Papers by Lian Liu
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning with large language models have popularized Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) a framework that converts sequential LCoTs into hierarchical tree structures enables deeper structural analysis of LLM reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts sequential LCoTs into hierarchical tree structures and enables deeper structural analysis of LLM reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to analyze LLM reasoning in a variety of tasks and models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (MDS) is a critical task with wide-ranging applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark for multimodal dialogue summarization based on image-sharing dialogues, corresponding summaries and human judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first to identify and formalize key evaluation dimensions specific to MDS. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing fashion recommendation systems struggle with the unique challenges of the fashion domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential fashion recommendation framework that leverages a pre-trained large language model enhanced with recommendation-specific prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves fashion recommendation performance on Amazon fashion. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current studies have focused on fine-tuning, but the use of instruction tuning is not as effective as fine-cuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonality-aware instruction tuning strategy to cluster instruction datasets into distinct groups with three proposed metrics Task, Embedding and Length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy boosts an average improvement of 2.1% on the general domain and 5.2% on the special domain. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in agents have enabled multi-file, multi-language, and dependency-aware AI coding. |
| Approach: | They propose an SWE-level benchmark for AI coding in the Huawei Ascend CANN software stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is constructed from real-world CANN repositories and consists of over 400 task instances spanning multiple file, multi-language, and execution-aware coding challenges. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual token pruning lack insight into the intrinsic property of the vision encoder . et al., 2017: 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic token pruning method that trains without training . they propose 'HiPrune' method which prunes visual tokens according to their attention . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 99.3% of task accuracy with only 1/3 of the tokens . it reduces inference FLOPs by 58.7% and maintains 99.99% accuracy with 2/9 tokens. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing automated ICD coding systems face several fundamental challenges due to the limited availability of publicly available Chinese ICD datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese ICD coding dataset and a multi-agent framework to reformulate ICD as a joint disease-procedure coding task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world Chinese ICD coding datasets and 1.7B-parameter models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Lack of human preference labels remains a significant bottleneck when applying RLHF to a downstream domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human priors encoded in Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to derive RL rewards in the absence of manual annotations. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three public and one private medical dialogue datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the competitive RLAIF in improving LLM diagnostic accuracy. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess human emotion are limited by the subjective nature of emotion perception, limiting the robustness of existing models. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module that enhances MLLMs’ ability to tackle compound and context-rich emotion tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves MLLMs' ability to tackle compound and context-rich emotion tasks and the Compound Emotion QA dataset shows it performs well across both benchmarks and evaluation frameworks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Consistency learning (CL) has proven to be a valuable technique for improving the robustness of conditional sentence generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that guides models to learn consistency in alignment with their current capacity to differentiate between features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy delivers +2.0 accuracy point improvement compared with vanilla IT and +0.7 COMET scores over traditional CL methods in MT tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce a new embedding model for semantic retrieval of more than 100 working languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a new embedding model that supports multi-lingual, cross-lingual and long-document retrieval . they propose integrating relevance scores from different retrieval functionalities into the teacher signal . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superior performance on multilingual, cross-lingual, and long-document retrieval benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based on Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) enforce uniform expert sizes, creating a rigidity that fails to align computational costs with varying token-level complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture of heterogeneous grouped experts (MoHGE) that allows for flexible, resource-aware expert combinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches the performance of existing Mixture-of-Experts architectures while maintaining balanced GPU utilization. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite the growing demand for multimodal retrieval, there is a lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis method that leverages vision language models and open-domain images to generate high-quality data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on 70 more datasets and can scale up. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that traditional retrievers struggle with reasoningintensive tasks such as personal assistants and scientific research. |
| Approach: | They propose a new data synthesis method that overcomes the triviality problem prevalent in previous synthetic datasets and propose 'ReMixer', a data fusion method that generates 82K high-quality training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Product quantization (PQ) is a widely used technique for ad-hoc retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a match-oriented product quantization with a multinoulli contrastive loss objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maximizes matching probability of query and ground-truth key, compared with previous methods on non-supervised datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering focus on generating simple questions and neglecting the integration of essential knowledge, such as relevant sentences within documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to expand the diversity of generated multi-hop questions by sampling varied knowledge compositions within a given context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the overall accuracy of knowledge composition selection by 3.9% on hotpotQA and 2WikiMultihopQA datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models often require domain-specific fine-tuning to address targeted tasks, which risks degrading their general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use self-generated dis-preferred weakness data to enhance model performance with a targeted training approach that minimizes interference with existing knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach ensures no reduction in generic capacity and achieves superior performance on downstream tasks compared to existing methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods focus on one dataset, e.g., Newstest dataset in each year’s WMT Metrics Shared Task. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a single dataset to evaluate the performance of automatic translation metrics. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the rankings of metrics vary when the evaluation is conducted on different datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated that explicit step-by-step thinking can substantially improve performance on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates preliminary thoughts for input queries before document retrieval. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Dense retrieval requires discriminative embeddings to represent the semantic relationship between query and document. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach that performs unsupervised adaptation of large language models for dense retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on a variety of dense retrieval benchmarks and is available on github. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that encoding more syntactic information does not lead to better performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize pareto-optimal models by formalizing it as a multi-objective optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is better than a baseline method on two NLP tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for preference optimization of large language models use pairs of positive and negative samples, but the quality of positive samples may become similar during training, complicating preference learning. |
| Approach: | SeaPO introduces error types commonly occurring in large language models to improve preference learning. |
| Outcome: | SeaPO introduces error types into model Preference Optimization to improve model performance . negative samples are more erroneous than positive samples, and preference-based training mitigates errors . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics focus on turnlevel quality, which is not well suited for open-end dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to measure the performance of a dialogue system by computing the distributionwise distance between its generated conversations and real-world conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics correlate better with human judgments than existing metrics on dialogue systems. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluation benchmarks based on predefined domains and human-labeled data face limitations in addressing evaluation needs for emerging domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated information retrieval benchmark based on predefined domains and human-labeled data . AIR-Bench is automated and Heterogeneous with three key features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on predefined domains and human-labeled data. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | representative ReAct-style approaches lack explicit System-2 reasoning for deep analysis and handling complex edge cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a software agent framework that preserves full reasoning history while compressing historical reasoning content into concise Reasoning Digests. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed framework sets a new standard for 7B-8B models on SWE-Bench-Verified using only 2.2k trajectories and 896 tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for processing long contexts are ineffective due to their inherent context window limitations and the computational burden of extensive key-value activations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for processing long context information-seeking tasks via query-guided ACtivation REfilling (ACRE) a bi-layer KV Cache is constructed where the layer-1 cache compactly captures global information and the layer-2 cache provides detailed, localized information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in both performance and efficiency on a variety of long-context information-seeking datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge-intensive long texts struggle with issues like hallucinations, topic incoherence, and significant latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented long text generation framework with writing P**lanning and I**nformation to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a freshWiki-2024 dataset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle with highly specialized situations that require extensive domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates additional information from an LLM-based generator to enhance query performance and train the retriever to better discriminate the relevant documents identified by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by a large margin and leads to substantial improvements in retrieval quality across a wide range of application scenarios. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting LLM-Generated text suffer from distribution misalignment and limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical framework utilizing supervised subspace learning to extract compact features and construct conditional semantic distributions based on syntactic structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior in cross-domain, cross-model, and adversarial scenarios. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing facial forgery detection methods focus on binary classification or pixel-level localization, providing little semantic insight into the nature of the manipulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal task that localizes forged regions and generates natural language explanations grounded in editing process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task localizes forged regions and generates natural language explanations grounded in editing process. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in slow-thinking reasoning models have shown exceptional performance in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables models to automatically adjust Chain-of-Thought (CoT) length based on problem difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework penalizes inefficiency on simple problems while incentivizing deep reasoning for complex ones. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) show strong capabilities in complex reasoning, yet their marginal gains on evidence-dependent factual questions are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta-Reasoning informed alignment framework that quantifies state-transition probabilities along the model’s thinking process and constructs a transition-aware implicit reward that reinforces beneficial reasoning patterns while suppressing defective ones at the atomic thinking segments. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations of four factual QA datasets and one long-form factuality benchmark show that MR-ALIGN consistently improves accuracy and truthfulness while reducing misleading reasoning. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms, consumer-to consumer (C2C), is mainly targeting individual sellers. |
| Approach: | They develop an intelligent product listing tool that generates product descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation is an important technique for personalized news service. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a large-scale news recommendation dataset from Microsoft News . they demonstrate that news recommendation relies on the quality of news content understanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 1 million users and more than 160k English news articles, each of which has rich textual content such as title, abstract and body. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing semantic similarity methods struggle to accurately identify semantically equivalent steps in domain-specific contexts like mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective approach that identifies and prunes semantically equivalent actions during LLM reasoning search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces token consumption while improving reasoning efficiency and accuracy on Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct on GSM8K. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are robust in contextual understanding but their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to prune PLMs . they prune less critical connections using conventional pruning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms SparseGPT and Wanda under identical sparsity. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal retrieval models are lacking in visual representations of multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a visualized information retrieval paradigm where multimodal information is represented by a unified visual format called Screenshots for various retrieval applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a large dataset of screenshots from diverse sources . it is compared with existing models and lays a solid foundation for the new model . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods treat three modal features equally, without distinguishing the importance of different modalities. Existing models split the video into frames, leading to missing the global acoustic information. |
| Approach: | They propose a global Acoustic feature enhanced Modal-Order-Aware network to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two public datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | ambiguity, polysemy, or uncertainty remain significant challenges in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework that integrates LLM semantic priors with continuous fuzzy membership degrees to create an explicit interaction between probability-based reasoning and fuzzy membership reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates semantic priors with continuous fuzzy membership degrees . it allows ambiguous inputs to be gradually transformed into clear and interpretable decisions . |