Papers by Lei Tian
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihang Wang, Xu Huang, Bowen Tian, Yueyang Su, Lei Yu, Huaming Liao, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing context by removing redundant tokens are inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses information bottleneck theory to compress context . they propose to remove redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art . |
ParaMac: A General Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation Framework Leveraging Semantic Constraints and Diversifying Mechanisms (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised methods for paraphrase generation are weak in semantic equivalence or expression diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for unsupervised paraphrase generation that employs multi-aspect equivalence constraints and multi-granularity diversifying mechanisms to achieve good semantic equvalence and expressive diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9.1% and 3.3% absolute gains over previous SOTA on Quora and MSCOCO and can improve to 18.0% and 4.6% on GLUE. |
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Sun, null Ymyang, Xinyi Jiang, Yu Tian, Junnan Zhu, Jiang Zhong, Qin Lei, Jingwang Huang, Haoyang Zeng, Xinyu Zhou, Xin Xiao, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis. |
Learning Personalized Alignment for Evaluating Open-ended Text Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Traditional evaluation metrics rely heavily on lexical similarity with human-written references, showing poor correlation with human judgments and failing to account for alignment with the diversity of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable evaluation framework that evaluates alignment with specific human preferences by providing detailed comments and fine-grained scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GPT-4 in Kendall correlation and accuracy with zero-shot reviewers. |
ZoFia: Zero-Shot Fake News Detection with Entity-Guided Retrieval and Multi-LLM Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited by knowledge cutoff and can generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework that uses a hierarchical salience and saliency-calibrated minimum margin of relevance algorithm to extract core entities accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods on two public datasets. |
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoyun Du, Chen Qian, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Rennai Qiu, Yufan Dang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework can generate better software quality compared to state-of-the-art frameworks. |
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. |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
Attention Consistency for LLMs Explanation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretability methods face limitations such as low resolution and high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer attention consistency score to estimate the importance of input tokens in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed heuristic achieves a favorable trade-off between interpretability quality and computational efficiency . |
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. |
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Shuzheng Si, Zhu Liu, Yingli Shen, Zhitong Wang, Cunliang Kong, Wenhao Li, Yufei Huang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack the ability to integrate structural information into LLMs and output predictions deterministically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which encodes structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of KG Completion datasets on KGs by integrating structural information with LLMs. |
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets. |
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. |
TaCL: Improving BERT Pre-training with Token-aware Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained MLMs produce an anisotropic distribution of token representations . this is not ideal for tasks that require discriminative semantic meanings of distinct tokens - a problem that exists in pre-training models . |
| Approach: | They propose a continual pre-training approach that encourages BERT to learn an isotropic distribution of token representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on a wide range of English and Chinese benchmarks. |
GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural semantic parsing are limited by the semantic gap between natural and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified intermediate representation for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR, which has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation can convert user queries into graphQ IR, which can later be losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. |
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. |