Papers by Linli Xu
Span-level Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Table Filling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on word-level dependencies between aspect and opinion expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level ABSA model which considers consistency of multi-word opinion expressions at the span- level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to identify the sentiment polarity of a given aspect . it is based on a table filling method and a regularizer to guarantee consistency . |
Jointly Masked Sequence-to-Sequence Model for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | masked language models have been used for natural language processing tasks but few studies have adopted it in the sequence-to-sequence models. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine encoder and decoder to train a masked sequence-to-sequence model . they propose to train the encoder more rigorously by masking the encoded input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 27.69/32.24 BLEU scores on English-German/German-English tasks with 5+ times speed up compared with an autoregressive model. |
Unifying Continuous and Discrete Text Diffusion with Non-simultaneous Diffusion Processes (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate NeoDiff’s superior performance compared to baselines of non-autoregressive continuous and discrete diffusion models, iterative-based methods and autoregressive diffusion-based approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a discrete and continuous diffusion model that integrates the strengths of discrete, continuous and continuous approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model unifies the theories of discrete and continuous diffusion models, offering a more principled and effective framework for text generation. |
LaDiC: Are Diffusion Models Really Inferior to Autoregressive Counterparts for Image-to-Text Generation? (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text-to-image generation have been underperforming in image-totext generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a split BERT to create a dedicated latent space for captions and integrates a regularization module to manage varying text lengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MS COCO dataset with 38.2 BLEU@4 and 126.2 CIDEr . |
Dynamic Prefix as Instructor for Incremental Named Entity Recognition: A Unified Seq2Seq Generation Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental problem in information extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) task aimed at updating a model to extract entities from an expanding set of entity type candidates by employing a dynamic prefix as a task instructor to guide the generative model. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method preserves task-invariant knowledge while adapting to new entities with minimal parameter updates. |
Semantic-Preserving Abstractive Text Summarization with Siamese Generative Adversarial Net (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on attention mechanism, but they are not suitable for abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a siamese generative adversarial net for abstractive text summarization which preserves the main semantics of the source text and the target summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can preserve the main semantics of the source text and target summary. |
DiffS2UT: A Semantic Preserving Diffusion Model for Textless Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for speech generation are not efficient due to low information density of speech data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate discrete diffusion models into speech generation tasks . they propose to apply diffusion forward process while employing diffusion backward process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to the auto-regressive baselines with significantly fewer decoding steps (50 steps). |
Generative Pre-trained Speech Language Model with Efficient Hierarchical Transformer (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results indicate that GPST significantly outperforms the existing speech language models in terms of word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical transformer that quantizes audio waveforms into two distinct types of discrete speech representations and integrates them within a transformer architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing speech language models in word error rate, speech quality, and speaker similarity. |
Generative Frame Sampler for Long Video Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video large language models (LMMs) employ an impedance of thousands of frames to understand long videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module integrated with VideoLLMs to facilitate efficient lengthy video perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module boosts the performance of open-source VideoLLMs and proprietary assistants on long-form video benchmarks. |
RICO: Improving Accuracy and Completeness in Image Recaptioning via Visual Reconstruction (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuchi Wang, Yishuo Cai, Shuhuai Ren, Sihan Yang, Linli Yao, Yuanxin Liu, Yuanxing Zhang, Pengfei Wan, Xu Sun
| Challenge: | Existing recaptioning methods suffer from inaccuracies due to missing fine-grained details. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines captions through visual reconstruction using a text-to-image model and a visual reconstruction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on CapsBench and CompreCap by 10%. |
Empowering Diffusion Models on the Embedding Space for Text Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work adapts diffusion models to textual data by diffusing on the embedding space. |
| Approach: | They propose an embedding diffusion model based on Transformer to solve the problem of embeddable space and denoising model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more efficient than previous methods on seminal text generation tasks and is superior to existing models. |
Few-shot Temporal Pruning Accelerates Diffusion Models for Text Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods for text generation ignore the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in slow sampling rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without additional training by using a Bayesian optimization approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves 400x acceleration even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization yielding a competitive performance even with minimum sampling steps. |
CoCGAN: Contrastive Learning for Adversarial Category Text Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on synthetic and real category text generation datasets demonstrate that CoCGAN can achieve significant improvements over the baseline category text generators. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate contrastive learning into adversarial category text generation by using a discriminator to optimize a contrastive learn objective to capture more flexible data-to-class relations and data- to-data relations among training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on synthetic and real category text generation datasets. |
Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification with Horizontal and Vertical Category Correlations (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to hierarchical multi-label text classification ignore vertical category correlations or exploit dependencies across levels without considering horizontal correlations . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-label text classification framework that considers both vertical and horizontal category correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on real-world HMTC datasets with significant improvements over baselines. |
MVP: Enhancing Video Large Language Models via Self-supervised Masked Video Prediction (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has attempted to transfer reinforcement learning paradigms to Video Large Language Models (MLLMs) but these methods lack explicit supervision for intrinsic temporal coherence and inter-frame correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel post-training objective: Masked Video Prediction (MVP) that requires the model to reconstruct a masked continuous segment from a set of challenging distractors and employs Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a fine-grained reward function to enhance the model's understanding of video context and temporal properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves video reasoning capabilities by reinforcing temporal reasoning and causal understanding. |