-Language Adversary Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks using imperceptible perturbations are challenging to simulate . e-commerce product restrictions and hate speech monitoring are examples of such attacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box adversarial attack that leverages sparse perturbations to simulate adversarials exhibited by illegal merchants in the black- box scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing attacks and unimodal attacks by treating images and text in discrete space and outperforming existing models. |
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)
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Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Ziyan Ma, Haoyang He, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Zihua Rong, Rongjin Li, Kun Ji, Qing Huang, Xinyang Hu, Yang Liu, Qianhe Zheng
| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
DATA-CUBE: Data Curriculum for Instruction-based Sentence Representation Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve sentence representation learning (SRL) ignore the potential interference problems across tasks and instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction tuning method that arranges the order of multi- task data for training to minimize interference risks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost the performance of state-of-the-art methods. |
Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that clusters dense persona descriptions into sparse categories and generates personalized responses from dialogue histories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English datasets. |
TopKG: Target-oriented Dialog via Global Planning on Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing target-oriented dialogs take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a global planning method for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph to adjust local response generation towards the global target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses. |
Graph Hawkes Transformer for Extrapolated Reasoning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for entity prediction cannot predict when an event will occur . there are many facts not related to the query that can confuse the model . |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge Graph reasoning model based on Graph Hawkes Transformer . the model captures instantaneous structural and temporal evolution information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs much better under long-term evolution scenarios. |
Automatic Slide Updating with User-Defined Dynamic Templates and Natural Language Instructions (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing automation methods follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored decks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework updates content while preserving layout and style while maintaining a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide. |
Query-Efficient Textual Adversarial Example Generation for Black-Box Attacks (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing black-box attacks require thousands of queries on the target model, making them expensive in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that guides word substitutions using prior knowledge from the training set to improve the attack efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces query-free attack and guided search attacks by a factor of 10 500 . it improves transferability and generalization by the ensemble of the ABPens in NLP . |
Synonym-unaware Fast Adversarial Training against Textual Adversarial Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial defense methods rely on predetermined linguistic knowledge and assume that attackers’ synonym candidates are known, which is often unrealistic. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast Adversarial Training method that leverages single-step perturbation generation and effective perturbation initialization to improve model robustness without requiring synonym awareness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms existing models under character-level and word-level attacks while still maintaining the correct syntax. |
Robustness-Aware Word Embedding Improves Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Embedding interval bound constraint is important for NLP models to be certified robust, but adversarial examples can be crafted by synonym substitutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a triplet loss to train robustness-aware word embeddings for better certified robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art certified defense baselines and generalizes well to unseen substitutions. |
MTGP: Multi-turn Target-oriented Dialogue Guided by Generative Global Path with Flexible Turns (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on global planning, which plans toward the target before the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a global path as a natural language sentence instead of a sequence of nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has fewer turns, more coherent semantics, and higher success rate than baselines. |
Crafting Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Effective adversary generation for neural machine translation is crucial for robust systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage round-trip translation technique to build valid metrics for evaluating NMT adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could break the state-of-art NMT models with small perturbations. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
VisCRA: A Visual Chain Reasoning Attack for Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have enabled sophisticated visual reasoning capabilities by integrating reinforcement learning and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak framework that exploits visual reasoning chains to bypass safety mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high attack success rates on leading closed-source MLRMs. |
Latent Attention Denoising: A Training-Free Energy-Based Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision-Language Models lack reliable visual hallucination . despite advances in multimodal perception, they are still limited in real-world applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that recasts attention calibration as a one-step score-based denoising process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance on generative and discriminative tasks while maintaining efficiency comparable to standard decoding. |
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)
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Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. |
| Approach: | They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. |
A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Jiamin Su, Jianxiang He, Fangteng Fu, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Kun Wang, Shen Wang, Qingsong Wen, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | This survey provides **the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models** . integrating large language model with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming significant as AI advances . |
| Approach: | They review over 200 studies published since 2021 and examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs . they identify five major challenges hindering the realization of AGI in this domain . |
| Outcome: | The authors examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs with a focus on multimodal settings. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Mitigating Safety Context Amnesia in Multimodal Reasoning Models via Intent-Guided Safety Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) have enabled explicit chain-of-thought inference across vision and language, improving performance on complex cognitive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time defense that uses a percept decoupler to extract objective visual evidence into a structured intent output and a cognitive arbiter to enforce explicit safety constraints prior to generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense improves defense success rates by over 62% compared to baselines while preserving task utility. |
TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on reasoning at past timestamps to complete the missing facts, and there are only a few works of reasoning on known TKGs to forecast future facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a time-shaped reward method that captures historical knowledge graph snapshots and a new representation method for unseen entities to improve the inductive inference ability of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four benchmark datasets with higher explainability, less calculation, and fewer parameters when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. |
TextHacker: Learning based Hybrid Local Search Algorithm for Text Hard-label Adversarial Attack (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing textual adversarial attacks use gradient or prediction confidence to generate adversarials, making it hard to be deployed in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual adversarial attack that randomly perturbs lots of words to craft an adversarial example. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms existing hard-label attacks in terms of attack performance and adversary quality. |
FiDeLiS: Faithful Reasoning in Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based or agent-based methods are prone to generating erroneous or hallucinated outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage knowledge graphs as external knowledge sources to improve the factuality of LLM responses by anchoring answers to verifiable reasoning steps retrieved from KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves factuality and interpretability across benchmarks and reduces computational costs. |
Guiding Dialogue Agents to Complex Semantic Targets by Dynamically Completing Knowledge Graph (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are incomplete in tracking complex semantic relations of the target-oriented dialogue. |
| Approach: | They combine methods of knowledge retrieval and relationship prediction to construct a context-related dynamic KG and a metric to evaluate the tracked path automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can control the agent more logically and smoothly toward the complex target. |
Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommendation systems ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, leading to an ineffective loose coupling structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual imitation to explicitly align recommendation and conversation paths . they propose to generate high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics. |
Search-in-Context: Efficient Multi-Hop QA over Long Contexts via Monte Carlo Tree Search with Dynamic KV Retrieval (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multihop question answering (MHQA) over long contexts are often neglecting explicit reasoning or incurring expensive computational costs due to full-attention mechanisms over long contextuals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with dynamic key-value retrieval to enable iterative, context-aware reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) with dynamic key-value (KV) retrieval to enable iterative, context-aware reasoning. |
Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples through Probability Weighted Word Saliency (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to attack text classification are limited due to the complexity of the problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a greedy algorithm to generate adversarial examples that maintain lexical correctness, grammatical correctiness and semantic similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm maintains lexical correctness, grammatical correctity and semantic similarity well and is hard for humans to perceive. |