Papers by Lei Gan
PVTNL: Prompting Vision Transformers with Natural Language for Generalizable Person Re-identification (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Domain generalization person re-identification (DG-ReID) aims to train models on source domains and generalize to unseen target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generalize person re-identification using a vision-language model . body-part cues are used to segment images into semantically coherent regions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize to unseen domains and generalize semantics to people . it leverages the pre-trained vision-language model BLIP to extract aligned visual and textual embeddings. |
ExpanRL: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for concept expansion in MOOCs are inefficient because of the diversity of MOOC courses and rapid updates. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) model for concept expansion in MOOCs that employs a two-level mechanism of seed selection and concept expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on nine real MOOC datasets and maintains competitive performance under different settings. |
RepEval: Effective Text Evaluation with LLM Representation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shuqian Sheng, Yi Xu, Tianhang Zhang, Zanwei Shen, Luoyi Fu, Jiaxin Ding, Lei Zhou, Xiaoying Gan, Xinbing Wang, Chenghu Zhou
| Challenge: | Traditional metrics for automatic text evaluation are tailored to specific tasks, while LLM-based evaluation metrics are costly. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that leverages projections of LLM representations for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric exhibits higher correlation with human judgments than previous methods on 14 datasets. |
CRAFTQA: A Code-Driven Adaptive Framework for Complex Structured Data Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unified structured data question answering methods rely on a set of predefined functions, which restricts their ability to perform complex reasoning beyond these predefined operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive code-driven framework that generates code-based reasoning operations based on a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on multiple structured datasets on real-world scenarios. |
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)
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Jifan Yu, Gan Luo, Tong Xiao, Qingyang Zhong, Yuquan Wang, Wenzheng Feng, Junyi Luo, Chenyu Wang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs. |
UCL-Bench: A Chinese User-Centric Legal Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Ruoli Gan, Duanyu Feng, Chen Zhang, Zhihang Lin, Haochen Jia, Hao Wang, Zhenyang Cai, Lei Cui, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing legal benchmarks focusing on knowledge and logic evaluate LLMs on various tasks in legal domain, but few have explored the practical application of LLM by actual users. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese user-centric legal benchmark that aims to assess the practical application of LLMs by real users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on various tasks in legal domain but does not outperfect ChatGPT. |
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuzhe Yang, Yifei Zhang, Yan Hu, Yilin Guo, Ruoli Gan, Yueru He, Mingcong Lei, Xiao Zhang, Haining Wang, Qianqian Xie, Jimin Huang, Honghai Yu, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their potential applications in finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the ability of large language models to handle financial tasks using human expert evaluations and task-specific interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to handle complex financial tasks and combines human expert evaluations with dynamic, task-specific interactions to simulate the complexities of evolving financial scenarios. |
Probabilistic Graph Reasoning for Natural Proof Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reasoning over formal representations do not explicitly consider inter-dependency between answers and proofs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for joint answer prediction and proof generation using an induced graphical model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 10%-30% improvement on QA accuracy in evaluations under diverse conditions. |
Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that VOLT beats widely-used vocabularies in diverse scenarios, including WMT-14 English-German translation, TED bilingual translation, and TED multilingual translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a token dictionary solution that can be used without trial training to find the best dictionary with a proper size. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution beats widely-used vocabularies in English-German translation, TED bilingual translation, and TED multilingual translation. |
Re-examining the Role of Schema Linking in Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models treat schema linking as a minor component . Existing solutions treat schema as merely a string component based on string matching . |
| Approach: | They build a schema linking corpus based on a Spider text-to-SQL dataset . they find schema linking is the crux for the current text- to-Sql task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on the Spider text-to-SQL dataset despite its simplicity. |
Exploiting Contrastive Learning and Numerical Evidence for Confusing Legal Judgment Prediction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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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. |
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu, Ke Lei, Jieming Zhu, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Ruiming Tang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for addressing item-level user interests are lacking in cross-domain generalization . RecBase model is domain-agnostic and can be used to enhance recommender systems' effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective that leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross- domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks on eight real-world datasets. |
TIGEr: Text-to-Image Grounding for Image Caption Evaluation (D19-1)
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Ming Jiang, Qiuyuan Huang, Lei Zhang, Xin Wang, Pengchuan Zhang, Zhe Gan, Jana Diesner, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing metrics based on text-level comparisons fail to assess the quality of captions produced by machines. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a machine-learned text-image grounding model to measure the accuracy of machine-generated captions and their correlation with human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric has higher consistency with human judgments and is more accurate than existing metrics. |
Course Concept Expansion in MOOCs with External Knowledge and Interactive Game (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand course concepts in MOOCs suffer from semantic drifts and lack of knowledge guidance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a boundary search method to search for new concepts via external knowledge base and then use heterogeneous features to verify the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the datasets from Coursera and XuetangX. |
AI2Agent: An End-to-End Framework for Deploying AI Projects as Autonomous Agents (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiaxiang Chen, Jingwei Shi, Lei Gan, Jiale Zhang, Qingyu Zhang, Dongqian Zhang, Pang Xin, Zhucong Li, Xu Yinghui
| Challenge: | a new framework automates deployment and debugging of AI projects . complexity of environment configurations, dependency conflicts, and debuggering issues hinder scalability and adoption. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework that automates AI project deployment . they conducted experiments on 30 AI deployment cases to evaluate its effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces deployment time and improves success rates by reducing human intervention. |