Papers by Mu Li

50 papers
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Enhancing Event Causality Identification with Counterfactual Reasoning (2023.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Cross-layer Attention Sharing for Pre-trained Large Language Models (2026.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Emotion Classification by Jointly Learning to Lexiconize and Classify (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DeepGuard: Secure Code Generation via Multi-Layer Semantic Aggregation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Evaluation and LLM-Guided Learning of ICD Coding Rationales (2026.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Graph Reasoning Paradigm: Structured and Symbolic Reasoning with Topology-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Recurrent Attention for Neural Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Beyond Decoder-only: Large Language Models Can be Good Encoders for Machine Translation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Generative Bridging Network for Neural Sequence Prediction (N18-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Polynomial Expansion Rank Adaptation: Enhancing Low-Rank Fine-Tuning with High-Order Interactions (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Revealing the Parallel Multilingual Learning within Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Beyond Static Evaluation: A Dynamic Approach to Assessing AI Assistants’ API Invocation Capabilities (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Training Language Model to Critique for Better Refinement (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Effect Generation Based on Causal Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Tailoring Instructions to Student’s Learning Levels Boosts Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
SCALAR: Scientific Citation-based Live Assessment of Long-context Academic Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
FAEDKV: Infinite-Window Fourier Transform for Unbiased KV Cache Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Cheaper and Better Diffusion Language Model with Soft-Masked Noise (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Improving Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Facet-Aware Modeling (2021.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Learning Confidence for Transformer-based Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Modeling Multi-Granularity Hierarchical Features for Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
When Truthful Representations Flip Under Deceptive Instructions? (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Language-Specific Layer Matters: Efficient Multilingual Enhancement for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (P19-3)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction by Jointly Modeling Local and Global Context (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Augmenting Large Language Model Translators via Translation Memories (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
TalkLoRA: Communication-Aware Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Task-guided Disentangled Tuning for Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Triangular Architecture for Rare Language Translation (P18-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Don’t waste a single annotation: improving single-label classifiers through soft labels (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DICP: Deep In-Context Prompt for Event Causality Identification (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Probing Social Identity Bias in Chinese LLMs with Gendered Pronouns and Social Groups (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DenseLoRA: Dense Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
JW-SVD: Bridging the Cross-Modal Mismatch in Post-Training MLLM Compression (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
GraphLoRA: Structure-Aware Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Model Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Modelling Instance-Level Annotator Reliability for Natural Language Labelling Tasks (N19-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Quantized but Deceptive? A Multi-Dimensional Truthfulness Evaluation of Quantized LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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 .
Attention Calibration for Transformer in Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
An Efficient Coarse-to-Fine Facet-Aware Unsupervised Summarization Framework Based on Semantic Blocks (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Causal Approach for Counterfactual Reasoning in Narratives (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Generating Contrastive Narratives Using the Brownian Bridge Process for Narrative Coherence Learning (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LANG: Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Reasoning with Language-Adaptive Hint Guidance (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations