Papers by Liangming Pan
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| Challenge: | Recent question generation approaches use the sequence-to-sequence framework to optimize the log likelihood of ground-truth questions using teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize for QG-specific objectives via reinforcement learning to improve question quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the fluency, relevance, and answerability of generated questions. |
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| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems cannot search the whole design space due to the restriction of human-designed components. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gödel Agent framework that allows agents to recursively improve themselves without relying on fixed algorithms or fixed algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses manual crafted agents in performance, efficiency, and generalizability. |
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| Challenge: | Fact-checking real-world claims often requires collecting multiple pieces of evidence and complex multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fact-checking model that decomposes complex claims into simpler sub-tasks that can be solved using a shared library of specialized functions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms seven baselines on two fact-checking datasets and has explicit output programs that benefit human debugging. |
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| Challenge: | Existing dynamic topic models lack the ability to reveal the evolution of topics . Existing models suffer from repetitive topic and unassociated topic issues . |
| Approach: | They propose a new evolution-tracking contrastive learning method that builds the similarity relations among dynamic topics and an unassociated word exclusion method to avoid unassociated topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on downstream tasks and is robust to evolution intensities. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that reinforcement learning can elicit intriguing emergent reasoning behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive survey of the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models . they organize findings into three core dimensions: 1) training dynamics, 2) reasoning mechanisms, and 3) unintended behaviors. |
| Outcome: | This paper synthesizes the mechanistic understanding of large reasoning models into three dimensions . authors outline a roadmap for future studies including improved interpretability and methodologies . |
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| Challenge: | Existing QG datasets are not suitable for educational question generation because the questions are not real questions asked by humans during learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for question generation that contains 1,034 high-quality learner-generated questions seeking an in-depth understanding of the taught online courses in Khan Academy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 1,034 high-quality learner-generated questions seeking an in-depth understanding of the taught online courses in Khan Academy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking systems lack transparency in their decision-making process, making it difficult for users to comprehend their reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a Question-guided Multi-hop Fact-Checking system which asks a series of questions critical for verifying a claim. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a comprehensive report detailing its reasoning process, guided by a sequence of questions, answer pairs, and the source of evidence supporting each question. |
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| Challenge: | Known-unknown questions are characterized by high uncertainty due to the absence of definitive answers. |
| Approach: | They introduce a dataset with known-unknown questions and establish a categorization framework to clarify the origins of uncertainty in such queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improved in distinguishing between known and unknown queries within open-ended question-answering scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems fail to fully leverage the structure of logical tasks throughout the reasoning process, causing bottlenecks in efficiency and efficacy. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-complete reasoning framework, Aristotle, which integrates symbolic expressions and logical rules into the entire reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning frameworks in accuracy and efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | a curse of knowledge can impede communication between experts and laymen. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of expertise style transfer to automate the communication between experts and laymen using an annotated dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task simplifies professional language and improves accuracy and expertise level of laymen descriptions using simple words. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification require large datasets, which can be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training a robust fact verification model by using automatically generated claims that can be supported, refuted, or unverifiable from evidence from Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the demand for human-annotated training data and improves a model's F1 from 50% to 77%, equivalent in performance to 2K+ manually-curated examples. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies solve this challenge by updating benchmarks with newly collected data, but they fail to guarantee contamination-free evaluation as the newly collected knowledge may contain pre-existing knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated anti-leakage benchmarking framework that builds and updates benchmarks without human labor instead of using newly collected data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces the cost of benchmark maintenance to accommodate emerging LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on deductive reasoning, largely overlooking inductive reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the inductive reasoning ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that even the most advanced modelw struggle to master the simplest complexity classes within the subregular hierarchy of functions. |
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| Challenge: | a recent study demonstrates that large language models can be misused for generating credible-sounding misinformation . however, the ability to produce credible text raises concerns regarding their potential misuse . |
| Approach: | They propose three defense strategies to mitigate misinformation generated by Large Language Models . they propose a threat model and simulate potential misuse scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategies have shown promising results, albeit with costs. |
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| Challenge: | Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective strategy to alleviate hallucination of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive RAG model that extracts self-aware uncertainty of large language models from their internal states and invokes retrieval accordingly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing adaptive RAG methods on complex and simple Question Answering datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing training data for multi-hop question answering (QA) is time-consuming and resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that generates human-like multi-hop training data from homogeneous and heterogeneously data sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 61% and 83% of the supervised learning performance for the HybridQA and HotpotQA datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate naturally sounding answers over a broad range of human inquiries, but they often generate answers that contradict real-world facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for annotating and evaluating the factuality of large language models . they propose 'factcheck-bench' which provides a multi-stage annotation scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms several popular LLM fact-checkers in claim, sentence, and document levels. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate the quality of language generation do not provide explicit explanation of their verdicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained explainable evaluation metric for text generation that harnesses human instruction and implicit knowledge of GPT-4 to fine-tune it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all other unsupervised metrics on translation, captioning, data-to-text, and commonsense generation tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results when working individually, and have reduced parameter size and inference times. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary and examine inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based model-driven analysis shows that the model-led model-mediated debates generate more compelling arguments and provide a defensive strategy. |
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims at building a Knowledge Graph (KG) of rich content by linking the equivalent entities from various KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an attributed value encoder to partition a Knowledge Graph into subgraphs to model the various types of attribute triples efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements over 12 baselines in cross-lingual and monolingual datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the benefits of distilling the ability to repair code for both high and low resource languages to determine if the techniques are also applicable in low resource settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques are effective in high- and low-resource languages, but weak in low-level languages. |
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| Challenge: | Modern Natural Language Processing models are sensitive to input perturbations and their performance can decrease when applied to noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose to explain the extent to which a model is affected by an unseen textual perturbation by the learnability of the perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is better at identifying a perturbation (higher learnability) but worse at ignoring it (lower robustness). |
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| Challenge: | Current Large Language Models lack ability to understand table structures and apply precise numerical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented reasoning framework for table-based tasks that integrates LLMs with specialized tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the TOOLTAB dataset, a benchmark for LLMs in table–tool integration. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics and benchmarks to attribute large language models to structured knowledge are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution that improves upon three core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves upon core concerns with conventional attributed LMs. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to an increase in synthetic content generation . the ability to detect LLMs-generated content has become of paramount importance . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a detailed overview of existing detection strategies and benchmarks, scrutinizing their differences and advocating for more adaptable and robust models to enhance detection accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model will be able to detect human-written content in real time. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate conversational question are naive and do not account for the answer span. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating a conversational question from a context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in two different settings compared to existing models . it uses a sentence as the rationale and extracts the answer span from it . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of language refinement focus on narrow, specific linguistic features within isolated sentences, such as grammatical errors and improper word use. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to improve the overall quality of academic writing at paragraph level by integrating automatic feedback into the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves the overall quality of formal academic writing at the paragraph level. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown human-like reasoning abilities but struggle with complex logical problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which integrates large language models with symbolic solvers to improve logical problem-solving by combining them with a self-refinement module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves logical problem-solving by integrating LLMs with symbolic solvers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on single-turn question generation, but few studies have studied the challenges of multiturn QG. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage conversational question generation framework that shortens the context and history of the input and calculates relevance scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on CoQA in answer-aware and answer-unaware settings. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on generating factoid questions relevant to one fact obtainable from a single sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that first constructs a semantic-level graph and then encodes it by introducing an attention-based GGNN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the global structure of the document and facilitates reasoning over multiple facts. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models often ignore external knowledge to generate accurate answers . despite correct groundings, they can rely on wrong grounding or biases to hallucinate . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates human and human user clarifications to improve knowledge alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance and mitigates hallucination by producing user-centered clarifications. |
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| Challenge: | RuleArena assesses the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers airline baggage fees, NBA transactions, and tax regulations. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work has not explored the mechanisms underlying this sensitivity. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models’ reasoning robustness against systematically controlled irrelevant context (IC). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in-distribution and out-of-disttribution scenarios while training with strong distractors. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance Language Models fail to address diverse error types . generic feedback is a bottleneck for addressing diverse errors in reasoning chains . |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative refinement framework that integrates multiple feedback modules . they propose to address errors in reasoning chains by integrating frozen LMs with external tools . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance in Mathematical Reasoning and Logical Entailment by 20% and 18% respectively. |
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| Challenge: | SciAgent surpasses other LLMs with the comparable size by more than 8.0% in absolute accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented scientific reasoning setting that supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets and builds a benchmark to evaluate LLM’s abilities with tool assistance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed setting augments LLMs with scalable toolsets and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. |
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| Challenge: | Current scientific fact-checking benchmarks exhibit several shortcomings, such as biases arising from crowd-sourced claims and an over-reliance on text-based evidence. |
| Approach: | They present a dataset of 1.2K expert-verified scientific claims that require compositional reasoning for verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in table-based pretraining models and large language models. |
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized the NLP field but their knowledge could become incorrect or outdated over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a new practical benchmark for knowledge editing that covers three editing settings of knowledge updates: structured facts, unstructured texts as facts, and extracted triplets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method covers structured facts, unstructured texts as facts, and extracted triplets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on explainable AI focus on post-hoc explanation methods that interpret trained models through external approximations. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize existing approaches into five design paradigms: functional transparency, concept alignment, representational decomposability, explicit modularization, and latent sparsity induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches are categorized into five design paradigms: functional transparency, concept alignment, representational decomposability, explicit modularization, and latent sparsity induction. |
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models are trained exclusively left-to-right, yet they are limited in their ability to factorize text. |
| Approach: | They propose a purely reverse autoregressive language model that factorizes text as a product of left-to-right conditionals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to score forward outputs using reverse posterior estimates. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Complex KBQA lack compositional reasoning capabilities . Existing methods for Complex questions are poor in diversity or scale . |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes around 120K diverse natural language questions . it provides a compositional and interpretable programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions based on the proposed model . |
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| Challenge: | SymbCoT is a framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a Symbolic Chain-of-Thought framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 5 standard datasets with symbolic expressions and rules . it shows that it is more faithful, flexible, and explainable than the current method . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel at complex tasks by breaking down problems into structured reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperparameter-free conciseness score to guide models toward generating correct reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage by 31x on simple problems while improving accuracy by 7% on the hardest problems. |