Papers by Mingxuan Liu
Literature Meets Data: A Synergistic Approach to Hypothesis Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hypothesis generation are theory-driven and data-driven, but they lack the computational power to complement each other. |
| Approach: | They develop a method that combines literature-based insights with data to perform LLM-powered hypothesis generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on five datasets and shows human accuracy improves on deception detection and AI generated content detection tasks. |
Analytical FFN-to-MoE Restructuring via Activation Pattern Analysis (2026.acl-long)
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Zehua Pei, Hui-Ling Zhen, Lancheng Zou, Xianzhi Yu, Wulong Liu, Sinno Jialin Pan, Mingxuan Yuan, Bei Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are fast but require expensive pre-training . a new approach to scale large language models into MoEs reduces inference costs . |
| Approach: | They propose an analytical post-training framework that rapidly restructures FFNs into sparse MoE architectures using only a small calibration dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on a small calibration dataset. |
RIFT: Repurposing Negative Samples via Reward-Informed Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reward Informed Fine-Tuning (RIFT) is an effective and robust alternative to expensive expert data for LLM alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-informed fine-tuning framework that utilizes all self-generated samples to learn from both positive and negative trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both RFT and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on mathematical benchmarks. |
Threshold Differential Attention for Sink-Free, Ultra-Sparse, and Non-Dispersive Language Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a strict sum-to-one constraint forces attention sinks on irrelevant tokens, while probability mass disperses as sequence lengths increase. |
| Approach: | They propose a sink-free attention mechanism that achieves ultra-sparsity and improved robustness at longer sequence lengths without the computational overhead of projection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism produces >99 % exact zeros and eliminates attention sinks while maintaining competitive performance on standard and long-context benchmarks. |
Hierarchical Token Prepending: Enhancing Information Flow in Decoder-based LLM Embeddings (2026.acl-long)
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Xueying Ding, Xingyue Huang, Mingxuan Ju, Liam Collins, Yozen Liu, Leman Akoglu, Neil Shah, Tong Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models produce powerful text embeddings, but their causal attention mechanism restricts the flow of information from later to earlier tokens, harming performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prepending a single summary token to reduce attention-level compression by partitioning the input into blocks and prepending blocks to subsequent blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent performance gains across 11 retrieval datasets and 30 general embedding benchmarks. |
CTC-based Non-autoregressive Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Xiaoqian Liu, Xiaowen Liu, Qingxuan Sun, Yuhao Zhang, Murun Yang, Qianqian Dong, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Tong Xiao, Anxiang Ma, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E ST) and non-autoregressive (NAR) generation are promising in language and speech processing for their advantages of less error propagation and low latency. |
| Approach: | They develop a model that uses connectionist temporal classification to predict the source and target texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average BLEU score of 29.5 with a speed-up of 5.67. |
LoRE-Merging: Exploring Low-Rank Estimation For Large Language Model Merging (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a framework for model merging is proposed without additional training . task vectors from fine-tuned models exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without access to the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models without additional training without additional inputs. |
Diffusion Glancing Transformer for Parallel Sequence-to-Sequence Learning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that non-autoregressive generation models are superior in generation efficiency but inferior in generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion glancing transformer which employs a modality diffusion process and residual glancy sampling to improve multi-modality modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms autoregressive and non-autoregressive models on machine translation and text generation benchmarks. |
ValCAT: Variable-Length Contextualized Adversarial Transformations Using Encoder-Decoder Language Model (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing word-level approaches to attack text are limited to a single word . existing methods ignore interactions between consecutive words, resulting in one-to-one attacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box attack framework that misleads the language model by applying variable-length contextualized transformations to the original text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on classification and inference tasks. |
PEAR: Planner-Executor Agent Robustness Benchmark (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies examine isolated attack surfaces or specific scenarios, leaving a lack of holistic understanding of MAS vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the utility and vulnerability of planner–executor MAS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates planner–executor MAS on a widely adopted design. |
Sens-Merging: Sensitivity-Guided Parameter Balancing for Merging Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing task vector-based model merging methods apply uniform coefficients across all parameters, overlooking varying parameter importance both within and across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sensitivity-guided coefficient adjustment method that optimizes existing model merging techniques by operating at both task-specific and cross-task levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing model merging techniques on mistral 7B and LLaMA2 7B/13B models and enables them to outperformed specialized models. |