Papers by Liang Dou
Boosting Large Language Models with Continual Learning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on improving the performance of domain-specific models based on the target dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-based Continual Learning (LLM-CL) model for ABSA that learns the target domain’s ability while maintaining the history domains’ abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains new state-of-the-art over 19 datasets. |
MINER: Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Limao Xiong, Yicheng Zou, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Liang Qiao, Zhanzhan Cheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition models are feature-engineering and machine learning based. |
| Approach: | They propose a new NER learning framework that uses entity mentions to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on OOV entities on various settings and datasets. |
HELENE: Hessian Layer-wise Clipping and Gradient Annealing for Accelerating Fine-tuning LLM with Zeroth-order Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face memory challenges due to the high cost of backpropagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization that matches memory usage to inference . they propose scalable and memory-efficient zeroth order (ZE) optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping as a second-order pre-conditioner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average speedup of 20 over MeZO on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B. |
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ming Zhang, Yuhui Wang, Yujiong Shen, Tingyi Yang, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Shihan Dou, Qinhao Chen, Zhiheng Xi, Zhihao Zhang, Yi Dong, Zhen Wang, Zhihui Fei, Mingyang Wan, Tao Liang, Guojun Ma, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset. |
RLSeek: Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for RAG Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoheng Huang, Dacheng Wen, Yutao Zhu, Xiaoying Lian, Yushi Liang, Kai Hao, Nan Li, Liangjie Zhang, Qi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | Recent work addresses this problem by training span-level hallucination detectors using reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly enforces active evidence seeking during CoT reasoning by requiring quotation of relevant source segments at each verification step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves hallucination span detection performance with limited reasoning overhead and improved robustness in out-of-domain settings. |
Little Giants: Synthesizing High-Quality Embedding Data at Scale (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Synthetic data generation is an increasingly popular way of training models without the need for large, manually labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns open-source small models to efficiently generate large-scale embedding data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art embedding models by using only 1/10 of the GPT API calls. |
mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality Synthetic Data (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal embedding models encode multimedia inputs into latent vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize multimodal multilingual data using a multimodal large language model . they identify three criteria for high-quality synthetic multimodal data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on the MMEB Benchmark and the XTD benchmark. |
APEX: Learning Adaptive Priorities for Multi-Objective Alignment in Vision-Language Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dongliang Chen, Xinlin Zhuang, Junjie Xu, Luojian Xie, Zehui Wang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Haolin Yang, Liang Dou, Xiao He, Xingjiao Wu, Ying Qian
| Challenge: | APEX optimizes for text-to-image generation by combining learning potential, conflict penalty, and progress need. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that stabilizes heterogeneous rewards and dynamically schedules objectives . they propose a method that achieves better Pareto trade-offs across four heterogenous objectives based on P3 Adaptive Priorities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves better pareto trade-offs across four heterogeneous objectives while maintaining competitive OCR accuracy. |
MoCa: Modality-aware Continual Pre-training Makes Better Bidirectional Multimodal Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to embed multimodal models face limitations such as suboptimal causal attention in VLMs and limited diversity in training objectives and data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for transforming pre-trained VLMs into bidirectional multimodal embedding models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across MMEB and ViDoRe-v2 benchmarks and exhibits strong scalability with both model size and training data on MMEF. |
LLM-KT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Knowledge Tracing via Multi-Level Plug-and-Play Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn behavioral sequences fail to capture complex behavioral patterns due to a lack of deep reasoning capabilities and world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the reasoning power of Large Language Models with the sequential modeling strengths of traditional KT methods via multi-level plug-and-play alignment. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on four standard datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on state-of-the-art questions. |