Papers by Liang Feng

41 papers
CACL: Community-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Contrastive Learning for Social Media Bot Detection (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for social media bot detection neglect community structure and poor model generalization due to the relatively small scale of the dataset.
Approach: They propose a framework that constructs social networks as heterogeneous graphs and uses community-aware modules to mine hard positive and hard negative samples for supervised graph contrastive learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on three social media bot benchmarks.
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images.
Approach: They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks.
Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to composable text operations often require plug-and-play . a single LM can perform arbitrary text operation composition in the latent space .
Approach: They propose an efficient approach for composable text operations in the latent space of text . they connect pretrained LMs to the laten space and adapt them to the space .
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on existing methods in the latent space of text.
I-MCTS: Enhancing Agentic AutoML via Introspective Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing LLM-based agents struggle with low diversity and suboptimal code generation.
Approach: They propose an approach that iteratively expands tree nodes through an introspective process that meticulously analyzes solutions and results from parent and sibling nodes.
Outcome: The proposed approach shows a 4% improvement in performance compared to the strong open-source AutoML agents.
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless"
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently.
Outcome: The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks.
Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge distillation use a two-stage paradigm: general distillation with a task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation using augmented task- specific corpus.
Approach: They propose a contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval to improve student learning.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the GLUE benchmark and shows that it is better than generalized corpus and augmented task-specific corpus.
Deep Attention Diffusion Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text classification based on graph neural networks (GNNs) consider only one-hop neighborhoods and low-frequency information within texts, which suffer from over-smoothing issues if many graph layers are stacked.
Approach: They propose a deep attention diffusion Graph Neural Network model to learn text representations by bridging the chasm of interaction difficulties between a word and its distant neighbors.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods on standard benchmark datasets on a set of textual features.
Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on equally treating the contribution of each modality or statically using text as the dominant modality to conduct interaction, which neglects the situation where each modal may become dominant.
Approach: They propose a Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework (KuDA) that uses sentiment knowledge to guide the model dynamically selecting the dominant modality and adjusting the contributions of each modality.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to highlight the contribution of dominant modality through the correlation evaluation loss.
MT3: A Synergistic Multi-Task RL Framework for Specializing MLLMs in Text Image Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Text Image Machine Translation (TIMT) is a critical subfield of machine translation . it requires accurate optical character recognition, robust visual-text reasoning, and high-quality translation a challenge .
Approach: They propose a multi-task optimization framework to specialize MLLMs into expert TIMT models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on the latest in-domain MIT-10M benchmark.
CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing concept reasoning related datasets suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage.
Approach: They propose a concept reasoning for large language models with modeledge leakage prevention and context leakage preventive methods to improve the models' conceptual reasoning abilities.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the existing models and reasoning methods, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy compared to CoT and showing better granularity.
Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Historical analogies are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world.
Approach: They propose a historical analogy acquisition task that uses large language models to acquire historical analogies.
Outcome: The proposed method mitigates hallucinations and stereotypes when LLMs generate historical analogies.
From Hypothesis to Publication: A Comprehensive Survey of AI-Driven Research Support Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies has inspired researchers to explore how AI can accelerate and enhance research.
Approach: They organize the relevant studies into three main categories: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication.
Outcome: The authors summarize the current state of research in three main areas: hypothesis formulation, hypothesis validation, and manuscript publication.
Examining False Positives under Inference Scaling for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in language models have led to significant improvements in mathematical reasoning across benchmarks.
Approach: They analyze the prevalence of false positives in language models by using heuristic evaluation methods . they find that false positive models produce correct final answers but with flawed deduction paths .
Outcome: The proposed model performance improvements are based on the proposed model and its evaluation metrics.
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints.
Approach: They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications.
Alleviating Hallucinations from Knowledge Misalignment in Large Language Models via Selective Abstention Learning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) suffer from severe hallucination issues due to the knowledge misalignment between the pre-training stage and the supervised fine-tuning stage.
Approach: They propose a training objective with an abstention mechanism that selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token.
Outcome: The proposed model selectively rejects tokens that misalign with the desired knowledge distribution via a special [REJ] token.
Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning quality but at the cost of efficiency.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead.
Outcome: The proposed framework yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks while remaining highly efficient.
Visually-Guided Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RLVRs lack visual faithfulness due to text-dominated reasoning . a novel framework to reinforce visual focus during policy optimization is proposed .
Approach: They propose a framework to reinforce visual focus during policy optimization using visual attention compensation mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework exhibits better visual activation and superior performance in multimodal reasoning and visual-dependent tasks.
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from multimodal hallucinations . however, the generated hallucines could influence the models’ subsequent generation .
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations and a method to revise the output distribution of LVLs with the one derived from the residual visual input.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the performance of open-source LVLMs by 31%, indicating that they are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions.
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains.
Approach: They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs.
Outcome: The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods.
C2PO: Diagnosing and Disentangling Bias Shortcuts in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to solve large language models address stereotypical and structural biases in isolation . however, prior paradigms address these in isolation, often at the expense of exacerbating the other .
Approach: They propose a framework to tackle latent spurious feature correlations within input that drive erroneous reasoning shortcuts.
Outcome: The proposed framework mitigates stereotypical and structural biases while preserving robust general reasoning capabilities.
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using structured attention, a model can learn dialogue structure in unsupervised fashion.
Approach: They propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion.
Outcome: The proposed model learns semantic structures similar to templates used to generate a dialogue corpus on two-party datasets and on multi-party dialogues, disentangling dialogues without human annotation.
RGR-KBQA: Generating Logical Forms for Question Answering Using Knowledge-Graph-Enhanced Large Language Model (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) face hallucination problems, resulting in low accuracy.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-generate-retrieve framework that uses a Retrieve-Generate framework to retrieve factual knowledge from a knowledge graph.
Outcome: Experimental results show that RGR-KBQA improves on CWQ and WebQSP datasets.
AlignedCoT: Prompting Large Language Models via Native-Speaking Demonstrations (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs are delicate and elusive in prompt words and styles.
Approach: They propose an LLM-acquainted prompting technique that includes proficient "native-speaking" they propose to use in-context learning to prompt LLMs to perform high-performance reasoning .
Outcome: The proposed technique achieves step-wise prompts in zero-shot scenarios while maintaining the prompt quality.
Length-Adaptive Distillation: Customizing Small Language Model for Dynamic Token Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to accelerate inference speed are model compression and dynamic computation (e.g., dynamic token pruning).
Approach: They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that produces a customized small language model for dynamic token pruning.
Outcome: The proposed framework can make the small language model more customized for dynamic token pruning and achieve better speed-performance trade-off.
DeepPlanner: Scaling Planning Capability for Deep Research Agents via Advantage Shaping (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to planning involve implicit planning or introduce explicit planners without systematically optimizing the planning stage.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end RL framework that enhances the planning capabilities of deep research agents.
Outcome: Experiments show that DeepPlanner improves planning quality and achieves state-of-the-art results under a lower training budget.
Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss.
Approach: They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant.
Outcome: The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting.
RelCLIP: Adapting Language-Image Pretraining for Visual Relationship Detection via Relational Contrastive Learning (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing visual relationship detection models only use numeric ids of relation labels for training, but ignore semantic correlation between labels.
Approach: They propose a visual Relationship prediction framework that transfers natural language knowledge from Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training models to enhance the relationship prediction.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves visual relationship prediction by matching semantic correlations with relation triplets.
G-Cap: A Game Character Caption Generator (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) primarily focus on real-world scenarios, leaving surreal, highly stylized, and semantically hybrid virtual-world situations significantly underexplored.
Approach: They propose to use a manually annotated benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world.
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates LVLMs’ ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world.
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content.
Outcome: The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context.
Prompts Can Play Lottery Tickets Well: Achieving Lifelong Information Extraction via Lottery Prompt Tuning (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on information extraction tasks focuses on one specific task, but in real-world scenarios, new data of different IE tasks and domains come in a stream over time.
Approach: They propose a parameter- and deployment-efficient prompt tuning method to evaluate the UIE system under a “lifelong learning” setting.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to learn new tasks without forgetting old ones and expand knowledge and functionalities without retraining the whole system.
Length Extrapolation of Transformers: A Survey from the Perspective of Positional Encoding (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to enhance length extrapolation of large language models have been developed, but a systematic survey is lacking.
Approach: They propose to examine the effects of positional encoding on length extrapolation.
Outcome: The proposed methods improve the extrapolation of large language models, but they are still lacking a systematic survey.
COIG-P: A High-Quality and Large-Scale Chinese Preference Dataset for Alignment with Human Values (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing Chinese preference datasets suffer from limited scale, restricted domain coverage, and insufficiently rigorous data validation.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based data annotation pipeline with no human intervention to annotate Chinese preference datasets.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline outperforms existing Chinese preference datasets on AlignBench and Chinese Reward Benchmark.
Speeding Up Neural Machine Translation Decoding by Cube Pruning (D18-1)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation suffers from slow translation speed due to the large search space . a trade-off has to be made between translation quality and speed, argues a new study .
Approach: They apply cube pruning technique to speed up dynamic programming into neural machine translation to speed it up.
Outcome: The proposed method can translate faster on GPUs and CPUs with better translation quality than naive beam search.
MultiLingPoT: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs through Multilingual Program Integration (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Program-of-Thought is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems.
Approach: They propose a multilingual programme reasoning method that uses program instead of natural language in reasoning and proposes to integrate multilingual integration into the training and inference.
Outcome: The proposed method improves individual language’s reasoning accuracy by 2.5% and improves performance by 8%.
Advancing Large Language Model Attribution through Self-Improving (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Teaching large language models to generate text with citations to evidence sources requires high-quality attribution data, which is costly and labor-intensive.
Approach: They propose a framework for iteratively improving the attribution capability of large language models (LLMs) by attributing output to verifiable sources.
Outcome: Experiments on three open-domain question-answering datasets show that START improves in aggregating information across multiple sources.
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty.
Outcome: Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect.
RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Several perspectives of robustness for pre-trained language models have been studied independently, but lacking a unified consideration in multiple perspectives.
Approach: They propose a technique to enhance the multi-perspective robustness of LMs by introducing adversarial perturbation while the model parameters are selectively updated upon their relative importance.
Outcome: The proposed technique improves the robustness of LMs by incorporating four perspectives on model robustness.
Attend, Select and Eliminate: Accelerating Multi-turn Response Selection with Dual-attention-based Content Elimination (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models can be used to perform multi-turn response selection, but they can be expensive.
Approach: They propose a framework and a strategy that progressively selects and eliminates unimportant content under context-response dual-attention.
Outcome: The proposed method can effectively speed-up SOTA models without much performance degradation and shows a better trade-off between speed and performance than previous methods.
SELP: A Semantically-Driven Approach for Separated and Accurate Class Prototypes in Few-Shot Text Classification (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for few-shot text classification focus on enhancing separation of prototypes without taking semantic relationships into account.
Approach: They propose to utilize semantically enhanced labels to calibrate class Prototypes . they propose a center loss method to enhance intra-class compactness .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on eight few-shot text classification datasets.
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes .
Approach: They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers .
Outcome: The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models .

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