Papers by Nan Cheng
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
Before Generation, Align it! A Novel and Effective Strategy for Mitigating Hallucinations in Text-to-SQL Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) have improved performance of text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to mitigate hallucinations in large language models driven by In-Context Learning (ICL) they propose TA-SQL, a text-to-Sql framework that encourages LLMs to take advantage of similar tasks rather than starting from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of the GPT-4 model by 21.23% on BIRD dev. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Bolun Yao, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baseline methods on two datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus compared with baseline methods. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
LiveFact: A Dynamic, Time-Aware Benchmark for LLM-Driven Fake News Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current evaluation frameworks are static and vulnerable to benchmark data contamination . current models are ineffective at assessing reasoning under temporal uncertainty . |
| Approach: | They propose a live-based benchmark that simulates the real-world "fog of war" they propose evaluating models on their ability to reason with evolving, incomplete information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms proprietary state-of-the-art models in classification and evidence mode . it also provides a component to monitor BDC explicitly . |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
CodeTool: Enhancing Programmatic Tool Invocation of LLMs via Process Supervision (2025.acl-long)
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YifeiLu YifeiLu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Qiang Gao, Cheng Liu, Haibo Luo, Nan Du, Xiaolong Li, Feiliang Ren
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool invocation are often unnecessarily long and require lengthy reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for stepwise code generation that improves LLM tool invocation . they incorporate two distinct process rewards: the On-the-spot and the Latent Reward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM tool invocation by leveraging the concise nature of code. |
On Diversified Preferences of Large Language Model Alignment (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be fine tuned with human feedback, but human preferences can be diversified due to annotators’ different tastes, which hinders the effectiveness of LLM alignment methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration error metric to evaluate large language models (LLMs) and a multi-objective reward learning method to enhance the calibration performance of RMs on shared preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be adopted as a key calibration error and MORE can achieve superior alignment performance. |
SSA: Semantic Contamination of LLM-Driven Fake News Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating 45 variants of nine LLMs, we find LIAR2 accuracy climbs monotonically with injected contamination, while the SSA Factor escalates in near-perfect lock-step. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects BDC risks across semantic to label level via entity shift perturbation and an interpretable metric, the SSA Factor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects BDC risks across semantic to label level via entity shift perturbation and interpretable metric, the SSA Factor. |
TripleFact: Defending Data Contamination in the Evaluation of LLM-driven Fake News Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation paradigms for fake news detection are based on static datasets and closed-world assumptions that are inadvertently memorized during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate BDC risk while prioritizing real-world applicability by integrating three components to assess robustness against human-crafted misinformation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates BDC risk while prioritizing real-world applicability. |
Pruning as a Domain-specific LLM Extractor (2024.findings-naacl)
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Nan Zhang, Yanchi Liu, Xujiang Zhao, Wei Cheng, Runxue Bao, Rui Zhang, Prasenjit Mitra, Haifeng Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable proficiency across a wide array of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning large language models using general or task-specific weights to extract a compressed, task-agnostic LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts a compressed, domain-specific, and task- agnostic LLM by identifying LLM weights that are pivotal for general capabilities, like linguistic capability and multi-task solving, and domain- specific knowledge. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Metric-guided Distillation: Distilling Knowledge from the Metric to Ranker and Retriever for Generative Commonsense Reasoning (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xingwei He, Yeyun Gong, A-Long Jin, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Sm Yiu, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work on commonsense generation requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from a standard metric to a ranker and transfer it to re-ranking a retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the previous SOTA. |
SHARE: An SLM-based Hierarchical Action CorREction Assistant for Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-correct text-to-SQL fail to demonstrate underlying reasoning path . authors propose **SHARE**, a self-revolution assistant for text-based error correction . |
| Approach: | They propose a "SHARE" assistant that enables LLMs to perform more precise error localization and efficient correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed assistant performs more precise error localization and efficient correction for monolithic SQL queries. |
Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Augmented Step-Level Transitions for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large language model agents rely on increasingly long interaction histories, resulting in high computational cost and limited scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that enables step-level learning by conditioning only on single-step transitions rather than full interaction histories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld benchmarks in terms of performance and generalization while reducing token usage. |
Towards Robust Temporal Activity Localization Learning with Noisy Labels (2024.lrec-main)
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Daizong Liu, Xiaoye Qu, Xiang Fang, Jianfeng Dong, Pan Zhou, Guoshun Nan, Keke Tang, Wanlong Fang, Yu Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal activity localization are expensive and difficult to satisfy due to subjective labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a new TAL setting where a TAL model should be robust to mixed training data with noisy moment boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is significantly more robust to noisy training data than existing methods. |
DCR: Quantifying Data Contamination in LLMs Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) memorize evaluation data during training, inflating performance metrics and undermining genuine generalization assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect and quantify benchmark data contamination (BDC) by synthesizing contamination scores via a fuzzy inference system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects and quantifies BDC risk across semantic, informational, data, and label levels. |
MoLoRAG: Bootstrapping Document Understanding via Multi-modal Logic-aware Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Document Understanding is a foundational AI capability with broad applications . Large Vision-Language Models (LLMs) can't handle multi-page document comprehension . a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi- page document understanding is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-aware retrieval framework for multi-modal, multi-page document understanding . MoLoRAG uses semantic and logical relevance to deliver more accurate retrieval . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on four DocQA datasets and demonstrates 9.68% accuracy improvement over existing methods. |
Chunk, Align, Select: A Simple Long-sequence Processing Method for Transformers (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing transformer-based models struggle with long-sequence processing due to computational costs . a framework to enhance long-content processing of transformers is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance long-sequence processing of transformers by three steps . they demonstrate that the framework significantly outperforms prior long-quence processors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on long-sequence summarization and reading comprehension tasks. |
Micro-Act: Mitigate Knowledge Conflict in Question Answering via Actionable Self-Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to mitigate knowledge conflict by comparing two knowledge sources can overwhelm LLMs with extraneous or lengthy contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes knowledge into fine-grained comparisons . they propose 'Micro-Act' framework that allows for reasoning beyond the superficial context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant increase in QA accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines on five benchmark datasets. |
Graph Neural News Recommendation with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative user and news representations fail to consider high-order connectivity underlying the user-news interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph Neural News Recommendation model with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement which can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph and disentangle latent preference factors by a neighborhood routing algorithm. |
DialogVED: A Pre-trained Latent Variable Encoder-Decoder Model for Dialog Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Song Wang, Bolun Yao, Weizhen Qi, Zhongyu Wei, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Yi Mao, Weizhu Chen, Biao Cheng, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained dialog models shed light on various downstream tasks in natural language processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They propose a dialog pre-training framework that introduces latent variables into the enhanced encoder-decoder pre-train framework to increase relevance and diversity of responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on personaChat, DailyDialog, and DSTC7-AVSD datasets. |