Papers by Lin Shang
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
Neural-Symbolic Inference for Robust Autoregressive Graph Parsing via Compositional Uncertainty Quantification (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models excel at graph semantic parsing with rich annotated data, but generalize poorly to out-of-distribution and long-tail examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositionality-aware approach to neural-symbolic inference informed by model confidence to capture different aspects of the graph prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on an English resource grammar parsing problem on standard in-domain and seven OOD corpora. |
PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute in- formation extractor. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (29.9% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
Retrieval-Augmented Parsing for Complex Graphs by Exploiting Structure and Uncertainty (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval augmentation is effective for large graph parsing tasks, but can fail to identify the most informative exemplars . structure-aware and uncertainty-guided adaptive retrieval (SUGAR) exploits two unique sources of information: structural similarity and model uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware and uncertainty-guided adaptive retrieval approach that exploits structural similarity and model uncertainty to improve retrieval-augmented parsing for complex graph problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves retrieval-augmented parsing for graph parsers with large output graphs and non-trivial structure. |
AutoPKG: An Automated Framework for Dynamic E-commerce Product-Attribute Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.findings-acl)
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Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang, Zhichao Wan, Yi Gao, Yuanming Li, Lin Gui, Wenhao Sun, Cheng Yu
| Challenge: | Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model framework that constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph from multimodal product content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 0.953 WKE for product types, 0.724 WKEs for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization on a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba). |
EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to integrate semantic knowledge into EA to identify entities across different knowledge graphs that refer to the same object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. |
Train a Unified Multimodal Data Quality Classifier with Synthetic Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weizhi Wang, Rongmei Lin, Shiyang Li, Colin Lockard, Ritesh Sarkhel, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Jingbo Shang, Xifeng Yan, Nasser Zalmout, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models are pre-trained on image-text caption data and interleaved document data. |
| Approach: | They propose to train an efficient MLLM as a Unified Mulitmodal Data Quality Classifier to filter image-text caption and interleaved data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables efficient creation of sample-score pairs for caption and interleaved data to train UniFilter. |
BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Ken Gu, Ruoxi Shang, Ruien Jiang, Keying Kuang, Richard-John Lin, Donghe Lyu, Yue Mao, Youran Pan, Teng Wu, Jiaqian Yu, Yikun Zhang, Tianmai Zhang, Lanyi Zhu, Mike Merrill, Jeffrey Heer, Tim Althoff
| Challenge: | Language model-based agents can be used to conduct and support data-driven science, but evaluating them on open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. |
| Outcome: | BLADE evaluates agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions using data from 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature. |
A Span-based Dynamic Local Attention Model for Sequential Sentence Classification (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence classification ignore latent segment structure of document, in which contiguous sentences have coherent semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based dynamic local attention model that captures structural information by supervised dynamic local focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets. |
Generate & Rank: A Multi-task Framework for Math Word Problems (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies formalize MWP as a generation task but mathematical expressions are prone to minor mistakes. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking task for math word problem (MWP) that learns from its own mistakes and distinguishes between correct and incorrect expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on the classical Math23k dataset and is 7% higher than the state-of-the-art. |
Autonomous Aspect-Image Instruction a2II: Q-Former Guided Multimodal Sentiment Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify sentiment polarities of aspects are limited by the limited multimodal data available. |
| Approach: | They propose to use instruction tuning paradigm to combine language and vision data to combine text and image modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on benchmark datasets and in few-shot settings. |
ToxicChat: Unveiling Hidden Challenges of Toxicity Detection in Real-World User-AI Conversation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | toxicity detection has been largely based on social media content, leaving the unique challenges inherent to real-world user-AI interactions insufficiently explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to detect toxicity in real-world user-AI conversations . they compare existing models with social media content to find toxicity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals that existing models fail to recognize toxicity in real-world user-AI conversations. |
Efficient Nearest Neighbor Emotion Classification with BERT-whitening (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-based methods use pre-trained models for similarity search, but they perform poorly in retrieving semantically similar sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric emotion classification method using nearest neighbor retrieval that can be added to any pre-trained model without further training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the pre-trained model by 1.17 F1-macro on two emotion classification datasets. |
Towards Collaborative Neural-Symbolic Graph Semantic Parsing via Uncertainty (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in task-independent graph semantic parsing has shifted from symbolic approaches to neural models, showing strong performance on different types of meaning representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates prior knowledge from a symbolic parser into a decision criterion for beam search to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the in-distribution test set but degrades significantly on long-tail situations while the symbolic parser performs more robustly. |
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Bowen Ding, Yuhan Chen, Jiayang Lyu, Jiyao Yuan, Qi Zhu, Shuangshuang Tian, Dantong Zhu, Futing Wang, Heyuan Deng, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Tao Lin
| 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. |
Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion methods ignore inconsistent representation spaces between natural language and graph structures, leading to duplicate works and time-consuming processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances LLMs for KGC via structure-aware alignment-tuning to align graph embeddings with the natural language space through multi-task contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two KGC tasks across four benchmark datasets. |