Papers by Lei Fang
CAT: A Contextualized Conceptualization and Instantiation Framework for Commonsense Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | HKUST-KnowComp proposes a framework for commonsense reasoning that can be used to conceptualize commonsence knowledge bases at scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates event conceptualization and instantiation to conceptualize commonsense knowledge bases at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two conceptualization tasks and the acquired abstract commonsense knowledge significantly improves commonsence inference modeling. |
HTMuon: Improving Muon via Heavy-Tailed Spectral Correction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Muon’s orthogonalized update rule suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes the training along noise-dominated directions. |
| Approach: | They propose to preserve Muon's ability to capture parameter interdependencies while producing heavier-tailed updates and inducing heavier-tail weight spectra. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes training along noise-dominated directions. |
ChatHLS: Towards Systematic Design Automation and Optimization for High-Level Synthesis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a hardware design tool that can be used to design hardware from C-like languages, but its widespread adoption is limited by strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-3-pro in debugging and speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators. |
Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing structural bias adapters for aspect sentiment triplet extraction are under-confident . a large-scale dataset for ASTE shows the adapter is effective and efficient to a larger scale. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a structural adapter to integrate structural bias into pretrained language models . they propose to add a relative position structure in place of the syntactic dependency structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter achieves state-of-the-art performance over strong baselines, but with a light parameter demand and low latency. |
TWT: Table with Written Text for Controlled Data-to-Text Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods output hallucinated text that is not faithful on TWT. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate text conditioned on the structured data and a prefix by leveraging pre-trained neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods under automatic and human evaluation metrics. |
RAAMove: A Corpus for Analyzing Moves in Research Article Abstracts (2024.lrec-main)
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Hongzheng Li, Ruojin Wang, Ge Shi, Xing Lv, Lei Lei, Chong Feng, Fang Liu, Jinkun Lin, Yangguang Mei, Linnan Xu
| Challenge: | RAAMove is a comprehensive multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in Research Article (RA) abstracts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-domain corpus dedicated to the annotation of move structures in RA abstracts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a human-annotated dataset and a BERT-based model to verify its effectiveness. |
Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Jia Li, Xuyuan Guo, Lei Li, Kechi Zhang, Ge Li, Jia Li, Zhengwei Tao, Fang Liu, Chongyang Tao, Yuqi Zhu, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Currently, long-context language models are limited by the lack of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU to evaluate LCLMs' long code comprehension ability for practical applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LCLMs are limited in their long code understanding ability, particularly when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows. |
Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wenqing Tian, Zhipeng Chen, Yuhuan Wu, Jiahao Zhao, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train large language models to leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. |
XPrompt: Exploring the Extreme of Prompt Tuning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning learns soft prompts to condition pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a Prompt tuning model with an eXtremely small scale that learns soft prompts to condition the frozen Pre-trained Language Models for performing downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the vanilla Prompt-Tuning and can significantly improve across tasks and model scales. |
A Split-and-Recombine Approach for Follow-up Query Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Context-dependent semantic parsing has proved to be an important but challenging task. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform follow-up query analysis to restate context-dependent queries with contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art by nearly 8% on the FollowUp dataset . the extensibility of STAR on the SQA dataset is also promising . |
CAFE: Retrieval Head-based Coarse-to-Fine Information Seeking to Enhance Multi-Document QA Capability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extend context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with retrieval and reasoning in long context inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine method to enhance multi-document question-answering capacities by removing background and distracting documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAFE outperforms baseline methods on multiple documents. |
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github. |
Doolittle: Benchmarks and Corpora for Academic Writing Formalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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Shizhe Diao, Yongyu Lei, Liangming Pan, Tianqing Fang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Sedrick Keh, Min-Yen Kan, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods of language refinement focus on narrow, specific linguistic features within isolated sentences, such as grammatical errors and improper word use. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to improve the overall quality of academic writing at paragraph level by integrating automatic feedback into the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the overall quality of formal academic writing at the paragraph level. |
Leveraging Adjective-Noun Phrasing Knowledge for Comparison Relation Prediction in Text-to-SQL (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text-to-SQL do not explicitly introduce common knowledge to address comparison relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage adjective-noun phrasing knowledge mined from the web to predict comparison relations in text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the original and re-split Spider datasets on comparison relation prediction. |
STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn speech representations for end-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate the representation discrepancy between modalities by mixing up the representation sequences of different modality inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy and improves on a strong baseline on eight translation directions. |
Phrase-level Textual Adversarial Attack with Label Preservation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks are usually realized through word-level or sentence-level perturbations, which either limit the perturbation space or sacrifice fluency and textual quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a phrase-level perturbation-based adversarial ATtack that generates adversarials through phrase- level perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of natural language processing models by reducing the need for word-level perturbations and preserving the fluency and grammaticality of the samples. |
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Shuang Sun, Huatong Song, Yuhao Wang, Ruiyang Ren, Jinhao Jiang, Junjie Zhang, Fei Bai, Jia Deng, Xin Zhao, Zheng Liu, Lei Fang, Zhongyuan Wang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments. |
Discovering a Shared Logical Subspace: Steering LLM Logical Reasoning via Alignment of Natural-Language and Symbolic Views (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multistep logical reasoning are limited by natural language refinement or external symbolic solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical subspace that captures logical reasoning capabilities in LLMs that are shared across views while remaining independent of surface forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy by 11 percentage points and generalizes well on out-of-domain problems. |