Papers by Nan Hu
HiCLRE: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework for distantly supervised relation extraction to reduce noisy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in various mainstream DSRE datasets. |
Dual-Channel Evidence Fusion for Fact Verification over Texts and Tables (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact extraction and verification tasks only consider evidence of a single format . Existing models convert evidence into either sentences or tables, thus losing context information . |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Channel Unified Format fact verification model which unifies various evidence into parallel streams, i.e., natural language sentences and a global evidence table, simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in two formats by a large margin . it makes the most of existing tables and tables to absorb evidence of two formats . |
Can Language Models Replace Programmers for Coding? REPOCOD Says ‘Not Yet’ (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for code generation use short completions, synthetic examples, or focus on limited scale repositories, failing to represent real-world coding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Python code-generation benchmark that contains 980 whole-function generation tasks with realistic dependencies from 11 popular projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are short completions, synthetic examples, or focus on limited scale repositories, failing to represent real-world coding tasks. |
Attention-Guided Answer Distillation for Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reading comprehension systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from an ensemble to a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform the teacher on adversarial datasets and NarrativeQA benchmarks. |
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. |
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yong Lin, Hangyu Lin, Wei Xiong, Shizhe Diao, Jianmeng Liu, Jipeng Zhang, Rui Pan, Haoxiang Wang, Wenbin Hu, Hanning Zhang, Hanze Dong, Renjie Pi, Han Zhao, Nan Jiang, Heng Ji, Yuan Yao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods. |
UnifEE: Unified Evidence Extraction for Fact Verification (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models extract evidence in both sentences and table cells from Wikipedia dumps, ignoring potential connections between them. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which uses a mixed evidence graph to extract the evidence in both formats without manually designed conversion rules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and improves the verification step. |
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. |
Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma
| Challenge: | Recent studies have looked into the ability of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc. However, few studies investigate the controllability of large languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare large language models with state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models to find that large language model controls are comparable to smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can meet hard constraints and perform better than state-of-the-art models. |
Extracting Financial Events from Raw Texts via Matrix Chunking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Event Extraction (EE) is widely used in the Chinese financial field to provide valuable structured information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task which extracts financial events from raw texts and an efficient method called MACK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is fault-tolerant and can visualize interactions among text components. |
Enhancing Structured Evidence Extraction for Fact Verification (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain fact verification requires extracting and integrating both structured and unstructured evidence to verify a claim. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance the extraction of structured evidence by leveraging the row and column semantics of tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves evidence recall of 60.01% on the test set, higher than the previous state-of-the-art method. |
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. |
Explicit Role Interaction Network for Event Argument Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods extract arguments of each role independently, ignoring the relationship between different roles. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model that captures the correlations between different argument roles within an event. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset ACE2005 show the superiority of the proposed model over existing methods. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
Is Graph Structure Necessary for Multi-hop Question Answering? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multi-hop question answering across multiple documents or paragraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural network to deal with graph structure in textual multi-hop reasoning . they propose 'self-attention' and propose removing entire graph structure may not hurt the final results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that graph-attention or the entire graph structure can be replaced by self-attention . hotpotQA is a widely used benchmark for multi-hop question answering . |
FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster (2021.acl-demo)
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Yu Yan, Fei Hu, Jiusheng Chen, Nikhil Bhendawade, Ting Ye, Yeyun Gong, Nan Duan, Desheng Cui, Bingyu Chi, Ruofei Zhang
| Challenge: | Transformer-based models have made tremendous impact in natural language generation, but inference speed is still a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O to accelerate sequence generation without loss of accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can accelerate the sequence generation by 4x to 9x with a simple one-line code change for a set of widely used and diverse models. |
CogniBench: A Legal-inspired Framework and Dataset for Assessing Cognitive Faithfulness of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on “factual statements” that rephrase source materials, but ignore “cognitive statements” . evaluating and detecting "faithfulness hallucinations" remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess faithfulness of cognitive statements and introduce a dataset to scale easily across models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses faithfulness of cognitive statements and scales easily across models. |
CoTKR: Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge rewriting methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question’s semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a new rewriting method CoTKR for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewrite. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting and bridges the preference gap between the knowledge reactor and the question answering (QA) model. |
Compare to The Knowledge: Graph Neural Fake News Detection with External Knowledge (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection rely on linguistic and semantic features from news content and do not exploit external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural model which compares news to knowledge base through entities for fake news detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yufei Wang, Yuanhao Xi, Jianqiao Lu, Huan Zhang, Nan Hu, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with stateful tool interactions considering the whole life cycle of tool use across six key tasks in three stages . they also build VirtualMobile – an embodied virtual mobile evaluation environment to simulate API calls and assess the robustness of the created APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates 13 open- and closed-source LLMs and provides detailed analysis at each stage. |
Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)
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Nan Hu, Jiaoyan Chen, Yike Wu, Guilin Qi, Hongru Wang, Sheng Bi, Yongrui Chen, Tongtong Wu, Jeff Z. Pan
| Challenge: | Attributed Question Answering (AQA) has attracted wide attention, but there are several limitations in evaluating the attributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale benchmark containing comprehensive attribution categories . they compare 25 automatic evaluators with human evaluers and tested LLM evalators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can compare attributions with subtle differences and provide feedback to improve them. |
MINTQA: A Multi-Hop Question Answering Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on New and Long-tail Knowledge (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that large language models can handle knowledge with varying familiarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate multi-hop question answering on new and tail knowledge . they use RAG to integrate external knowledge into large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the multi-hop reasoning ability of large language models . it primarily evaluates their ability to handle knowledge with different levels of familiarity . |
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. |
Rhombus: Incentivizing Coordination in Parallel Thinking through Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziyuan Nan, Qi Yi, Di Huang, Yutong Wu, Guanhua Huang, Xue Gong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Chenchen Zhang, Zenan Xu, Xing Hu, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Parallel thinking is a promising avenue for scaling test-time compute in Large Language Models . however, coordinating the exploration and aggregation stages remains challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel thinking framework that explicitly incentivizes coordination between components via end-to-end reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 6.0% over long chain-of-thought baselines while reducing wall-clock latency by 39.4% under matched token budgets. |