Papers by Ling Liu
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| Challenge: | Existing classification and regression models that only extract finer-grained information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may not be effective for Alzheimer's disease (AD). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a 3D Adapter in a Vision Transformer to extract the patient's EHR information and questions related to the disease as text prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can discriminate and predict the corresponding MMSE score based on the extracted brain structural information and textual content . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect mental manipulations are limited due to complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to detect mental manipulations using large language models using intent-aware prompting by capturing the intents of participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing RS agents built on general-purpose LLMs are domain-agnostic, resulting in brittle and error-prone workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced memory evolution mechanism that bootstraps RS agents with pre-distilled domain knowledge and iteratively integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the new model improves tool-use performance and accuracy . iteratively, iteration of the model integrates online experience for robust multi-step tool execution . |
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| Challenge: | Current long-context large language models lack citations to support their responses, making verification difficult due to potential hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf LLMs to automatically construct long-context QA instances with precise sentence-level citations and leverage this pipeline to construct a large-scale SFT dataset for LQAC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate responses with fine-grained citations on the fly, surpassing existing models including GPT-4o. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research in mechanistic interpretability has revealed that Large Language models contain disentangled, human-understandable components. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that first identifies causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects “Feature-Resonant Data” that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks while using only 50% of the data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align pre-trained LLMs with instructions for one property are difficult to fine-tune. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-experts-based fusion mechanism that models alignment as a controllable drift within the subspace, guided by a drift-regularization loss to balance competing alignment dimensions. |
| Outcome: | Extensive evaluations of three benchmark datasets show that H3Fusion outperforms each individually aligned model by 11.37% and provides stronger robustness compared to the state-of-the-art LLM ensemble approaches by 13.77% and model-merging approaches by 6.18 %. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning continual tasks do not cache history data, which makes the problem more challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates a small portion of private parameters and learns them with a shared pre-trained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is comparable to existing methods and comparable to those using historical data. |
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that our approach outperforms the SOTA methods in improving the interpretability of text classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose an enhanced variational word masks approach that exploits the Variational Information Bottleneck to obtain task-specific words. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method outperforms the SOTA methods in improving the interpretability of the model. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this alignment involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) Existing approaches involve using RLHF to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels . however, RLRF is susceptible to instability during fine- tuning and presents challenges in implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune large language models with human preferences to achieve precise control of model behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAHF can be used to capture and manipulate representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values rather than being confined to a single concept or function. |
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| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise prompt tuning method that uses a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens to generate an instance-dependent prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieves state-of-the-art by tuning only 0.035% parameters on 14 datasets. |
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| Challenge: | morphological inflection models have been successful with shared tasks . but they fail at generalizing inflation patterns when trained on a limited number of lemmata . |
| Approach: | They find that standard models fail at generalizing inflection patterns when trained on a limited number of lemmata and asked to inflect previously unseen lemma. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform well on morphological inflection tasks if training data covers a diversity of lemmata or some variant of the input lemma has been witnessed during training. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to evaluate the correctness of non-parametric knowledge when it differs from internal memorization, leading to knowledge conflicts during response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight alignment method to leverage multi-source knowledge based on retrieval relevance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four datasets show that the proposed method outperforms RAG by 4-10% in accuracy without any extra component. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from multiple-file coding scenarios with strong inter-file dependencies . experimental results show that large language models exhibit inadequate performance in multi-file scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for repository-level code repair . they use a dataset to generate standardized patches based on the key snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and repair success on SWE-bench Lite . it surpasses models with larger size in managing extensive code contexts and fixing bugs spanning across multiple files. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that FIRE outperforms previous methods for building knowledge-grounded retrieval-based chatbots . a method called Filtering before iteratively referring is used to ground a conversation on background knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for grounding conversation on background knowledge . they use context filter and knowledge filter to make context and knowledge aware . experimental results show that FIRE outperforms previous methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on two datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing mainstream methods for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition ignore the rich and complementary information lying in the intermediate layers of pre-trained language models and domain-invariant information is easily lost during transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture of short-channel distillers to fully interact the rich hierarchical information in the teacher model and to transfer knowledge to the student model sufficiently and efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows great generalization and compatibility across languages and fields. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive ability to role-play humans and replicate complex social dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient agent communication language induction for social simulations that reduces token consumption by over 20%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces token consumption by over 20% while preserving human language. |
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| Challenge: | Extensive evaluation of modern large language models shows performance gain over component LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a diversityoptimized LLM ensemble method with three unique properties . they introduce the focal diversity metric to capture diversityperformance correlation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the best-performing ensemble on four benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Currently, studies on bias and fairness in natural language processing focus on a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across languages for individual attributes. |
| Approach: | They adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for race, religion, nationality, and gender. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model favors groups that are dominant in each language's culture, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-source neural machine translation neglect inconsistencies between sources of information. |
| Approach: | They propose a source invariance network to learn invariant information of parallel sources . they propose to integrate such network with multi-encoder based multi-source NMT methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves clear gains in translation quality and captures implicit invariance between different sources. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that decomposing complex problems into simple subtasks has significantly boosted the performance of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-training framework that distills synthetic task decompositions and fine-tunes smaller LLMs via supervised and reinforcement-learning objectives to improve complex reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on GSM8k and MATH benchmarks and shows that it can improve generalization capabilities on out-of-domain datasets. |
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the safety implications of large language models in diplomatic positions . it identifies potential risks and ideological biases that could arise from LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based multi-agent system for diplomatic position analysis . they propose ethical constraint measures to enhance the safety of LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system assesses the safety implications of large language models in diplomacy . it reveals that LLMs could exhibit a strong bias towards interests, leading to unsafe decisions . |
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| Challenge: | LLaVA-7B demonstrated a decline in safety alignment ability on multi-modal inputs compared to its LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to recover alignment ability from LLM backbone while preserving functional capabilities of VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers alignment ability that is inherent in the LLM backbone with minimal impact on fluency and linguistic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for labeling relational facts require significant expert labor to write relation-specific patterns, which makes them too sophisticated to generalize quickly. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pattern diagnosis framework that can summarize and refine relation-specific patterns with human experts in the loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can summarize and refine high-quality relational patterns from noise data with human experts in the loop. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their capabilities through function-calling (FC) however, obtaining and annotating real function-called data is challenging, and synthetic data from existing pipelines suffers from unreliable APIs, limited tool scalability, insufficient diversity, and weak quality control. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for generating FC training data using reliable tools and a multi-agent framework that supports a dialogue generation system that produces conversations spanning diverse scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms open-source models in in-domain FC performance and out-of-domain generalization while reaching FC capabilities comparable to some of the latest API-based models. |
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to commonsense reasoning are limited due to limited answer scope. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve a commonsense question without a pre-defined answer scope . they leverage pre-trained language models to iteratively retrieve reasoning paths on the external knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance on two commonsense benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | In supervised learning of morphological patterns, the strategy of generalizing inflectional tables into more abstract paradigms has been proposed as an efficient method to deduce the inflection of unseen word forms. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize inflectional tables into more abstract paradigms by aligning the longest common subsequence found in an inflection table with the longest lexeme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches linguist intuitions about what an inflectional paradigm is and can reconstruct missing inflections and generalize and group the witnessed patterns into a model of more abstract paradigmatic behavior of lexemes. |
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| Challenge: | Existing compression approaches prioritize tokens based on local saliency metrics to decouple prefill computation from decoding memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware KV cache compression framework that prioritizes tokens based on local saliency metrics to decouple prefill computation from decoding memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves long-range dependencies and retrieval robustness. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for AD detection are too expensive and time-consuming to cover all potential patients. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning method to obtain effective text representations based on monolingual embeddings of BERT and a cross-lingual data augmentation method by building autoencoders to learn the text representation shared by both languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other methods on a Mandarin AD corpus and achieves 81.6% detection accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-party conversations rely on addressee labels and can only be applied to an ideal setting where addresses are missing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that maximizes addressee deduction expectation in heterogeneous graph neural networks for MPC generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on Ubuntu IRC channel benchmarks on the task of MPC generation under a common and challenging setting where addressee labels are missing. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to the contextual position of information in input. |
| Approach: | They introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank) which estimates a model’s intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set and reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks show that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures. |
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| Challenge: | EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions, especially for vulnerable human users with psychological disorders. |
| Approach: | EmoAgent is a multi-agent AI framework designed to evaluate and mitigate mental health hazards in human-AI interactions. |
| Outcome: | EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions. |
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| Challenge: | Annotation errors that stem from various sources are usually unavoidable when performing large-scale annotation of linguistic data. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the feasibility of using a deep learning model to detect annotator errors in morphological data sets that contain inflected word forms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects typographic errors, linguistic confusion errors and self-adversarial errors on four languages. |
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and strict context limits. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use where context length quickly becomes a bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to fine-tuning neural models that scales and biases the representation produced at each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 25,700 compared to full parameter fine-tuning and by . 32 compared with LoRA. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on in-context learning have focused on quantifying the uncertainty associated with the model's response, but they neglect the complexity of the LLM and the uniqueness of in-constitut learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify the uncertainty associated with in-context learning and propose corresponding estimation method to quantify both types of uncertainties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method offers an unsupervised way to understand the prediction of in-context learning in a plug-and-play fashion. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text-to-speech (TTS) synthesize speech with acoustic features . autoregressive models have problems with word skipping and repeated reading . non-autoregressive acustic models lack probabilistic modeling and unimodal characteristics of Gaussian distribution don't conform to true distribution of aural features, which restricts the diversity of generated prosodic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-speaker acoustic model that hierarchically models speech prosodic features and controls different prosodic styles to guide prosody prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models in naturalness and achieves superior synthesis speed compared to baseline models. |
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| Challenge: | Part-of-Speech (POS) tags are routinely included in many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use POS tags to examine morphological learning in low-resource languages . they find that POS tagging improves joint segmentation and glossing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is tested on two identical datasets with the Transformer architecture. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods on understanding multi-party conversations typically embed interlocutors and utterances into sequential information flows or use superficial graph structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method which adapts Transformer-based pre-trained language models for universal MPC understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can adapt Transformer-based pre-trained language models for universal MPC understanding. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for learning morphology have limited their use to languages with publicly available structured data, such as online dictionaries like Wiktionary. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that generates entire morphological paradigms from IGT input and a language expert cleaning noisy IGT data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task speeds up the process and generates entire morphological paradigm tables from IGT input. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to natural language inference rely on simple reading mechanisms for independent encoding of the premise and hypothesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel bidirectional dependent reading network to efficiently model the relationship between a premise and a hypothesis during encoding and inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods by a considerable margin on the Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for personalized dialogues rank responses according to their semantic relevance with the given context. |
| Approach: | They propose a dually interactive matching network (DIM) for presenting personalities of dialogue agents in retrieval-based chatbots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model by 14.5% and 27.7% on a PERSONA-CHAT dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on personas are pre-defined and hard to obtain before a conversation . a new task aims to detect speaker persona based on conversational text . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to detect speaker personas based on conversational text . they build a dataset for SPD and propose utterance-to-profile matching networks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms baseline models and utterance-to-profile (U2P) matching networks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing federated learning frameworks require substantial data and computational resources to develop large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that distributes a quantized version of the model’s parameters during training and combine it with a popular fine-tuning method to significantly reduce communication costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables accurate estimations for parameter updates while preventing clients from accessing a model whose performance is comparable to the centrally hosted one. |
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| Challenge: | In this position paper, we argue that human evaluation of generative large language models (LLMs) should be a multidisciplinary undertaking that draws upon the insights from disciplines such as user experience research and human behavioral psychology to ensure that the results are reliable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for human evaluation of generative large language models that takes into account usability, aesthetics and cognitive biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the framework proposed by Deutsch and alnajjar . it is aimed at ensuring that human evaluation is accurate in the age of generative AI . |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at generalized reasoning, but lack the ability to accumulate experiences and maintain narrative coherence over long horizons. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified memory architecture that transcends static vector similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in temporal and multihop reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods lack the capability for continuous learning and self-evolution from interactions, limiting the diversity and adaptability of attack strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework capable of discovering, retrieving, and evolving attack strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines in a black-box setting. |
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| Challenge: | Neural network models are usually very data-hungry and performance of such models can suffer when labeled data is not available. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide models with additional analogy sources to strengthen analogy-formation . they propose to combine the analogy motivated approach with data hallucination or augmentation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on state-of-the-art results on 46 languages, especially in low-resource settings. |