Papers by Lin Deng

37 papers
Logit Space Constrained Fine-Tuning for Mitigating Hallucinations in LLM-Based Recommender Systems (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing LLM-based recommender systems rely on standard fine-tuning methodologies, often ignoring hallucination issues during the fine-uning process.
Approach: They propose a logit space constraint-based fine-tuning framework to mitigate hallucination in LLM-based recommenders by incorporating Kullback–Leibler divergence into the training objective.
Outcome: Experiments on two recommendation models with distinct LLM backbones and four real-world datasets show that LCFT reduces hallucination and enhances recommendation performance.
CodeScope: An Execution-based Multilingual Multitask Multidimensional Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Code Understanding and Generation (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for evaluating the code understanding and generation capacities of Large Language Models are insufficient . existing benchmarks focus on a narrow range of popular programming languages and specific tasks .
Approach: They propose an execution-based, multilingual, multitask evaluation benchmark for LLMs . they evaluate coding performance from three dimensions: length, difficulty, efficiency .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers 43 programming languages and eight coding tasks.
Dual Hierarchical Dialogue Policy Learning for Legal Inquisitive Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing systems for conversational AI are user-driven, but in many real-world situations, they do not extract information to achieve its own objectives.
Approach: They propose an inquisitive conversational agent that learns when and how to ask probing questions . they also propose a framework for a conversational ICA specifically tailored to the court .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms single-agent RL baselines on a U.S. Supreme Court dataset.
Aegis:An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Aegis is an advanced LLM-based multi-agent for intelligent functional safety engineering that can perform all phases of a vehicle's lifecycle, including design, development, production, operation, and decommissioning.
Approach: They introduce Aegis: An Advanced LLM-Based Multi-Agent for Intelligent Functional Safety Engineering.
Outcome: The proposed solution can perform Hazard Analysis and Risk Assessment (HARA), document Functional Safety Requirements (FSR), and plan test cases for Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) systems.
Correctable-DST: Mitigating Historical Context Mismatch between Training and Inference for Improved Dialogue State Tracking (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing dialogue state tracking approaches predict the dialogue state of a target turn sequentially based on the ground-truth previous dialogue state.
Approach: They propose a method that predicts dialogue state sequentially based on previous dialogue state . they propose generating a previously “predicted” dialogue state using ground-truth previous dialogue states .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 67.51%, 68.24%, 70.30%, 71.38%, and 81.27% joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4 datasets.
Dynamic Sampling that Adapts: Self-Aware Iterative Data Persistent Optimization for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current data selection paradigms rely on static, externally defined metrics, which fail to adapt to the evolving capabilities of models during training.
Approach: They propose a dynamic sampling framework that aligns training data with the model's intrinsic competence by iterating on real-time feedback.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on eight benchmarks show that SAI-DPO outperforms static baselines at most nearly 6 points, achieving state-of-the-art efficiency with significantly less data.
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction.
Outcome: The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency.
Lightweight Spatial Modeling for Combinatorial Information Extraction From Documents (2023.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets do not cover documents with complex spatial structures and a lack of spatial information for document entity classification.
Approach: They propose a new spatial bias in attention calculation based on the K-nearest-neighbor graph of document entities that limits entities’ attention to their local radius.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in most entity types and is highly parameter-efficient compared to existing methods.
Enhancing Uncertainty-Based Hallucination Detection with Stronger Focus (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for detecting hallucinations in LLMs rely on external knowledge for reference retrieval or require sampling multiple responses for consistency verification.
Approach: They propose a reference-free, uncertainty-based method for detecting hallucinations in Large Language Models that imitates human focus in factuality checking from three aspects: focus on the most informative keywords; focus on unreliable tokens in historical context; focus of token properties such as token type and token frequency.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation metrics and eliminates the need for additional information.
FACT-AUDIT: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Dynamic Fact-Checking Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing fact-checking evaluation methods rely on static datasets and classification metrics, which fail to evaluate justification production and uncover the nuanced limitations of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a framework that adaptively and dynamically assesses LLMs’ fact-checking capabilities by incorporating justification production alongside verdict prediction.
Outcome: Experiments show that the framework differentiates among state-of-the-art LLMs, providing valuable insights into model strengths and limitations in model-centric fact-checking analysis.
Tree of Agents: Improving Long-Context Capabilities of Large Language Models through Multi-Perspective Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models face persistent challenges when handling long-context tasks . existing methods that reduce input have the risk of discarding key information .
Approach: To address this issue, we propose a multi-agent reasoning framework called Tree of Agents . the framework segments input into chunks processed by independent agents .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on long-context tasks.
FLAG-TRADER: Fusion LLM-Agent with Gradient-based Reinforcement Learning for Financial Trading (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive reasoning capabilities in financial tasks, but struggle with multi-step, goal-oriented scenarios in interactive financial markets.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates large language models with gradient-driven reinforcement learning (RL) policy optimization.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance in trading and other financial domain tasks.
AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for temporal reasoning are limited and apply a fixed pipeline to all questions.
Approach: They propose an adaptive temporal reasoning method that dynamically executes reasoning steps based on context and task requirements.
Outcome: Experiments on two temporal QA benchmarks show the proposed method works.
MemeArena: Automating Context-Aware Unbiased Evaluation of Harmfulness Understanding for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation approaches focus on mLLMs’ detection accuracy for binary classification tasks, which often fail to reflect the in-depth interpretive nuance of harmfulness across diverse contexts.
Approach: They propose an agent-based arena-style evaluation framework that provides context-aware and unbiased assessment for mLLMs’ understanding of multimodal harmfulness.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces evaluation biases of judge agents and provides unbiased comparisons of mLLMs’ abilities to interpret multimodal harmfulness.
P-MMEval: A Parallel Multilingual Multitask Benchmark for Consistent Evaluation of LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models showcase varied multilingual capabilities across tasks . previous assessments focused on fundamental natural language processing (NLP) or isolated capability-specific tasks.
Approach: They propose a multilingual multitask benchmark to assess multilingual capabilities . they use a large-scale benchmark covering fundamental and capability-specialized datasets .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark compares models and tasks across languages and tasks and examines knowledge transfer from English to other languages.
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts.
Outcome: The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set.
ICL-Bandit: Relevance Labeling in Advertisement Recommendation Systems via LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) is a common practice to enhance LLM performance on domain-specific tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages large language models to enhance query-ad relevance labeling . they identify and provide superior demonstrations for ICL, thereby improving labeling performance .
Outcome: The proposed method improves query-ad relevance labeling performance by providing demonstrations.
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability.
Approach: They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets.
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.
STSPL-SSC: Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Short Text Clustering with Semantic text similarity Optimized Pseudo-Labels (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for obtaining task-specific labels require prior knowledge of clustering categories and uncontrollable clustering centers.
Approach: They propose a framework for supervised clustering using a discrete process and a robust Contrastive Learning module.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a real-world dataset with just one label per class . the proposed framework is based on k-means clustering and a robust Contrastive Learning module .
The World is Not Binary: Learning to Rank with Grayscale Data for Dialogue Response Selection (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to learning-to-rank response selection are suboptimal due to ignorance of diversity of response quality.
Approach: They propose to use off-the-shelf response retrieval models as automatic grayscale data generators to train response selection models.
Outcome: The proposed approach can be automated without human effort on grayscale data.
Fast Quiet-STaR: Thinking Without Thought Tokens (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance across a range of tasks, but further gains require more than scaling up model sizes or training data.
Approach: They propose a method that gradually reduces the number of thought tokens . this method allows models to internalize more abstract reasoning processes .
Outcome: The proposed framework preserves the benefits of token-level reasoning while reducing computational cost.
A Secure and Efficient Federated Learning Framework for NLP (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing FL frameworks require a trusted aggregator or require heavy-weight cryptographic primitives, which makes the performance significantly degraded.
Approach: They propose a framework that is federated and efficient for NLP . they propose to eliminate the need for trusted entities and achieve better model accuracy .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves better model accuracy and model accuracy than existing FL frameworks.
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks.
Tables as Texts or Images: Evaluating the Table Reasoning Ability of LLMs and MLLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent years have witnessed an explosion of Large Language Models (LLMs), with impressive performance on various NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose to use image-based representations to compare LLMs' performance on table-related tasks such as question-answering and fact-checking to determine their effectiveness.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on image-based representations than on text-based models.
Retrieved Sequence Augmentation for Protein Representation Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using multiple sequence alignments (MSA) to extract evolutionary knowledge is limited.
Approach: They propose to use multiple sequence alignments to augment protein representations . they propose to employ Retrieved Sequence Augmentation to enhance protein representation learning .
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses MSA Transformer by 5% in structural and property prediction tasks while being 373 times faster.
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities.
Approach: They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset.
Open Grounded Planning: Challenges and Benchmark Construction (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on LLM-based planning uses language generation to produce free-style plans . however, these plans are not grounded in an executable set of actions .
Approach: They propose a new task for open grounded planning that asks the model to generate an executable plan based on a variable action set.
Outcome: The proposed task is open grounded planning, which is based on a set of variables.
Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Critical Representation Fine-tuning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) is a proposed method for improving parameter efficiency . however, it yields suboptimal performance, as fixed-position representations have uncertain impact on outputs .
Approach: They propose a method that fine-tunes critical representations in a low-rank linear subspace while freezing the base model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves accuracy of LLaMA-2-7B and ReFT by 18.2 and 3.8 on GSM8K.
MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches focus on diagnostic reasoning based on internal model knowledge or static knowledge bases.
Approach: They propose a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that integrates multi-perspective evidence to generate a diagnostic prediction.
Outcome: The proposed method generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning traces from web search, SOAP-formatted case, and clinical case database.
DeepPlanning: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Agentic Planning with Verifiable Constraints (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing LLM planning benchmarks emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than global constrained optimization.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning that uses local constrained reasoning and global constrained optimization.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems.
Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear.
Approach: They evaluate cross-lingual context retrieval of over 40 large language models . they use cross-linguistic machine reading comprehension as a representative scenario .
Outcome: The results show that open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability . the results also show that their oracle performances improve after training .
Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models demonstrate that the proposed learning framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains matching models in an “easy-to-difficult” scheme.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves the model performance across evaluation metrics on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models.
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: evolving generic Large Language Models into specialized Large Reasoning Models requires effective post-training.
Approach: They propose a plasticity-ceiling framework to harness expert trajectories . they establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard .
Outcome: The proposed framework overcomes stability and premature convergence deficits in synchronized approaches.
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text mining models are fine-tuned by fine-timing a large pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised learning framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large pre-trained language model using knowledge distillation.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks while maintaining comparable performance.
Integrating Disfluency-based and Prosodic Features with Acoustics in Automatic Fluency Evaluation of Spontaneous Speech (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: acoustics, prosody, and disfluency-based features are used to evaluate fluent/disfluent speech . filling pauses and word fragments are used for automatic fluency evaluation .
Approach: They integrate acoustics, prosody, and disfluency-based features into an automatic fluency evaluation task.
Outcome: The proposed model improves when integrated with prosodic features, but not when disfluent speech is detected.

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