Papers by Longtao Huang
Syntax-guided Localized Self-attention by Constituency Syntactic Distance (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyuan Hou, Jushi Kai, Haotian Xue, Bingyu Zhu, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Xinbing Wang, Zhouhan Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Transformers is implicitly learning syntactic information from data, albeit is highly dependent on the quality and scale of the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-guided localized self-attention model that allows directly incorporating grammar structures from an external constituency parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation performance on a variety of datasets, from small to large datasets and with different source languages. |
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)
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Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol. |
DAFNet: Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion for Sequential Model Editing in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Taolin Zhang, Qizhou Chen, Dongyang Li, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results, but still suffer from hallucination, i.e., the generation of false information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sequential model editing that aims to rectify mistakes continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines in single-turn and sequential editing. |
KEHRL: Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Language Representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | General pre-trained language models (PLMs) leverage relation triples from knowledge graphs (KGs) and integrate external data sources into language models via self-supervised learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn Knowledge-Enhanced language representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (KEHRL) to detect positions for knowledge injection and integrate external knowledge into the model to avoid injecting inaccurate or irrelevant knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect essential positions in texts for knowledge injection and integrate external knowledge into the model to avoid injecting inaccurate or irrelevant knowledge. |
Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Textual adversarial samples are often misrepresented in research on security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial samples to evaluate their methods on security tasks to demonstrate the real-world concerns rather than developing impractical methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has higher practical value than the current benchmark. |
Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Tianlong Li, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
TRELM: Towards Robust and Efficient Pre-training for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating external knowledge into language models do not prioritize learning embeddings for entity-related tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incorporating external knowledge into pre-training models that utilize entity-related tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces pre-training time by 50% and outperforms other KEPLMs in knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. |
Large Language Models Can be Lazy Learners: Analyze Shortcuts in In-Context Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential for in-context learning, but their robustness and performance on downstream tasks remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the reliance of LLMs on shortcuts or spurious correlations within prompts for downstream tasks and find larger models are more likely to utilize shortcuts in prompts during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is “lazy learner” and more likely to use shortcuts in prompts during inference. |
SpanMlt: A Span-based Multi-Task Learning Framework for Pair-wise Aspect and Opinion Terms Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect terms and opinion terms are key problems of fine-grained aspect-based sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract aspect and opinion terms as pairs from a sentence . they use shared spans to extract the terms under supervision of span boundaries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both aspects and opinion terms extraction tasks. |
Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained models with parameters frozen are based on input-side adaptation, which requires thousands of API queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting to provide only the inference APIs for users . they argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 200x speed-up. |
Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)
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Haolei Xu, Haiwen Hong, Hongxing Li, Rui Zhou, Yang Zhang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Yongliang Shen, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks. |
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) are slow and cumbersome, resulting in catastrophic knowledge forgetting and degradation of model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method that converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining the overall performance of the model. |
On the Role of Long-tail Knowledge in Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models (2024.acl-short)
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Dongyang Li, Junbing Yan, Taolin Zhang, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods focus on improving the task performance, without fine-grained process of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects long-tail knowledge in large language models by analyzing retrieved documents and enhancing queries indiscriminately with retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves over 4x speedup in average inference time and consistent performance improvement in downstream tasks compared to existing pipelines. |
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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Bingxiang He, Ning Ding, Cheng Qian, Jia Deng, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Haiwen Hong, Huan-ang Gao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Huimin Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks. |
Prototypical Verbalizer for Prompt-based Few-shot Tuning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based tuning for pre-trained language models has shown its effectiveness in few-shot learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototypical verbalizer which learns prototype vectors as verbalizes by contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verbalizer outperforms existing verbalizing methods on topic classification and entity typing tasks. |
Multimodal Knowledge Learning for Named Entity Disambiguation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing attempts to model multimodal information at the knowledge level are lacking multimodal annotation data against the large-scale unlabeled corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal knowledge learning to link ambiguous mentions with textual and visual contexts to a predefined knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves improvements over the state-of-the-art methods on two public MNED datasets. |
How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors pose significant risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior serving as a foundation for future research. |
Adversarial Text Generation by Search and Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Guoyi Li, Bingkang Shi, Zongzhen Liu, Dehan Kong, Yulei Wu, Xiaodan Zhang, Longtao Huang, Honglei Lyu
| Challenge: | Existing text generation methods only use heuristic replacement strategies or language models to generate replacement words at the word level. |
| Approach: | They propose a search and learning framework for Adversarial Text Generation by Search and Learning to evaluate the robustness of natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are significantly superior to the most advanced methods in terms of attack efficiency and adversarial text quality. |
Text Editing as Imitation Game (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text editing is an important domain of processing tasks to edit the text in a localized fashion, such as text simplification. |
| Approach: | They propose a nonautoregressive decoder for state-to-action demonstrations that parallels the decoding while retaining the dependencies between tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the autoregressive baselines on a suite of Arithmetic Equation benchmarks in terms of performance, efficiency, and robustness. |
Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning for Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to capture emotions in conversation (ERC) lack the correlation between emotions and semantics, resulting in many challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (SPCL) loss for the ERC task . they use a Prototype Network to leverage the supervised contrastive learning approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms CoG-BART's proposed approach on three widely used benchmarks and shows that it is effective on multiple scenarios. |
Multiple Instance Learning for Offensive Language Detection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect offensive content are expensive and require massive manual effort. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach capable of utilizing the bag-level labeled data for offensive language detection by an annotation-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect offensive language on both bag-level and sentence level. |
Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting hallucinations require large numbers of observations to be retrieved, increasing response times. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods in efficiency and precision of hallucination detection. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |
UniPSDA: Unsupervised Pseudo Semantic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on shallow unsupervised data generated by token surface matching regardless of global context-aware semantics of the surrounding text tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose an Unsupervised Pseudo Semantic Data Augmentation mechanism to enrich training data without human intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on general zero-shot cross-lingual understanding tasks on different languages without human intervention. |