Papers by Kun Yang
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized downstream vision-language tasks including classification, object detection, and segmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for text prompts at the word level rather than optimizing continuous textual embeddings to boost adversarial robustness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms hand-engineered prompts with average gains of +4.9% and +5.8%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds. |
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| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for open-domain dialogues are difficult due to the one-to-many issue of the open- domain dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based automatic evaluation metric which can robustly evaluate open-domain dialogues by augmenting CVAEs with a Next Sentence Prediction objective and employing Mutual Information to model the semantic similarity of text in the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can evaluate open-domain dialogues on two open- domain dialogue datasets. |
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| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations between entities in a document. |
| Approach: | They propose a Document-level distant relation extraction framework with unreliable pseudo labels to denoise DS data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on two public datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on table-based reasoning distillation has focused on smaller models with limited performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based reasoning distillation approach to distill LLMs into smaller models . their results show that a 220 million parameter model fine-tuned using distilled data improves performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a scientific table-to-text generation dataset and surpasses specific LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics struggle to evaluate adversarial negative examples . existing metrics struggle in handling adversarials, resulting in low correlations with human judgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates AMR and domain-specific language models for automatic open-domain dialogue evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework achieves strong correlations with human judgments across multiple datasets. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to design the interaction strategy between large language models and knowledge graphs (KGs) are not effective for large language model (LLM)s to solve complex tasks due to the large volume and structured format of KG data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that enables small LLMs to actively make decisions over knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on in-domain and out-domain datasets using 10K samples. |
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| 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. |
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| Challenge: | Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating code large language models assume access to proprietary training corpora or use external reference sets with manually tuned, non-generalizable thresholds. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for self-referential leakage detection for gray-box and black-box settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves average F1 by 21.52 points in the gray-box setting and 14.46 points in black-box settings over strong baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is an effective yet efficient solution for fine-tuning large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that retrieves and composes multiple LoRAs according to input prompts. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LoraRetriever outperforms baselines in terms of performance and versatility. |
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| Challenge: | a challenge for aspect term extraction is to extract phrase-level aspect terms . a constituency lattice structure is constructed using the span annotations of constituents of a sentence . |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate the span annotations of constituents of a sentence to leverage syntactic information in neural network models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on two benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-agent Systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various complex tasks, but their vulnerability to adversarial attacks, misinformation propagation, and unintended behaviors have raised significant concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-guided security lens and treatment for robust LLM-MAS that leverages graph neural networks to detect anomalies on the multi-agent utterance graph and employ topological intervention for attack remediation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed security lens recovers 40% of the performance under various attack strategies and integrates with mainstream MAS with security guarantees. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations but lack robust data alignment . inherent data uncertainty renders PRVR vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities . |
| Approach: | proposed framework for partially relevant video retrieval aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in computer-using agents have created new safety and security risks . despite the impressive capabilities of CUAs, there are still significant security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematization of knowledge on the safety and security threats of Computer-Using Agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework for assessing the safety and security risks of computer-using agents. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to evaluate open domain dialogues have a one-to-many problem . existing approaches lack commonsense reasoning biases and perform poorly in domain-specific scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages both a small, specialised model and LLMs for the evaluation of open-domain dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both classification and evaluation tasks and exhibits better correlation with human judgements. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have fueled significant progress in intelligent Multi-agent Systems (MAS), with expanding academic and industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies diverse MAS workflows via iterative RelCom interactions to enable generalized analysis. |
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| Challenge: | Unlike existing MoE approaches that rely on fixed TopK Routing, our dynamic expert selection framework dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic expert selection framework that dynamically allocates experts based on the confidence level in expert selection for each input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of 0.7% with less than 90% activated parameters and outperforms dense models in QA and machine translation tasks. |
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| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
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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. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for WS-NLVL rarely consider complex temporal relations enclosing the language query, yielding illogical predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method to exploit temporal relations and logical rules for WS-NLVL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to retrieve the moment corresponding to a language query in a video with only video-language pairs utilized during training. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
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| Challenge: | Using CS/CM as a linguistic phenomenon could be a sign of tension in Holocaust survivors’ interviews. |
| Approach: | They annotated CS/CM codes and annotate silence situations in an open corpus . they found that most annotations were captured in the tension places . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that annotations are captured in the tension places . the study calls for more research endeavors on tension detection . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models have strong reasoning, coding, and generation capabilities, but retrieval-augmented generation remains difficult under fixed context budgets. |
| Approach: | They propose a coalition-aware context filtering framework supervised by Shapley-style marginal contributions that captures sign effects via teacher-forced probing and computes exact Shaply values for small retrieval sets. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RepoShapley improves completion quality while reducing harmful context and unnecessary retrieval. |
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| Challenge: | Long chain-of-thought reasoning improves performance of large language models, yet hallucinations in such settings often emerge subtly and propagate across reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat step-level hallucination judgments as local observations and introduce a cumulative prefix-level signal that tracks the global evolution of the reasoning state over the entire trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables streaming hallucination detection in long CoT reasoning, providing real-time, interpretable evidence. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tabular question answering systems cannot perform future-oriented numerical prediction . open-domain tabular questions are a popular approach for QA tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a task that covers time-series forecasting and forecast-based reasoning scenarios using real estate data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes the problem into three collaborative roles that synthesize the results to construct a precise and consistent final answer. |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular QA are limited to closed-domain scenarios . existing approaches do not solve the core challenge of generating correct answers without user clarification . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to tackle underspecified or uncertain queries in tabular question answering . they propose ODUTQA-MDC task and a multi-agent framework to detect ambiguities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at detecting ambiguities, clarifying them through dialogue, and refining answers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fail to distinguish different classification errors with a standard cross-entropy classification loss and ignore the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract crime amounts from fact description and use them to learn distinguishable representations to exploit the numbers in the fact description for predicting the term of penalty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on real-world datasets and ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component. |
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| Challenge: | a new open-domain question answering system integrates best practices from IR with a BERT-based reader to identify answers from a large corpus of Wikipedia articles. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end question answering system that integrates BERT with an IR reader. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on a standard benchmark test collection. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating human-like text, but the potential for freely customisable characters remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which employs Large Language Models to create freely customisable characters through personalised characteristic feature injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides valuable insights for developing more accurate and customisable human simulacra. |
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models are increasingly used in Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment (PIAA) however, their predictions may reflect subtle biases influenced by demographic factors such as gender, age, and education. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate MLLMs along two complementary dimensions: (1) stereotype bias and (2) alignment between model outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers three subtasks: aesthetic perception, assessment, empathy and alignment between outputs and genuine human aesthetic preferences. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text summarization have been investigated, but there are still gaps between them and human professionals. |
| Approach: | They analyze 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually. |
| Outcome: | Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limitations on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we use 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarizing models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for procedural planning over-rely on visual inputs and lack structured semantic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision–language framework for multimodal procedural planning that exploits implicit spatial relations and deep semantics encoded in object attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in terms of execution success rate, LCS, and planning correctness. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches when using the same amount of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions that integrates two tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data. |
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| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
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| Challenge: | e-commerce companies often have the option of escalating complaints by filing grievances with a government authority . this is detrimental to an ecommerce company, but this problem is challenging to solve by integrating recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates recurrent neural networks with manually-engineered features to identify cases where the customer expresses such an intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and provides better recall and triage for specialized agents. |
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL models struggle with complex analytical tasks such as generating simple SQL queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-sql model that leverages Python as a procedural reasoning pivot to enhance both complex SQL generation and tabular reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on six text-to-SQL benchmarks by 6.44% on average while maintaining good capability on three tableQA benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing security models rely on open-ended communication, but the collaborative process itself can be exploited and disrupted. |
| Approach: | They propose a new threat class, called Denial-of-Collaboration, which corrupts collaborative structure and transforms communication topology into self-sabotage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks bypass conventional safety alignments that are not designed to detect behavioral or systemic attacks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI benchmarks lack fine-grained diagnostics to identify which capabilities lead to task failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual P R GUI Benchmark to assess LVLMs' language capabilities . they propose XLI to align non-English hidden states with English ones during inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals consistent gaps between English and non-English settings . it reduces the cross-lingual gaps with an average gain of 6.5% in non- English settings compared to static benchmarks . |