Papers by Kun Yan
Pierce the Mists, Greet the Sky: Decipher Knowledge Overshadowing via Knowledge Circuit Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by hallucinations, a particularly challenging variant, knowledge overshadowing, which can lead to erroneous outputs even with high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze and detect knowledge overshadowing by using knowledge circuit analysis to dissect the function of key components in the circuit and how attention pattern dynamics contribute to the phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the framework can detect and analyze knowledge overshadowing and improves on existing models. |
Multiplex Word Embeddings for Selectional Preference Acquisition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing word embeddings are limited in their ability to represent fixed vectors . instead, they incorporate relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables - a limitation that is addressed by a multiplex model . |
| Approach: | They propose a word embedding model which incorporates relational dependencies of different words into their embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily extended according to various relations among words. |
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. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
DemonAgent: Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack on LLM-based Agent (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new method for detecting advanced backdoors is proposed to bypass safety audits. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor implantation strategy that introduces dynamic encryption to bypass safety audits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an attack success rate approaching 100% while maintaining a detection rate of 0%. |
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning. |
STORM-BORN: A Challenging Mathematical Derivations Dataset Curated via a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Zhenyi Lu, Xinyu Hu, Jerry Zhang, Dailin Li, Jiacheng Cen, Huilin Cao, Haiteng Wang, Yuhan Li, Xie Kun, Dandan Li, Pei Zhang, Chengbo Zhang, Yuxiang Ren, Xiaohong Huang, Yan Ma
| Challenge: | Existing datasets suffer from outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework that integrates reasoning-dense filters, multiagent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations to ensure the reliability and quality of the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and quality of the 2,000-synthesized datasets by integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations. |
CONE: An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework for Long Video Temporal Grounding (2023.acl-long)
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Zhijian Hou, Wanjun Zhong, Lei Ji, Difei Gao, Kun Yan, W.k. Chan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Mike Zheng Shou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work on video temporal grounding for long videos is limited by existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-guided window selection strategy and a coarse-to-fine mechanism to speed up inference for long videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates inference time by 2x on Ego4D-NLQ and 15x on MAD while keeping SOTA results. |
Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate image captions with user intention are still under exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a loop manner and engages explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on a trace-controlled image captioning task. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Conditional Augmentation for Aspect Term Extraction via Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect term extraction is a task to extract aspect terms from review texts as opinion targets for sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional generation task for augmentation of aspect term extraction . they use a sequence-to-sequence method that generates a new sentence . results confirm that their method alleviates the data scarcity problem significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the data scarcity problem significantly and boosts current models. |
ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify event-event causal relations in a document are noisy and require heuristic rules or external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level event-event causality identification framework that uses heuristic rules to design edges between events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)
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Lei Lin, Jiayi Fu, Pengli Liu, Qingyang Li, Yan Gong, Junchen Wan, Fuzheng Zhang, Zhongyuan Wang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective on complex reasoning tasks, but the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting causes the repetitiveness and local optimality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable ensemble-optimization method that uses a set of reasoning paths to prompt a language model one more time to determine the optimal answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be generalized to almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and answer format of reasoning paths may be unknown. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
Improving Open-Domain Dialogue Systems via Multi-Turn Incomplete Utterance Restoration (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that restoring incomplete utterances from context improves the performance of open-domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to restore incomplete utterances from context . they propose to pick and combine the data to restore the incomplete . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts response quality of open-domain dialogue systems. |
OTExtSum: Extractive Text Summarisation with Optimal Transport (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Extractive text summarisation aims to select salient sentences from a document to form a short yet informative summary. |
| Approach: | They propose to formulate extractive text summarisation as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem and use it to obtain an optimal summary that minimises the transportation cost to a given document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and learning-based methods on multiNews, PubMed, BillSum, and CNN/DM datasets. |
Rotation Control Unlearning: Quantifying and Controlling Continuous Unlearning for LLM with The Cognitive Rotation Space (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to remove undesirable data from Large Language Models suffer from cumulative catastrophic utility loss under continuous unlearning requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the rotational salience weight of RCU to quantify and control the unlearning degree in the continuous unlearning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA performance without a retained dataset. |
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. |
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jingheng Ye, Shen Wang, Deqing Zou, Yibo Yan, Kun Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ruitong Liu, Zenglin Xu, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning. |
| Approach: | They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education. |
X-ray Made Simple: Lay Radiology Report Generation and Robust Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Kun Zhao, Chenghao Xiao, Sixing Yan, Haoteng Tang, William K. Cheung, Noura Al Moubayed, Liang Zhan, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Technical language and templated nature of professional reports hinder patient comprehension and allow models to artificially boost lexical metrics such as BLEU by reproducing common report patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a layman's RRG framework that leverages layperson-friendly language to enhance patient accessibility and promote robust evaluation and report generation by encouraging models to focus on semantic accuracy over rigid templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance with more layman-style data, compared to templated professional language and inflated lexical scores. |
Stick to the Facts: Learning towards a Fidelity-oriented E-Commerce Product Description Generation (D19-1)
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Zhangming Chan, Xiuying Chen, Yongliang Wang, Juntao Li, Zhiqiang Zhang, Kun Gai, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Existing models for product description generation do not take the product attribute information into account. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that takes the embedding and the entity label of each word into account . they establish a keyword memory that stores the entity labels as keys and keywords as values . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model increases the fidelity of the generated descriptions by 25%. |
Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Matching Neural Network (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual knowledge graph (KG) alignment rely on entity embeddings derived from monolingual KG structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic entity graph to represent entities with contextual information in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. |