Papers by Le Yan
Magnet: Multi-turn Tool-use Data Synthesis and Distillation via Graph Translation (2025.acl-long)
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Fan Yin, Zifeng Wang, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Ke Jiang, Yanfei Chen, Jindong Gu, Long Le, Kai-Wei Chang, Chen-Yu Lee, Hamid Palangi, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Large language models have been shown to be effective in multi-turn interactions . however, their performance may be limited in complex, multi-turned interactions involving users and multiple tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for synthesizing high-quality training trajectories to enhance the function calling capability of large language model agents in multi-turn conversations with humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model by 68.01 on BFCL-v3 and 73.30 on ToolQuery. |
DeepPresenter: Environment-Grounded Reflection for Agentic Presentation Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hao Zheng, Guozhao Mo, Xinru Yan, Qianhao Yuan, Wenkai Zhang, Xuanang Chen, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing presentation agents rely on predefined workflows and fixed templates to generate presentations. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic framework that adapts to diverse user intents and iterative refinement based on observation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to generate presentations with environmental observations. |
Who Is Speaking to Whom? Learning to Identify Utterance Addressee in Multi-Party Conversations (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | In multi-party conversations, addressee information is not always explicit . researchers have spent great efforts to understand conversations between two participants, which is known as multi-part conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a who-to-whom model which models users and utterances in a conversation session jointly in an interactive way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the Ubuntu Multi-Party Conversation Corpus and shows consistent improvements. |
In Prospect and Retrospect: Reflective Memory Management for Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhen Tan, Jun Yan, I-Hung Hsu, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Yiwen Song, Yanfei Chen, Hamid Palangi, George Lee, Anand Rajan Iyer, Tianlong Chen, Huan Liu, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to long-term dialogue memory management fail to capture the natural semantic structure of conversations, leading to fragmented and incomplete representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that integrates forward- and backward-looking reflections into a personalized memory bank for effective future retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on a long-term dialogue memory model. |
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained masked language models can be factual knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs . they find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on illustrative cases and external contexts . the results question the previous findings that MLMs can be reliable factual knowledge bases . |
Beyond Yes and No: Improving Zero-Shot LLM Rankers via Scoring Fine-Grained Relevance Labels (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing pointwise LLMs provide noisy or biased answers for documents that are partially relevant to the query. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate fine-grained relevance labels into the LLM prompt . they propose to better differentiate between documents with different levels of relevance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can differentiate between documents with different levels of relevance to the query and derive a more accurate ranking. |
Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance labels for large language models have not been successful in generating relevance labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to combine LLM relevance labels with ranking abilities . they take both LLM generated relevance labels and pairwise preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method balances the ranking and labeling abilities of large language models . it takes both LLM generated relevance labels and pairwise preferences . |
Element Intervention for Open Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current OpenRE models are often trained on the datasets generated from distant supervision, which often results in instability and makes the model easily collapsed. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a causal model to identify relation instances referring to the same relation . they propose to perform Element Interventions on context and entities respectively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and is robust across datasets. |
Translation vs. Dialogue: A Comparative Analysis of Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine translation and dialogue response generation require a large number of handcrafted features. |
| Approach: | They propose to interpret a general neural model comparatively by using the seq2seq model in two mainstream NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is used in two mainstream NLP tasks and is compared with a standard model. |
From Long to Lean: Performance-aware and Adaptive Chain-of-Thought Compression via Multi-round Refinement (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought reasoning introduces significant inference latency due to its verbosity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages token elasticity phenomenon to progressively compress CoTs via multiround refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average accuracy improvement of 5.6% over state-of-the-art baselines while reducing CoT length by an average of 47 tokens and significantly lowering latency. |
Towards Efficient CoT Distillation: Self-Guided Rationale Selector for Better Performance with Fewer Rationales (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on rationale quality underestimates the importance of CoT distillation, focusing primarily on data quantity, which may result in transferring noisy or incorrect information to the student model. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can discern and select high quality rationales for distillation and a Rationale Difficulty metric to measure the ability of the student model to generate the correct answer under a given rationale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 4.6% accuracy improvement over baseline data on seven datasets over three tasks, controlling accuracy, diversity, and difficulty. |
Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhen Qin, Rolf Jagerman, Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Junru Wu, Le Yan, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Jialu Liu, Donald Metzler, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Existing methods to rank documents using large language models do not understand these challenging ranking formulations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Pairwise Ranking Prompting to improve ranking performance . they propose to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms supervised baselines on benchmark datasets and outperformed other LLM-based solutions by over 10% on average. |
Learning to Bootstrap for Entity Set Expansion (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing bootstrapping methods for Entity Set Expansion suffer from two problems: 1) delayed feedback and sparse supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that estimates delayed feedback and adaptively scores entities given sparse supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can estimate delayed feedback for pattern evaluation and adaptively score entities given sparse supervision signals. |
Global Bootstrapping Neural Network for Entity Set Expansion (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that end-to-end bootstrapping methods only leverage local semantics rather than global semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a global-sighted encoder to capture and encode local and global semantics into entity embedding and an attention-guided decoder to sequentially expand new entities based on these embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art on two bootstrapping datasets. |
Progressive Adversarial Learning for Bootstrapping: A Case Study on Entity Set Expansion (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for entity set expansion define the expansion boundary using seed-based distance metrics, which are hard to adjust due to the extremely sparse supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning method for bootstrapping which jointly models the bootstraping process and boundary learning process in a GAN framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance for entity set expansion. |