Papers by Lei Tan
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
How LLMs React to Industrial Spatio-Temporal Data? Assessing Hallucination with a Novel Traffic Incident Benchmark Dataset (2025.naacl-industry)
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Qiang Li, Mingkun Tan, Xun Zhao, Dan Zhang, Daoan Zhang, Shengzhao Lei, Anderson S. Chu, Lujun Li, Porawit Kamnoedboon
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a high potential to digitize and enhance the health & public services industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cross-lingual benchmark dataset to assess the robustness of state-of-the-art LLMs in the spatio vs temporal domain for traffic incident classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in the spatio-temporal domain and in the non-English context. |
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
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Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
Good Visual Guidance Make A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition and relation extraction suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images are incorporated in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual prefix fusion NeTwork for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction using pluggable visual prefixed visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
PodAgent: A Comprehensive Framework for Podcast Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic audio generation methods struggle to generate podcast-like audio programs effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for creating podcast-like audio programs that generates informative topic-discussion content by designing a multi-agent collaboration system, builds a voice pool and uses LLM-enhanced speech synthesis to generate expressive conversational speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses direct GPT-4 generation in topic-discussion dialogue content, and produces more expressive conversational speech. |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
SiMFy: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for temporal knowledge graph reasoning suffer from low training efficiency and insufficient generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning approach that uses multilayer perceptron to model the structural dependencies of events and adopts a fixed-frequency strategy to incorporate historical frequency during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with faster convergence speed and better generalization ability. |
Dynamic Nonlinear Mixup with Distance-based Sample Selection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment data with mixup are limited by the space of synthetic data and its regularization effect. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic nonlinear mixup with distance-based sample selection which generates multiple sample pairs based on the distance between each sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple public datasets. |
Learning from Diverse Reasoning Paths with Routing and Collaboration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) grows with model size and pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine quality filtering, conditional routing, and cooperative peer teaching to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that QR-Distill is superior to traditional methods. |
Towards Linear Time Neural Machine Translation with Capsule Networks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an endto-end learning approach to machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule network with dynamic routing for linear time Neural Machine Translation . they map the source sentence into a matrix with pre-determined size and apply a deep LSTM network to decode the target sequence from the source representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network achieves comparable results with the Transformer system on English-German and English-French tasks. |
NUMCoT: Numerals and Units of Measurement in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning using Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are not able to handle numerals and units of measurement, but they can be improved by introducing perturbations. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze existing LLMs on processing numerals and units of measurement by perturbing their datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on ancient Chinese arithmetic problems and can handle numeral and measurement conversions. |
Mitigating Cultural Bias in LLMs via Multi-Agent Cultural Debate (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to evaluate large language models fail to address cultural bias in non-Western languages . Chinese prompting shifts bias toward East Asian perspectives rather than eliminating it, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese–English bilingual benchmark and multi-agent vote frameworks that enable explicit "no bias" judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 57.6% average No Bias Rate on Chinese-English benchmark and 86.0% on Arabic CAMeL benchmark. |
GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup. |
KALM: Knowledge-Aware Integration of Local, Document, and Global Contexts for Long Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to infuse knowledge graphs with pre-trained LMs are limited by the input sequence length. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model that leverages knowledge in local, document-level, and global contexts for long document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three long document understanding tasks across 6 datasets/settings. |
An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System (2023.acl-demo)
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Yun Zhu, Xiayu Chen, Lei Shu, Bowen Tan, Xinying Song, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang, Jindong Chen, Ning Ruan
| Challenge: | a cloud-based smart compose system is designed to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a cloud-based smart compose system to improve conversation efficiency . they propose heuristics to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces latency without losing composing quality further. |
STORYTELLER: An Enhanced Plot-Planning Framework for Coherent and Cohesive Story Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiaming Li, Yukun Chen, Ziqiang Liu, Minghuan Tan, Lei Zhang, Yunshui Li, Run Luo, Longze Chen, Jing Luo, Ahmadreza Argha, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Wei Zhou, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for storytelling lack coherence and consistency, compromising the overall storytelling experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that improves the coherence and consistency of automatically generated stories by managing plot nodes and enabling dynamic interactions between different parts of the story. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in 84.33% of the trials. |
Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation (2024.acl-long)
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Songju Lei, Xize Cheng, Mengjiao Lyu, Jianqiao Hu, Jintao Tan, Runlin Liu, Lingyu Xiong, Tao Jin, Xiandong Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal speech synthesis is a key challenge due to the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets and freezes the video modality extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9% with single-modality audio. |
Scaling Behaviors of LLM Reinforcement Learning Post-Training: An Empirical Study in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zelin Tan, Hejia Geng, Xiaohang Yu, Mulei Zhang, Guancheng Wan, Yifan Zhou, Qiang He, Xiangyuan Xue, Heng Zhou, Yutao Fan, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zaibin Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Chen Zhang, Zhenfei Yin, Philip Torr, Lei Bai
| Challenge: | elucidating scaling laws for large language models (LLMs) during pre-training remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They characterize how model scale, data, and compute interact during pre-training . they find that large models consistently demonstrate superior compute and data efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws offer practical guidance for scaling reasoning capabilities through reinforcement learning post-training. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |