Papers by Lan Yang
Neural Topic Modeling with Large Language Models in the Loop (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in topic discovery, but their direct application to topic modeling suffers from issues such as incomplete topic coverage, misalignment of topics, and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop framework that integrates Large Language Models with Neural Topic Models (NTMs) global topics and document representations are learned through the NTM, while an LLM refines these topics using an Optimal Transport (OT)-based alignment objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves topic interpretability while preserving the efficiency of existing NTMs. |
Are U a Joke Master? Pun Generation via Multi-Stage Curriculum Learning towards a Humor LLM (2024.findings-acl)
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Yang Chen, Chong Yang, Tu Hu, Xinhao Chen, Man Lan, Li Cai, Xinlin Zhuang, Xuan Lin, Xin Lu, Aimin Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing research has demonstrated that the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate humorous sentences is limited to producing 25 unique jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences by a Chinese Pun dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baseline models on Chinese and English benchmark datasets. |
Enhancing Grammatical Error Correction Systems with Explanations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | To help language learners better understand why the GEC system makes a correction, the causes of errors and the corresponding error types are two key factors. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate large dataset with evidence words and grammatical error types to help language learners better understand corrections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be validated by human evaluation and can be used to help second-language learners decide whether to accept a correction suggestion and understand the associated grammar rule. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
MAssistant: A Personal Knowledge Assistant for MOOC Learners (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced a rapid development since 2012 . many MOOC platforms have been launched, including Coursera1 , edX2 , and Udacity3 etc. |
| Approach: | They present a personal knowledge assistant system called MAssistant for MOOC learners . MAsistants has a large-scale concept graph built from open data . it also provides a browser extension which interacts with users during video lectures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps users trace the concepts they have learned in MOOCs, and to build their own concept graphs. |
Interpretable Math Word Problem Solution Generation via Step-by-step Planning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving math word problems focus on obtaining the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step planning approach for intermediate solution generation that strategically plans the generation of the next solution step based on the MWP and the previous solution steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the accuracy and interpretability of the solution on automatic metrics and human evaluation. |
Unifying Discrete and Continuous Representations for Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Jie Fu, Jian Lan, Mei Li, Baosong Yang, Jun Xie, Yidan Zhang, Dezhong Peng, Jiancheng Lv
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised paraphrase generation methods require large-scale, manually annotated paraphrase datasets, which are labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised pseudo-data construction method that generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse pseudo-paraphrases in distinct surface structures for a given sentence. |
CSPO: Alleviating Reward Ambiguity for Structured Table-to-LaTeX Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Tables contain rich structured information, but when stored as images their contents remain "locked" within pixels. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that disentangles optimization across LaTeX tables components . CSPO assigns component-specific rewards and backpropagates each signal through tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles optimization across LaTeX tables components—structure, style, and content. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Neural CRF Model for Sentence Alignment in Text Simplification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Text simplification systems are based on the quality and quantity of complex-simple sentence pairs extracted by aligning sentences between parallel articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural CRF alignment model which leverages the sequential nature of sentences in parallel documents and utilizes a sentence pair model to capture semantic similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous work on monolingual sentence alignment task by more than 5 points in F1. |
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. |
Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph for Conditional Question Answering on Long Documents (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to conditional question answering on long documents ignore document structure and discourse relations between sentences in document sections. |
| Approach: | They construct a Structure-Discourse Hierarchical Graph and conduct bottom-up information propagation to address this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the existing methods on the conditional question answering on long documents by 3.0 EM score and 2.4 F1 score on answer measuring, and 2.2 EM and 1.9 F1 scores on jointly answer and condition measuring. |
LLM-Based Agent Society Investigation: Collaboration and Confrontation in Avalon Gameplay (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yihuai Lan, Zhiqiang Hu, Lei Wang, Yang Wang, Deheng Ye, Peilin Zhao, Ee-Peng Lim, Hui Xiong, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM agents' social behaviors are lacking . previous studies focused on positive social behaviors, leaving research on negative social behaviors relatively scarce. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features a multi-agent system facilitating efficient communication and interaction with LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on Avalon and evaluates on game success and analyzes agents’ social behaviors. |
CodexGraph: Bridging Large Language Models and Code Repositories via Code Graph Databases (2025.naacl-long)
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Xiangyan Liu, Bo Lan, Zhiyuan Hu, Yang Liu, Zhicheng Zhang, Fei Wang, Michael Qizhe Shieh, Wenmeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in stand-alone code tasks but struggle with handling entire code repositories. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system integrates LLM agents with graph database interfaces extracted from code repositories. |
LLM-Driven Multi-Perspective Location Completion for Next Location Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that check-in data is complete, overlooking the subjective nature of user behavior, leading to inaccurate capture of user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses spatial coordinates to augment location completion by transforming geographic coordinates into text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three real-world datasets. |
Efficient and Effective Prompt Tuning via Prompt Decomposition and Compressed Outer Product (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained language models overlook intrinsic semantic associations between soft prompt tokens, leading to high discreteness and limited interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-parameters Prompt Tuning method which leverages prompt decomposition and compressed outer product to facilitate multiple interactions among prompt tokens. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on six architectures and eight datasets show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in performance and efficiency. |
Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Zero-shot Relation Extraction via Self-Prompting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot Relation Extraction (RE) lack detailed, context-specific prompts for understanding various sentences and relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a three-stage diversity approach to prompt LLMs by generating multiple synthetic samples that encapsulate specific relations from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLM-based zero-shot RE methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it produces high-quality synthetic data that enhances performance. |
R3 Prompting: Review, Rephrase and Resolve for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models under Noisy Context (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have evaluated LLMs under noise-free context but the dilemma for LLM to produce inaccurate results under noisy context has not been fully investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method for CoT reasoning using Chain-of-Thought prompting that interacts with LLMs to perform key sentence extraction, variable declaration and answer prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing CoT prompting methods on five reasoning tasks under noisy context. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
Do Large Language Models Truly Grasp Addition? A Rule-Focused Diagnostic Using Two-Integer Arithmetic (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex math but fail on basic addition, raising the question of whether they grasp rules or are merely reproducing patterns. |
| Approach: | They systematically probe LLMs’ understanding of two-integer addition by testing three crucial properties: commutativity (A+B=B+A), representation invariance via symbolic remapping and consistent accuracy scaling with operand length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve high numeric accuracy but fail basic addition tasks. |
Knowledge Decoupling via Orthogonal Projection for Lifelong Editing of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing large language models (LLMs) have achieved some success, but their knowledge understanding and memory capacity significantly degrades after extensive editing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that stores the basis vectors of the representation space of past edits in a knowledge cache and projects the gradient of the current edit onto a space orthogonal to previous knowledge for updating. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves question-answering ability and hallucination mitigation by 14% and 61% for large language models after 3,000 edits. |
Large-Scale Corpus Construction and Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Ancient Chinese Poetry: New Method and Data Insights (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Ancient Chinese poetry presents unique challenges for Large Language Models due to data scarcity and limited ability of general LLMs when dealing with ACP. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework to improve LLMs' performance . they use 1.1 million ancient poems and 990K related texts to address hallucination issues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of LLMs in ancient Chinese poetry domain from 49.2% to 89.0%. |
History Semantic Graph Enhanced Conversational KBQA with Temporal Information Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational KBQA assume the independence of utterances and model them in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a History Semantic Graph Enhanced KBQA model that models long-range semantic dependencies in conversation history while maintaining low computational cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on a widely used question type dataset. |
An Empirical Study of Pre-trained Transformers for Arabic Information Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual pre-trained Transformers have been shown to enable effective cross-lingual zero-shot transfer, but their performance on Arabic information extraction tasks is not well studied. |
| Approach: | They pre-train a bilingual BERT that is designed specifically for Arabic NLP and English-to-Arabic zero-shot transfer learning. |
| Outcome: | The pre-trained model significantly outperforms mBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, and AraBERT in both the supervised and zero-shot transfer settings. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
HSCodeComp: A Realistic and Expert-level Agent Benchmark for Hierarchical Rule Application (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks neglect hierarchical rule application in real-world domains . a critical gap persists in numerous real-life professional domains where decision-making is governed by expert-written rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark requiring agents to assign a unique 10-digit Harmonized System (HS) Code to products by aligning their fuzzy attributes with strict tariff classification rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack hierarchical rule application capability in real-world domains . the proposed benchmark is based on e-commerce and is open-source . |
A Span-based Linearization for Constituent Trees (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing local models have been used to parse constituent trees, but local models can be faster and more efficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearization of a constituent tree and a locally normalized model which computes the normalizer on all spans ending with that split point. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing local models and achieves competitive results with global models. |
FinDABench: Benchmarking Financial Data Analysis Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Shu Liu, Shangqing Zhao, Chenghao Jia, Xinlin Zhuang, Zhaoguang Long, Jie Zhou, Aimin Zhou, Man Lan, Yang Chong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but their proficiency and reliability in the specialized domain of financial data analysis remain uncertain. |
| Approach: | FinDABench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the financial data analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it comprises 15,200 training instances and 8,900 test instances, all meticulously crafted by human experts. |
| Outcome: | FinDABench measures the financial data analysis capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across three dimensions: 1) Core Ability; 2) Analytical Ability; 3) Technical Ability. |
Amadeus: Autoregressive Model with Bidirectional Attribute Modelling for Symbolic Music (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing symbolic music generation models represent musical notes as a sequence of attribute tokens with fixed unidirectional dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic music generation framework that adopts a autoregressive and a discrete diffusion architectures for note attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves state-of-the-art models across objective and subjective metrics. |
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. |
Robust and Interpretable Grounding of Spatial References with Relation Networks (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for understanding spatial references in text are vulnerable to noise in input text or state observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-conditioned relation network with a cross-modal attention module to capture fine-grained spatial relations between entities and a model that is robust and interpretable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on three tasks with a 17% improvement in predicting goal locations and a 15% improvement in robustness compared to state-of-the-art systems. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Hongyi Wu, Xinshu Shen, Peimin Yu, Gaowei Yi, Xinhao Chen, Tu Hu, Yang Chen, Yupei Ren, Yadong Zhang, Youqi Song, Binxuan Liu, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing research on Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TOREE to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays to improve automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs. |