Papers by Miao Xu
Parameter-free and Accessible Prompt Learning to Enhance Adversarial Robustness for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized downstream vision-language tasks including classification, object detection, and segmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for text prompts at the word level rather than optimizing continuous textual embeddings to boost adversarial robustness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms hand-engineered prompts with average gains of +4.9% and +5.8%. |
Penetrating Linguistic Disguises: A Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework for Fine-Grained Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Flexible word boundaries and linguistic obfuscation, particularly slang, challenge precise span-level hate speech detection in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework that maps slang to explicit hate semantics and uses task-specific branches to mitigate feature interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ambiguity by mapping obscure slang to explicit hate semantics. |
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chaoyue He, Xin Zhou, Yi Wu, Xinjia Yu, Yan Zhang, Lei Zhang, Di Wang, Shengfei Lyu, Hong Xu, Wang Xiaoqiao, Wei Liu, Chunyan Miao
| Challenge: | ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge. |
| Approach: | They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks . |
| Outcome: | ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering. |
BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised defense methods rely on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised model of malicious behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects diverse attack types across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to baselines. |
Latent-Optimized Adversarial Neural Transfer for Sarcasm Detection (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for sarcasm detection are limited due to the difficulty in acquiring ground-truth annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized latent optimization strategy that allows different losses to accommodate each other and improves training dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms transfer learning and meta-learning baselines and achieves 10.02% performance gain on the iSarcasm dataset. |
SAM-NER: Semantic Archetype Mediation for Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition (ZS-NER) remains brittle under domain and schema shifts, where unseen label definitions misalign with a large language model’s intrinsic semantic organization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that stabilizes cross-domain transfer through an intermediate, domain-invariant archetype space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the CrossNER benchmark show that SAM-NER consistently outperforms strong prior ZS-NER baselines in cross-domain settings. |
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Yujing Wang, Jian Miao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fei Xu, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models only produce pedantic responses, which lacks emotion and attraction compared with the responses with polite style, positive and negative sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates and content templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on evaluation metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Structure-Aware Generative Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on temporal reasoning models neglect the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating robust generalization capabilities. |
RevMUX: Data Multiplexing with Reversible Adapters for Efficient LLM Batch Inference (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have brought a great breakthrough to the natural language processing community, but their high throughput demands make them difficult to handle concurrent queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient data multiplexing framework that integrates a reversible design in the multiplexer and can be reused to perform reverse operations and restore individual samples for classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining satisfactory classification performance. |
SMiLE: Schema-augmented Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for linking knowledge graphs lack contextual information in entity neighborhoods, which leads to false prediction results. |
| Approach: | They propose a Schema-augmented Multi-level contrastive LEarning framework to conduct knowledge graph link prediction using a knowledge graph schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a knowledge graph schema and is compared against state-of-the-art datasets. |
PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that training with CAD may lead models to overly focus on modified features while ignoring other important contextual information. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contrastive learning to promote global feature alignment and learning counterfactual clues to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on out-of distribution (OOD) datasets. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Deja vu: Contrastive Historical Modeling with Prefix-tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-based methods for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning struggle to balance textual knowledge and temporal information with expensive purpose-built training strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive historical modeling framework with prefix-tuning for TEmporal Reasoning that feeds history-contextualized text into the pseudo-Siamese encoders to strike a textual-temporal balance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance on four transductive and three few-shot inductive TKGR benchmarks. |
AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask (2026.acl-long)
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Bohan Lin, Kuo Yang, Zelin Tan, Yingchuan Lai, Chen Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Miao Yu, Xu Wang, Yudong Zhang, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems fail to consistently outperform strong single-a agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-aggent message handoffs. |
| Approach: | They propose an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four main errors in multi-agent interactions as data gaps, signal corruption, referential drift and capacity gaps as primary sources of failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module outperforms existing systems on five benchmarks and is architecture-agnostic. |
RelEdit: Evaluating Conceptual Knowledge Editing in Language Models via Relational Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to reason about related conceptual knowledge effectively, despite a lack of model-level relational reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess concept-level and instance-level relational reasoning abilities of edited models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains the best scores on the memory-based in-context editing baseline, MICE, suggesting a promising direction for model editing. |
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of neural table-to-text models due to the limited source tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-structureaware text generation model with pretrained language model and propose TASD to bridge the gap between the structured table and text input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between the structured table and text input and generates accurate and fluent descriptive texts on two public datasets. |
Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification Using Latent Space Geometry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on predictive shortcuts that hold in training data but break under distribution shifts, leading to large performance drops for minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms abstract biases into interpretable geometric anchors without auxiliary classifiers by manipulating latent space geometry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and improves worst-group accuracy by over 20% on the CivilComments dataset. |
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks, but their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate counterfactuals based on key factors including intrinsic properties and prompt design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the strengths and weaknesses of large language models (LLMs) and identifies factors that influence their ability to generate counterfactuals. |
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Hu Yiwen, Huatong Song, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Yang Lu, Xu Miao, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
pFedGPT: Hierarchically Optimizing LoRA Aggregation Weights for Personalized Federated GPT Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with data heterogeneity and adapt shared global knowledge to individual client needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Hierarchical Bayesian Optimization (HBO) for fine-grained, personalized LoRA aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on personalized FL benchmarks while introducing only minimal (approx. 4%) additional optimization overhead. |
Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language modeling is a fundamental task in natural language processing, applications include machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a cosine regularization method to solve the representation degeneration problem by analyzing the limitations of the proposed method and then propose an alternative regularization technique to tackle the problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in language modeling and image captioning. |
Pre-trained Language Model with Prompts for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) focus on extracting information from timestamps and insufficiently utilizing implied information in relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph completion model with prompts that converts quadruples into pre-trained language inputs and prompts to make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information. |
Multi-modal Action Chain Abductive Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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Mengze Li, Tianbao Wang, Jiahe Xu, Kairong Han, Shengyu Zhang, Zhou Zhao, Jiaxu Miao, Wenqiao Zhang, Shiliang Pu, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing models for Abductive Reasoning are limited in their ability to infer the most plausible explanation of incomplete known phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language task that aims to imagine the most plausible event by spatio-temporal grounding in past video and infer the hypothesis of subsequent action chain layer by layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing video-language models in terms of effectiveness on the proposed dataset. |
SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to continuous-space reasoning focus on hard token decoding and suffer from catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates instance-specific soft thought tokens as the initial chain of thoughts and maps them into the LLM’s representation space via a trainable projection module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLM reasoning performance through supervised, parameter-efficient fine-tuning. |
CLLE: A Benchmark for Continual Language Learning Evaluation in Multilingual Machine Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Continual Language Learning (CLL) are limited due to the complexity of the task and the lack of unified benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual Language Learning Evaluation benchmark CLLE in multilingual translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective when compared with other strong benchmarks. |
Learning Neural Templates for Recommender Dialogue System (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Jian Miao, Yingying He, Yining Chen, Xiubo Geng, Fan Liang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural models have shown promising progress on this task, but key challenges remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can decouple dialogue generation from item recommendation . they use a response template generator and item selector to generate a responses template . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ReDial. |
Understanding the Information Propagation Effects of Communication Topologies in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies for communication topology design often overlook why and when sparse and dense topologies help or hinder collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology design approach that balances error suppression and beneficial information propagation by fusing connectivity patterns from dense and sparse graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology design achieves superior performance across tasks with sparse and dense graphs. |
VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to long videos are limited by limited context windows and flatten videos into independent segments. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured and intent-aware long-video RAG framework that structures a video as a spatio-temporal graph and then performs multi-hop retrieval to aggregate evidence across distant yet contextually related events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is competitive with state-of-the-art baselines without auxiliary information. |