Papers by Lei Yan

46 papers
Dolphin: Moving Towards Closed-loop Auto-research through Thinking, Practice, and Feedback (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that AI-assisted research methods can improve research efficiency . a closed-loop framework is used to enhance the automation level of scientific research .
Approach: They propose a closed-loop LLM-driven framework to enhance the automation level of scientific research.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the efficiency of scientific research by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation.
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge.
Approach: They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks .
Outcome: ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering.
Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Reasoning Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains, but how their safety benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored.
Approach: They propose a safety-aware reasoning paradigm that integrates a pivot token-based safety-based reasoning mechanism into LLMs’ generation process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the safety of large language models against jailbreak queries while minimizing attacks and maintaining the original performance.
Rethinking Smoothness for Fast and Adaptable Entity Alignment Decoding (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs rely on entity and relation embeddings . Fig. 1 shows how to decode knowledge graph in under 6 seconds .
Approach: They propose a framework that only utilizes entity embeddings to decode knowledge graphs.
Outcome: The proposed framework reconstructs KG representation by maximizing smoothness of entity embeddings.
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.
Translating a Math Word Problem to a Expression Tree (D18-1)

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Challenge: Sequence-to-sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models have been successfully applied to automatic math word problem solving.
Approach: They propose an equation normalization method to normalize duplicated equations and propose an ensemble model to combine their advantages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models on the math word problem solving.
What Does Infect Mean to Cardio? Investigating the Role of Clinical Specialty Data in Medical LLMs (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: S-MedQA is an English question-answering dataset designed for benchmarking large language models in fine-grained clinical specialties.
Approach: They propose to use an English medical question-answering dataset to benchmark large language models in clinical specialties.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is designed to benchmark large language models in medical specialties.
R³A: Reinforced Reasoning for Relevance Assessment for RAG in User-Generated Content Platforms (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to query–document relevance assessment are limited . ambiguous user intent and asymmetric relevance are challenges for RAG platforms .
Approach: They propose a decomposed reasoning model for relevance assessment that decomposes query intent into intent inference and evidence grounding.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on offline benchmarks and achieves significant gains in large-scale online A/B testing.
Writing-RL: Advancing Long-form Writing via Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled strong performance in long-form writing, but current training paradigms remain limited.
Approach: They propose an Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Learning framework to advance long-form writing capabilities beyond SFT.
Outcome: Experiments on 7B-scale writer models show that Writing-RL improves long-form writing performance over strong SFT baselines.
UniRE: A Unified Label Space for Entity Relation Extraction (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing joint entity relation extraction models setup two separate label spaces for the two sub-tasks .
Approach: They propose to eliminate the different treatment on the two sub-tasks’ label spaces by applying a unified classifier to predict each cell’s label.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves competitive accuracy with the best extractor and is faster.
CONE: An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework for Long Video Temporal Grounding (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on video temporal grounding for long videos is limited by existing datasets.
Approach: They propose a query-guided window selection strategy and a coarse-to-fine mechanism to speed up inference for long videos.
Outcome: The proposed framework accelerates inference time by 2x on Ego4D-NLQ and 15x on MAD while keeping SOTA results.
QaDialMoE: Question-answering Dialogue based Fact Verification with Mixture of Experts (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing research on fact verification focuses on news, tables and Wikipedia passages.
Approach: They propose a question-answering dialogue based fact verification with mixture of experts that exploits questions and evidence effectively in the verification process.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms previous approaches on three benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to generate image captions with user intention are still under exploration.
Approach: They propose a model that connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a loop manner and engages explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance on a trace-controlled image captioning task.
Hierarchical Policy Optimization for Simultaneous Translation of Unbounded Speech (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing synthesis methods cannot guarantee data quality.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical reward that balances translation quality and latency objectives by combining supervised fine-tuning data with supervised inputs.
Outcome: The proposed model can reuse key-value caches across both modalities and eliminate redundant feature recomputation.
Think-Search-Patch: A Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Framework for Repository-Level Code Repair (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Large language models suffer from multiple-file coding scenarios with strong inter-file dependencies . experimental results show that large language models exhibit inadequate performance in multi-file scenarios .
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for repository-level code repair . they use a dataset to generate standardized patches based on the key snippets .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and repair success on SWE-bench Lite . it surpasses models with larger size in managing extensive code contexts and fixing bugs spanning across multiple files.
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans.
Approach: They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts.
From Observation to Understanding: Front-Door Adjustments with Uncertainty Calibration for Enhancing Egocentric Reasoning in LVLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods that adapt LVLMs to egocentric tasks overlook critical agent-environment interactions, limiting their ability to perform egoic reasoning.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot paradigm to enhance egocentric reasoning by simulating human causal reasoning by formalizing ego-centric reasoning using a structural causal model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves egocentric reasoning abilities on six tasks.
Tuning Less, Prompting More: In-Context Preference Learning Pipeline for Natural Language Transformation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to natural language transformation (NLT) tasks face significant challenges, such as the computational costs of leveraging large pre-trained models and the limited generalization ability of fine-tuned smaller models.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines prompting with fine-tuning to enhance smaller models by integrating In-Context Examples from retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across MT and TST tasks.
Qsnail: A Questionnaire Dataset for Sequential Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Questionnaires are a professional research methodology used for qualitative and quantitative analysis of human opinions, preferences, and behaviors.
Approach: They propose a questionnaire-based dataset that consists of 13,168 human-written questionnaires.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains 13,168 human-written questionnaires gathered from online platforms.
SURVEYFORGE : On the Outline Heuristics, Memory-Driven Generation, and Multi-dimensional Evaluation for Automated Survey Writing (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: SURVEYFORGE automates survey paper writing, but quality gap between LLM-generated and human-written surveys remains significant.
Approach: They propose a survey tool that automatically generates and refines human-written surveys.
Outcome: Experiments show that SURVEYFORGE outperforms previous work such as AutoSurvey in outline quality and content quality.
DecEx-RAG: Boosting Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Decision and Execution Optimization via Process Supervision (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Recent advances in outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) have shown strong performance, but this approach still suffers from inefficient exploration, sparse reward signals, and ambiguous global reward feedback.
Approach: They propose a model that models RAG as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and introduces an efficient pruning strategy to optimize data expansion.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods and achieves an average performance improvement of 6.2% across six datasets.
Modeling Intra-Relation in Math Word Problems with Different Functional Multi-Head Attentions (P19-1)

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Challenge: Several deep learning models have been proposed for solving math word problems (MWPs) but their approaches to capturing features are not specifically designed for MWP.
Approach: They propose to use a group attention mechanism to extract global features, quantity-related features, quantities-pair features and question-related feature in MWPs.
Outcome: The proposed approach performs significantly better than previous state-of-the-art methods and boosts performance from 66.9% to 69.5% on Math23K with training-test split, from 65.8% to 66.99% on Math 23K with 5-fold cross-validation and from 69.99% to 76.1% on MAWPS.
Just Ask One More Time! Self-Agreement Improves Reasoning of Language Models in (Almost) All Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective on complex reasoning tasks, but the naive greedy decoding used in CoT prompting causes the repetitiveness and local optimality.
Approach: They propose a generalizable ensemble-optimization method that uses a set of reasoning paths to prompt a language model one more time to determine the optimal answer.
Outcome: The proposed method can be generalized to almost all scenarios where the type of input questions and answer format of reasoning paths may be unknown.
BAR: A Backward Reasoning based Agent for Complex Minecraft Tasks (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on forward reasoning based planning, but this paradigm doesn't work well for complex tasks.
Approach: They propose to decompose a task into easily executed steps by planning and use a backward reasoning based agent to make the planning starting from the terminal state.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods and the proposed modules in a virtual environment that simulates complex tasks based on real-world scenarios.
Understanding the RoPE Extensions of Long-Context LLMs: An Attention Perspective (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Enabling LLMs to handle lengthy context is currently a research hotspot . a notable challenge limiting further customization is the inability of LLM to utilize context beyond pretrained length due to the inherent flaw of rotary position embedding (RoPE).
Approach: They propose to extend the RoPE from an attention perspective and on two benchmarking tasks.
Outcome: The proposed extension of the RoPE improves extrapolation and retrieval errors.
Act as you think: Reinforcing Consistent Reasoning in Medical Visual Question Answering (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances have improved the accuracy of medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) however, the high stakes nature of the medical domain has precipitated a shift towards interpretability and transparency of reasoning processes.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards framework that rewards internal consistency and logical coherence.
Outcome: The proposed framework rewards internal consistency and logical coherence, and is highly versatile, the authors show.
Spectral Insights into Data-Oblivious Critical Layers in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have identified critical layers linked to specific functions or behaviors, limiting their use to post-hoc settings.
Approach: They propose a data-oblivious approach to identify intrinsic critical layers in pre-fine-tuned LLMs by analyzing representation dynamics via Centered Kernel Alignment.
Outcome: The proposed approach identifies critical layers in pre-fine-tuned models . layers with significant shifts in representation space are also those most affected during fine-tuning .
FlowSearch: Advancing Deep Research with Dynamic Structured Knowledge Flow (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: FlowSearch is a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GAIA, HLE, GPQA and TRQA benchmarks and is available to download.
LLMs know their vulnerabilities: Uncover Safety Gaps through Natural Distribution Shifts (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current safety training focuses on teaching models to reject harmful queries, but recent research shows that adversarial attacks or jailbreak methods bypass these safety mechanisms.
Approach: They propose to use a new attack method to craft multi-turn toxic prompts that gradually lead LLMs to reveal unsafe content.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in diversity, effectiveness, and efficiency across aligned LLMs.
KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models for multilingual biomedical training are monolingual, resulting in limited cross-lingual capability.
Approach: They propose a model that transforms a multilingual biomedical corpus into a biomedically domain using a knowledge-anchored approach.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms monolingual and multilingual models in cross-lingual scenarios.
UCFE: A User-Centric Financial Expertise Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

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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.
DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient .
Approach: They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%.
Graph-to-Tree Learning for Solving Math Word Problems (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing tree-based neural models do not capture the relationships and order information among the quantities well.
Approach: They propose a novel deep learning architecture that combines the merits of the graph-based encoder and tree-based decoder to generate better solution expressions.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on two available datasets significantly.
OTExtSum: Extractive Text Summarisation with Optimal Transport (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Extractive text summarisation aims to select salient sentences from a document to form a short yet informative summary.
Approach: They propose to formulate extractive text summarisation as an Optimal Transport (OT) problem and use it to obtain an optimal summary that minimises the transportation cost to a given document.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and learning-based methods on multiNews, PubMed, BillSum, and CNN/DM datasets.
Half-S: Halving the Scale for Near-Lossless 4-Bit LLM Training (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing 4-bit training pipelines rely on max-scaling, which causes representation collapse . despite this, there are limitations in the accuracy of 4-bit LLM training .
Approach: They propose a scaling strategy that uses half-scaling as a hardware-friendly default . they propose fp4 support that allows for a faster scaling of large language models .
Outcome: The proposed scaling strategy narrows the gap between theoretical optimum and BF16 while maintaining the efficiency benefits of 4-bit training.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach: They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
A Finer-grain Universal Dialogue Semantic Structures based Model For Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Abstractive summarization models have achieved impressive results on document summarizing tasks, but their performance on dialogue modeling is poor due to the crude and straight methods for dialogue encoding.
Approach: They propose a model that leverages Finer-grain universal Dialogue semantic Structures to model dialogue and generate better summaries.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms various dialogue summarization approaches and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) ROUGE results on a SAMsum dataset.
ZigZagKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression for Long-context Modeling based on Layer Uncertainty (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to accelerate inference of Large Language models (LLMs) are limited in their ability to retain key tokens as input length increases.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages layer uncertainty to allocate budget size for each layer to reduce memory usage.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces memory usage of the KV caches to only 20% when compared to full KV inference while achieving nearly lossless performance.
SEMIROUTER: Sparse-Data Enhanced Routing for Adaptive Multi-LLM System (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing routing methods suffer from poor scalability and dependence on datasets for training . energy footprint is also considered in the decision to implement our new LLM routing framework .
Approach: They propose a new LLM routing framework that dynamically allocates queries to the most appropriate LLM.
Outcome: The proposed method improves data efficiency, adaptability, and routing accuracy compared to existing methods.
ATM: Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent System Makes a Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generator (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are proven to benefit a lot from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) due to noisy and fabricating content, it is inevitable that RAG systems are vulnerable to these noises and prone to respond incorrectly.
Approach: They propose to optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RGG) with an Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent system (ATM) ATM steers the Generator to have a robust perspective of useful documents for question answering with the help of an auxiliary Attacker agent.
Outcome: The proposed system improves the retrieval-augmented generator with an auxiliary Attacker agent and can discriminate useful documents amongst fabrications.
DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: DA-Code is a code generation benchmark designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks.
Approach: They propose a code generation benchmark specifically designed for LLMs on agent-based data science tasks.
Outcome: The benchmark performs better than existing frameworks, but lacks accuracy . it is based on real-world data, and includes examples that cover a wide range of tasks .
CC-Tuning: A Cross-Lingual Connection Mechanism for Improving Joint Multilingual Supervised Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing fine-tuning approaches that focus on English-centric training corpora often introduce implicit cross-lingual alignment, overlooking the potential for more profound, latent-level cross-linguistic interactions.
Approach: They propose a multilingual fine-tuning paradigm that explicitly establishes a cross-lingual connection mechanism at the latent level.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms vanilla SFT and offers a strong latent-level alternative to data-level augmentation methods.
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)

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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.
ENPAR:Enhancing Entity and Entity Pair Representations for Joint Entity Relation Extraction (2021.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for joint entity relation extraction use multitask learning frameworks, but annotations for additional tasks are hard to obtain.
Approach: They propose a pre-training method to improve the joint extraction performance with just extra entity annotations.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on ACE05, SciERC, and NYT and outperformed BERT on other tasks.
Taking a Deep Breath: Enhancing Language Modeling of Large Language Models with Sentinel Tokens (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies have explored compression and accumulation methods to compress contexts, but these methods lose useful context information during the compression process, leading to performance degradation.
Approach: They propose a method that allows LLMs to take a deep breath and insert a special token at the end of each chunk.
Outcome: Experiments on language modeling and out-of-domain tasks validate the superiority of the proposed method.

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