Papers by Mu Li
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event causality identification (ECI) focus on mining potential causal signals, but causal signals are ambiguous, which may lead to the context-keywords bias and the event-pairs bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly estimates the influence of context keywords and event pairs in training to eliminate biases in inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates biases in inference on two datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on compressing the Key-Value cache or grouping attention heads, while overlooking redundancy between layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight substitute for self-attention in well-trained LLMs that uses feed-forward networks to align attention heads between adjacent layers and low-rank matrices to approximate differences in layer-wise attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces redundancy by sharing weights across layers while maintaining high response quality while reducing redundant calculations within 53% 84% of the total layers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to identify emotions in short text are limited and lack coverage and inaccuracies when applied to informal short text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel emotional network to jointly learn sentence emotions and construct emotion lexicons which are dynamically adapted to a given context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several approaches proposed in previous studies and achieves new state-of-the-art on the benchmark Twitter dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can replicate insecure patterns from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages distributed security-relevant cues by aggregating representations from multiple upper layers via an attention-based module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework improves the secure-and-correct generation rate by 11.9% over baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the explainability of ICD coding rely on attention-based rationales and qualitative assessments conducted by physicians. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the explainability of rationales in ICD coding using a multi-granular rationale-annotated dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the explainability of rationales in ICD coding by using human-annotated rationale-announced rationale models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long chain-of-thought (LCoT) are coarse-grained, reward hacking, and poor generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT) model that integrates reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards with a process-aware verification approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning and code generation tasks while reducing the cost of training and performance bottlenecks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research questions the importance of dot-product self-attention in Transformer models and shows that most attention heads learn simple positional patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel mechanism to replace dot-product self-attention with a recurrent atteNtion mechanism that directly learns attention weights without token-to-token interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the Transformer model on translation tasks with fewer parameters and inference time. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine translation have focused on a single pre-trained decoder . encoder-decoder architectures have received relatively little attention in NMT . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages LLMs as MT encoders and pairs them with lightweight decoders to develop universal translation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses baselines in terms of translation quality but achieves 75% reduction in memory footprint of the KV cache. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the likelihood of sequence prediction models are based on MLE and teacher forcing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Bridging Network (GBN) that extends the point-wise ground truth to a bridge distribution conditioned on it and optimizes their KL-divergence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed bridge module can improve on two recognized sequence prediction tasks and minimize learning burden. |
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used strategy for efficient fine-tuning of large language models, but its strictly linear structure limits expressive capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that introduces structured polynomial expansion directly into the low-rank factor space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across diverse benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input; however, previous studies focusing on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning focus on using multiple languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel multilingual input to enhance the model's comprehension of the input and to examine how multilingual processing affects prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle multilingual and cross-lingual text within a single input, but previous studies focused on using English as the pivot language to enhance language understanding and reasoning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with instructions and preferences are conflicting . et al., 2023b) show that hybrid alignment training can outperform baselines . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid alignment training approach based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods to achieve better collaboration between different alignment tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline alignment training methods on summarization and dialogue tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question . |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered . |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for human-machine interactions are static and can be misleading. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a LLM-based user agent to assess an assistant's API call capability without human involvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mirrors real human conversation patterns in human-machine interactions, and shows that it aligns more closely with human assessment. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have remarkable evaluation and critique capabilities, providing insightful feedback and identifying flaws in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train critic models using refinement signals to generate feedback loops where critiques guide the model in refining its responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional methods and open-source models in terms of critique quality and refinement outcomes. |
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| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reasoning causalities on word level are limited . a word-level causal reasoning method may only predict the unintelligible effect of "quarrel" |
| Approach: | They propose a novel event-level causal reasoning method that structuralizes event-effect event pairs into an event causality network and shows its use in the task of effect generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more reasonable effect sentences than well-designed competitors. |
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| Challenge: | Recent success of natural language processing (NLP) is driven by the adoption of large-scale pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to determine the impact of distillation influence on student generalization ability by prioritizing samples likely to enhance the student's generalization abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 10 common knowledge distillation baselines on 6 text classification tasks in the GLUE benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning abilities, but these improvements are primarily focused on English, leading to inferior performance in non-English scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reasoning alignment approach that fine-tunes the layers responsible for multilingual comprehension in one stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes 6 of the 9 layers responsible for multilingual comprehension, while reducing training time by 4.1-11.9 compared to the two-stage method. |
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| Challenge: | Long-context understanding is a critical capability for large language models . evaluating this capability requires extensive human annotation, which is time-consuming and costly. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess citation-grounded long-context reasoning in academic writing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compares state-of-the-art models with human experts on two tasks . human experts achieve 90% accuracy, but most models struggle with the cloze-style task . |
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| Challenge: | Current compression strategies, including token eviction and learned projections, often lead to biased representations and may require costly model retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free KV cache compression framework that equalizes the contribution of all tokens to the compressed representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework ensures unbiased information retention in the KV cache. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods suffer from key information loss and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable performance to the upper-bound baseline under 16x compression ratio. |
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| Challenge: | Existing diffusion models have limitations in modeling discrete data, e.g., languages . we present a novel diffusion model for language modeling inspired by linguistic features in languages based on iterative denoising . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that iteratively denoises and adds corruptions to the textual data through soft-masking to better noise it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better generation quality and lower training cost than current models with better performance. |
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| Challenge: | Existing extractive summarization methods tend to select sentences within the same facet, which leads to facet bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a facet-aware centrality-based ranking model that gives a weight to the sentence centrality score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on a wide range of summarization tasks and performs comparably to other models. |
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| Challenge: | A well-calibrated confidence estimate is not sufficient for neural machine translation (NMT) where probabilities from softmax distribution fail to describe when the model is probably mistaken. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised confidence estimate learning jointly with the training of a neural machine translation model to quantify confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard label smoothing and can predict failures in two real-world scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on relation extraction focuses on constructing explicit structured features using knowledge graph and dependency tree. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract multi-granularity features based solely on the original input sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models that even use external knowledge on three public benchmarks: SemEval 2010 Task 8, Tacred, and Tacred Revisited. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. |
| Approach: | They use Sparse Autoencoders to analyze LLM's internal representations to determine when and how they "flip" from truthful to deceptive under deceptively crafted instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's True/False output is predictable across all conditions based on the model''s representation, and the Deceptive instructions induce significant representational shifts compared to Truthful/Neutral representations. |
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models exhibit an imbalance in multilingual capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a training recipe that achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by Precise Language Specific layers fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe achieves efficient multilingual enhancement for LVLMs by fine-tuning language specific layers. |
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| Challenge: | NeuralClassifier is a toolkit for hierarchical multi-label text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for neural hierarchical multi-label text classification . they use a variety of text encoders to implement the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with reported results in the literature. |
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| Challenge: | Embedding based methods are widely used for unsupervised keyphrase extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where local and global contexts are jointly modeled. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms most models while generalizing better on input documents with different domains and length. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
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| Challenge: | Using translation memories (TMs) as prompts is a promising approach to in-context learning of machine translation models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use translation memories (TMs) as prompts to prompt large language models (LLMs) they find that the ability of LLMs to "understand" prompts is helpful . |
| Outcome: | The results are comparable to state-of-the-art NMT systems with bilingual data and are tuned on downstream tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing LoRA methods assume that experts operate independently, leading to unstable routing, expert dominance. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication-aware MoELoRA framework that relaxes this assumption by introducing expert-level communication prior to routing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms vanilla LoRA and MoELoRA on diverse language understanding tasks while maintaining expert dominance. |
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are fine-tuned on task-specific datasets, but fail to capture task- specific patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which disentangles task-relevant signals from entangled representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization of representations by disentangling task-relevant signals from the entangled representations. |
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that Neural Machine Translation (NMT) performs poor on low-resource pairs especially when Z is a rare language. |
| Approach: | They propose a triangular triangulation technique to leverage bilingual data to optimize the translation performance of low-resource pairs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed architecture significantly improves translation quality of rare languages on MultiUN and IWSLT2012 datasets and even better when combining back-translation methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for annotating data are limited by ambiguity and lack of context in data samples. |
| Approach: | They challenge the traditional approach of annotating data by only providing a single label for each sample and annotator disagreement is discarded . instead, they use additional annotation information such as confidence, secondary label and disagreement to generate soft labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance and calibration on the hard label test set. |
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-learning-based methods concatenate in-context examples only at the input layer, limiting the model’s ability to capture abstract semantic cues necessary for identifying complex causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that injects in-context examples into the deeper layer of a pre-trained language model (PLM) this model leverages hierarchical semantic representations formed in deeper layers, thereby enhancing its capacity to learn high-level causal abstractions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two widely used datasets and shows that it can learn high-level causal abstractions. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, raising concerns that they reflect and amplify social biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Mandarin-specific evaluation framework to examine social identity biases in Chinese LLMs using Mandarin-based prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares ingroup (“We”) and outgroup (“They”) framings across 240 social groups salient in the Chinese context, using a two-tiered measurement framework that assesses both sentiment and toxicity. |
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is an efficient approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) but many of the weights in these matrices are redundant, leading to inefficiencies in parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation approach that fine-tunes two low-ranked matrices and adapts them through a dense low-Rank matrix, improving parameter utilization and adaptation efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 83.8% accuracy with only 0.01% of trainable parameters compared to LoRA's 80.8% with 0.70% of trainability parameters on LLaMA3-8B. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for compression of Multimodal Large Language Models lack multimodal adaptation to preserve cross-modal synergy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns vision and language manifolds via a Joint Covariance basis and propose Global Spectrum-Aware Truncation to dynamically transfer parameter budget to the sensitive Backbone. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Qwen2.5-VL and Llama-3-Next confirm that JW-SVD retains both text and image capabilities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for translating collaborative information into textual prompts or injecting pre-trained embeddings into the LLM treat structural information as static input and fail to capture high-order relational dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generalizes low-rank adaptation from independent to structure-aware propagation by embedding a trainable graph message-passing network within the low-ranked adaptation pathway. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that GraphLoRA outperforms state-of-the-art recommendation methods and achieves superior generalization. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models that estimate annotators' reliability only consider binary labels and multi-class labels. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised model which can handle binary and multi-class labels and integrate neural networks to model the dependency between latent variables and instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle binary and multi-class labels and can estimate reliability of annotators across instances. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning methods focus on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to predict query performance and cost required to accomplish a given task . they then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher performance at lower cost compared to baseline approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Quantization enables efficient deployment of large language models in resource-constrained environments . but impact on truthfulness remains largely unexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess the truthfulness of quantized large language models . they find quantized models retain internally truthful representations but produce false outputs . |
| Outcome: | The framework assesses the truthfulness of quantized models across three dimensions . it finds that quantized model models retain internally truthful representations but are more susceptible to false outputs . |
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| Challenge: | Attention mechanisms have been ubiquitous in neural machine translation (NMT) however, many studies doubt whether highlyattended inputs have a large impact on the model outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a mask perturbation model that automatically evaluates each input’s contribution to the model outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more uniform at lower layers while more concentrated on the specific inputs at higher layers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised summarization methods fail to consider efficiency and effectiveness when the input document is extremely long. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Ranking framework for unsupervised long document summarization based on the semantic block. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve new state-of-the-art unsupervised summarization results on Gov-Report, billSum, arXiv, and PubMed. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for counterfactual reasoning in narratives are based on dataset-specific heuristics, but they are abusing unique patterns, i.e., the feature of minimum editing, in the dataset, which limits the generality of their methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a basic VAE module for counterfactual reasoning in narratives and introduce a pre-trained classifier and external event commonsense to mitigate the posterior collapse problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the causality between the counterfactual condition and the generated counterf actual outcome on two public benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning narrative coherence are coarse-grained and superficial . existing methods are inadequate for learning negative samples, which are irrelevant or repetitive . |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies for mining hard negatives using the Brownian Bridge process . they evaluate the method on several tasks and show it is applicable to many applications . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method proves that it is applicable to many applications. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |