Papers by Minghui Li
Multimodal Topic-Enriched Auxiliary Learning for Depression Detection (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on depression detection rely on textual and visual content to determine whether a human being is depressed or non-depressed. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal topic-enriched Auxiliary Learning approach that captures topic information from texts and images for depression detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of the primary task by using topic information from text and images. |
Self-Error-Instruct: Generalizing from Errors for LLMs Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Erxin Yu, Jing Li, Ming Liao, Qi Zhu, Boyang Xue, Minghui Xu, Baojun Wang, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning from errors synthesize training data by extrapolating from isolated bad cases, thereby failing to generalize the extensive patterns inherent within these cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes more generalized training data from isolated bad cases by extrapolating from isolated cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes more generalized training data to address these model weaknesses. |
UnClE: Explicitly Leveraging Semantic Similarity to Reduce the Parameters of Word Embeddings (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce word embedding parameters ignore semantic information . existing methods do not consider semantic information, allowing for performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages semantic similarity with weight sharing to reduce dimensionality of word embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces word embedding parameters by more than 11x on a standard English-German dataset. |
Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the learning of data-scarce target domains have negative transfer due to the data distributions between source and target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a reinforced selector to select helpful data for transfer learning and a Wasserstein-based discriminator to maximize the distance between the selected data and target data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on three real-world text mining tasks. |
VoCoT: Unleashing Visually Grounded Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Multi-Modal Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Despite the impressive capabilities of large multi-modal models, their effectiveness in handling complex tasks has been limited by the prevailing singlestep reasoning paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a visuallygrounded object-centric Chain-of-Thought reasoning framework for LMMs that is based on a multi-modal interleaved and aligned representation of object concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms SOTA models in CLEVR and EmbSpatial benchmarks. |
A Copy-Augmented Generative Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering approaches follow a two-stage paradigm retriever then reader. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel reader-based generative approach that incorporates extractive and generative readers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two benchmark datasets, Natural Questions and TriviaQA. |
A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Cross-Lingual Stance Detection Using Chain-of-Thought Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual stance detection can't effectively perform cross-linguistic transfer of complex reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to facilitate cross-lingual transfer of complex reasoning processes in stance detection by using cross-linguistic Chain-of-Thought alignment to obtain high-quality CoTs generated from target language inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing models on four multilingual datasets. |
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
Domain-aware and Co-adaptive Feature Transformation for Domain Adaption Few-shot Relation Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction focus on the source domain, which makes it difficult to accurately transfer useful knowledge to the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-aware and co-adaptive feature transformation approach to address these issues by leveraging the target domain distribution features to guide the domain-based feature transformations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on a benchmark dataset. |
ChatSOP: An SOP-Guided MCTS Planning Framework for Controllable LLM Dialogue Agents (2025.acl-long)
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Zhigen Li, Jianxiang Peng, Yanmeng Wang, Yong Cao, Tianhao Shen, Minghui Zhang, Linxi Su, Shang Wu, Yihang Wu, YuQian Wang, Ye Wang, Wei Hu, Jianfeng Li, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing models that use Large Language Models (LLMs) show superior performance in various tasks, but lack of controllability leads to unfocused conversations or task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a standard operating procedure (SOP) framework to regulate dialogue flow by integrating Chain of Thought reasoning and supervised fine-tuning for SOP prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 27.95% improvement in action accuracy compared to baseline models based on GPT-3.5 and also shows notable gains for open-source models. |
Towards IP Intelligence: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Intellectual Property Knowledge and Practice (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiyao Wang, Guhong Chen, Hongbo Wang, Huaren Liu, Minghui Zhu, Zhifei Qin, Li Linwei, Yilin Yue, Shiqiang Wang, Jiayan Li, Wu Yihang, Ziqiang Liu, Longze Chen, Run Luo, Liyang Fan, Jiaming Li, Lei Zhang, Kan Xu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Chengming Li, Shiwen Ni, Yuan Lin, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets and benchmarks focus only on patents or cover limited aspects of the IP field, lacking alignment with real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual IP task taxonomy and a large-scale bilingual benchmark to evaluate LLMs in real-world IP practice. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves only 75.8% accuracy, indicating room for improvement . open-source IP and law-oriented models lag behind closed-source general-purpose models . |
HRKD: Hierarchical Relational Knowledge Distillation for Cross-domain Language Model Compression (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown overwhelming performances on many tasks, but their large size and slow inference speed have hindered practical deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical relational knowledge distillation method to capture hierarchic and domain relational information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multi-domain datasets and is highly reproducible. |
Spec-o3: A Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Agent for Rare Celestial Object Candidate Vetting via Automated Spectral Inspection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spec-o3 is a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection via interleaved multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Spec-o3 outperforms traditional visual inspection methods on rare-object inspection tasks. |
ARTIST: A Transformer-based Chinese Text-to-Image Synthesizer Digesting Linguistic and World Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Synthesis (TIS) is a popular task to convert natural language texts into realistic images. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based Chinese text-to-image synthesizer for high-resolution image generation that incorporates linguistic and relational knowledge facts into the model to ensure better performance without the usage of ultra-large models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in Chinese with linguistic and relational knowledge facts. |
DEPN: Detecting and Editing Privacy Neurons in Pretrained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that pretrained language models memorize and regurgitate a significant portion of training data, including atypical data points that appear only once in the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to locate and erase risky neurons in order to eliminate the impact of privacy data in the model in batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates the impact of privacy data in the model in batches without affecting the model's performance. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
EasyNLP: A Comprehensive and Easy-to-use Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Chengyu Wang, Minghui Qiu, Taolin Zhang, Tingting Liu, Lei Li, Jianing Wang, Ming Wang, Jun Huang, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Pre-Trained Models (PTMs) have reshaped the development of natural language processing (NLP) but it is not easy to obtain high-performing PTMs without a large amount of labeled training data and deploy them online with fast inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose to make it easy to build NLP applications with knowledge-enhanced pre-training and knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | EasyNLP supports a comprehensive suite of NLP algorithms and features knowledge-enhanced pre-training, knowledge distillation and few-shot learning functionalities. |
Knowledge Prompting in Pre-trained Language Model for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce redundant factual knowledge from knowledge bases and require complex modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge prompting-based PLM framework that incorporates factual knowledge into PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be flexibly combined with existing mainstream PLMs. |
For-Value: Efficient Forward-Only Data Valuation for finetuning LLMs and VLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis, Boying Gong, Xiaoxiao Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data valuation rely on gradient computations, making them prohibitive for billion-parameter models. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data while achieving significant efficiency improvements. |
DocEE-zh: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Chinese Document-level Event Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chinese document-level event extraction is still largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese document-level event extraction dataset with over 36,000 events and 210,000 arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes over 36,000 events and more than 210,000 arguments . it is an extension of the DocEE dataset, utilizing the same event schema and annotated by human experts. |
SueNes: A Weakly Supervised Approach to Evaluating Single-Document Summarization via Negative Sampling (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on automatic summary evaluation metrics focus on lexical similarity and require a reference summary which is expensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a weakly supervised summary evaluation approach without the presence of reference summaries to transform existing summarization datasets into corrupted reference summarizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines and shows that it improves linguistic quality over all metrics. |
ResLoRA: Identity Residual Mapping in Low-Rank Adaption (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuhua Shi, Shaohan Huang, Minghui Song, Zhoujun Li, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
Meta-KD: A Meta Knowledge Distillation Framework for Language Model Compression across Domains (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been successful in NLP tasks, but their large size and long inference time limit their deployment in real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-teacher model that captures transferable knowledge across domains and passes it to students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distill large teacher models into small student models with guidance from the meta-teacher. |
UI-Hawk: Unleashing the Screen Stream Understanding for Mobile GUI Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents depend on current visual observations and plain-text action history, ignoring the significance of history screens. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal GUI agent specifically designed to process screen streams . they propose UI-Hawk incorporates a history-aware visual encoder to handle the sequences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent can process screen streams encountered during GUI navigation. |
DocAsRef: An Empirical Study on Repurposing Reference-based Summary Quality Metrics as Reference-free Metrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-based metrics are limited by their reliance on human input. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt some reference-based metrics to assess system summary against human-written references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms reference-based metrics on two datasets and is comparable to reference-free metrics. |
Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify named entity mentions with fewshots fail to differentiate rich semantics in other-class words, which will aggravate overfitting under few shot scenario. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can automatically induce different unde- fined classes from the other class to improve few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms five state-of-the-art models in 1- shot and 5-shots settings on four NER bench marks. |
Decoder-Only LLMs can be Masked Auto-Encoders (2025.acl-short)
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Dan Qiao, Yuan Gao, Zheming Yang, Di Yang, Ziheng Wu, Pengcheng Lu, Minghui Qiu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Modern NLP workflows require different models for generation and embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transforms an LLM into a Uni-Directional Masked Auto-Encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art under unsupervised conditions with merely 100 training steps. |
More is Better: Enhancing Open-Domain Dialogue Generation via Multi-Source Heterogeneous Knowledge (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods use a single-source homogeneous knowledge base with limited knowledge coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source heterogeneous knowledge-enhanced dialogue generation model that leverages multiple knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing knowledge-enhanced models on a Chinese dataset and shows that it can leverage multiple heterogeneous knowledge sources to improve knowledge coverage. |
Transferable Direct Prompt Injection via Activation-Guided MCMC Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show superior cross-model transferability . Prompt injection attacks are among the most critical threats . |
| Approach: | They propose an activations-guided prompt injection attack framework to address the impracticality of existing white-box/gray-box methods and the poor transferability of black-box approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 49.6% success rate and 34.6% improvement over human-crafted prompts on five mainstream LLMs. |