Papers by Lan Ma
Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs rely on commercial models such as GPT-4o for evaluations, but they are not universally accessible. |
| Approach: | They propose a task decomposition evaluation framework based on GPT-4o to automatically construct a specialized training dataset to break down the multifaceted evaluation process into simpler sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the current state-of-the-art GPT-4o evaluation framework with over 4.6% improvement in Spearman and Kendall correlations with human judgments. |
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets. |
Understanding Client Reactions in Online Mental Health Counseling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Communication success relies heavily on reading participants’ reactions, but little research is on how listeners' reactions shape trajectories and outcomes of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use client reactions to predict counseling outcomes by using an annotation framework that encompasses counselors’ strategies and client reaction behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict counselors' strategies and client reaction behaviors against a large-scale text-based counseling dataset. |
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups. |
RS-DPO: A Hybrid Rejection Sampling and Direct Preference Optimization Method for Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is widely employed to align large language models with user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine rejection sampling and direct preference optimization to improve alignment with user intent by identifying pairs of contrastive samples from human annotator and alternative LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods including RS, PPO, and DPO in a limited resource environment. |
Unsupervised Text Style Transfer for Controllable Intensity (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (UTST) aims to transfer the stylistic properties of a given text without parallel text pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a SFT-then-PPO paradigm to fine-tune an LLM with parallel data and reward functions for distinguishing stylistic intensity in hierarchical levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can transfer stylistic properties without parallel text pairs even for adjacent levels of intensity. |
Diff4TST: Masked Diffusion Language Model for Text Style Transfer (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text style transfer rely on task-specific training and expensive training stages. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based language model that formulates text style transfer as an explicit copy-and-edit process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves style accuracy and controllability while maintaining strong content preservation and fluency. |
Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation. |
Your Reasoning Model Knows What Counts: Self-Guided Chain-of-Thought Pruning for Efficient Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chain-of-Thought reasoning are often degraded because they disregard the model’s intrinsic reasoning dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided pruning framework that leverages the model’s intrinsic likelihood landscape to identify segments that are extraneous to its specific reasoning pattern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces output length while maintaining or improving accuracy on multiple benchmarks. |
An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds. |
PsyGUARD: An Automated System for Suicide Detection and Risk Assessment in Psychological Counseling (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for fine-grained suicide detection and risk assessment are lacking . a lack of domain-specific systems for this task poses a challenge to automated crisis intervention aimed at suicide prevention. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fine-grained suicide detection system to assess risk in counseling . they develop a taxonomy for detecting suicide ideation and a large-scale dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects suicidal ideation and assesses risk in counseling . it can provide safe, helpful, and tailored responses for further assessment . |
Understanding Gender Bias in Knowledge Base Embeddings (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge base (KB) embeddings have been shown to contain gender biases . authors develop two new bias measures to quantify them and trace their origins in KB . |
| Approach: | They propose two ways to quantify gender biases in knowledge base (KB) embeddings . they use the influence function to inspect the contribution of each triple in KB to the overall group bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed measures are compared with real-world census data to examine gender biases. |
Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In traditional face-to-face therapy, the assessment of therapeutic alliance is not directly translated to text-based settings. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic approach to understand the development of therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling by using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach demonstrates that the framework is effective in identifying the therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling. |
Prompt-based Connective Prediction Method for Fine-grained Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to aid implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) lack explicit connectives and are difficult to implement on fine-grained IDRR. |
| Approach: | They propose a Prompt-based Connective Prediction method that instructs large-scale pre-trained models to use knowledge relevant to discourse relation and utilizes strong correlation between connectives and discourse relation to help the model recognize implicit discourse relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the state-of-the-art model and achieves significant improvements on those fine-grained few-shot discourse relation classes. |
A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment between Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for EA between temporal KGs incorporate relational and temporal information into entity embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate unsupervised alignment seeds using temporal information from TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous methods by using temporal information. |