Papers by Nan Lin
Disentangling Reasoning Capabilities from Language Models with Compositional Reasoning Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | ReasonFormer is a unified reasoning framework for complex decision-making . it is based on the dual-process theory of cognitive science, where two cognitive systems interact to form a whole reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified reasoning framework that mirrors the modular reasoning process of humans . they decouple the representation module and the reasoning modules to capture different levels of cognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that humans can perform better in complex decision-making tasks. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
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. |
Aggregating Bidirectional Encoder Representations Using MatchLSTM for Sequence Matching (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on text sequence matching tasks uses task specific supervised datasets, which are always limited to the amount due to the cost of annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose an aggregation method to combine Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) with a MatchLSTM layer for Sequence Matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two publicly available datasets, WikiQA and SNLI. |
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions (2024.findings-acl)
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Honglin Lin, Siyu Li, Guoshun Nan, Chaoyue Tang, Xueting Wang, Jingxin Xu, Rong Yankai, Zhouzhili Zhouzhili, Yutong Gao, Qimei Cui, Xiaofeng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) lag behind human performance in IRCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite fewer parameters. |
Prompt Space Optimizing Few-shot Reasoning Success with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt engineering is an essential technique for enhancing the abilities of large language models (LLMs) by providing explicit and specific instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that uses text embeddings to obtain basis vectors by matrix decomposition and constructs a space for representing all prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompt paradigms on ten public reasoning benchmarks. |
GEM: A General Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Tasks (2021.findings-acl)
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Lin Su, Nan Duan, Edward Cui, Lei Ji, Chenfei Wu, Huaishao Luo, Yongfei Liu, Ming Zhong, Taroon Bharti, Arun Sacheti
| Challenge: | Existing datasets that focus on natural language tasks are not considered as a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a general evaluation benchmark for multimodal tasks, GEM 1 . they compare it with existing multimodal vision-language datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with existing vision-language datasets focusing on natural language tasks . it is the largest vision-linguistic dataset covering image-language tasks and video-language task at the same time . |
Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the brain builds hierarchical syntactic structures, but it is unknown whether they are universal across languages. |
| Approach: | They analyze the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to two languages: Chinese and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory load according to different language structures. |
Sentiment-Aware Word and Sentence Level Pre-training for Sentiment Analysis (2022.emnlp-main)
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Shuai Fan, Chen Lin, Haonan Li, Zhenghao Lin, Jinsong Su, Hang Zhang, Yeyun Gong, JIan Guo, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language representation models (PLMs) capture sentiment information from word-level while under-considering sentence-level information. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sentiment-aware pre-trained language model with combined Word-level and Sentence-level Pre-training tasks that enhance the PLM’s knowledge about sentiment words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on various sentence-level and aspect-level sentiment classification benchmarks. |
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. |
DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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Linyong Nan, Dragomir Radev, Rui Zhang, Amrit Rau, Abhinand Sivaprasad, Chiachun Hsieh, Xiangru Tang, Aadit Vyas, Neha Verma, Pranav Krishna, Yangxiaokang Liu, Nadia Irwanto, Jessica Pan, Faiaz Rahman, Ahmad Zaidi, Mutethia Mutuma, Yasin Tarabar, Ankit Gupta, Tao Yu, Yi Chern Tan, Xi Victoria Lin, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Nazneen Fatema Rajani
| Challenge: | Data-to-text annotations can be costly when dealing with tables with nontrivial structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedure for extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting table headers and table title. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the semantic dependencies between table headers and title to extract semantic triples from tables. |
Multi-level Alignment Pretraining for Multi-lingual Semantic Parsing (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual semantic parsing only handle monolingual parsers, while in real world applications such as Chatbot and search engine, we generally need to handle multi-lingual semanticparsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level alignment pretraining method in a unified architecture for multi-lingual semantic parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a publicly avail-able multi-lingual semantic parsing dataset and a newly constructed dataset. |
Discovering Semantic Subdimensions through Disentangled Conceptual Representations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on predefined dimensions that overlook finer conceptual distinctions . a new framework is proposed to investigate the subdimensions underlying coarse-grained semantic dimensions . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes word embeddings into multiple sub-embeddings . they propose to map these subdimensions to brain activation to assess their plausibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes word embeddings from large language models into sub-embeddings, each encoding specific semantic information. |
EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to integrate semantic knowledge into EA to identify entities across different knowledge graphs that refer to the same object. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets. |
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. |
WAFFLE: Fine-tuning Multi-Modal Model for Automated Front-End Development (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating source code, but two major challenges persist in UI-to-HTML code generation: (1) effectively representing HTML’s hierarchical structure for LLMs; and (2) bridging the gap between the visual nature of UI designs and the text-based format of HTML code. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware attention mechanism that uses a contrastive fine-tuning approach to align LLMs’ understanding of UI images and HTML code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the WebSight-Test and Design2Code benchmarks. |
FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering (2022.tacl-1)
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Linyong Nan, Chiachun Hsieh, Ziming Mao, Xi Victoria Lin, Neha Verma, Rui Zhang, Wojciech Kryściński, Hailey Schoelkopf, Riley Kong, Xiangru Tang, Mutethia Mutuma, Ben Rosand, Isabel Trindade, Renusree Bandaru, Jacob Cunningham, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing table-based question answering datasets lack advanced information-based questions that require reasoning and integration of information pieces retrieved from structured knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset with 10K Wikipedia-based table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells pairs that can be used to generate an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has 10K Wikipedia-based table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells pairs. |
Pruning Redundant Mappings in Transformer Models via Spectral-Normalized Identity Prior (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Spectral-normalized identity priors (SNIP) is a structured pruning approach for a Transformer model. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach which penalizes an entire residual module toward an identity mapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 5 GLUE benchmark tasks while maintaining comparable performance. |
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. |
Invocation Refiner: A Plug-and-Play Module for Rectifying LLM Tool Invocations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) however, the practical application is often hindered by frequent errors in tool invocations, such as incorrect tool names, invalid parameters, wrong tool-call order, or malformed invocation formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized post-processing module that performs independent reasoning on the input of a frozen upstream LLM and an advanced RL algorithm to improve the tool-use reliability of base LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module improves task completion rates and invocation accuracy over the raw outputs of various upstream LLMs on a diverse set of tool-use and reasoning benchmarks. |
MEBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Cross-Document Multi-Entity Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) systems show promise, but their performance on cross-document MEQA remains underexplored due to the lack of tailored benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable multi-document, multi-entity benchmark to evaluate LLMs' capacity to retrieve, consolidate, and reason over scattered and dense information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that even advanced models achieve only 59% accuracy on MEBench. |
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Noise Robust Named Entity Understanding for Voice Assistants (2021.naacl-industry)
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Deepak Muralidharan, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Sida Gao, Xiao Yang, Justine Kao, Stephen Pulman, Atish Kothari, Ray Shen, Yinying Pan, Vivek Kaul, Mubarak Seyed Ibrahim, Gang Xiang, Nan Dun, Yidan Zhou, Andy O, Yuan Zhang, Pooja Chitkara, Xuan Wang, Alkesh Patel, Kushal Tayal, Roger Zheng, Peter Grasch, Jason D Williams, Lin Li
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition and Entity Linking are challenging for voice assistants . utterances are relatively short, so there is not much context to help disambiguate . |
| Approach: | They propose a Named Entity Understanding system that combines NER and EL in a joint reranking module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves NER accuracy by up to 3.13% and EL accuracy by 3.6% in F1 score . it also leads to better accuracies in other natural language understanding tasks . |
Soft-Labeled Contrastive Pre-Training for Function-Level Code Representation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaonan Li, Daya Guo, Yeyun Gong, Yun Lin, Yelong Shen, Xipeng Qiu, Daxin Jiang, Weizhu Chen, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for contrastive pre-training ignore the relevance between codes in large code corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a Soft-labeled contrastive pre-training framework with positive sample construction methods to learn functional-level code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can obtain fine-grained soft-labels through an iterative adversarial manner and use them to learn better code representation. |
Competition-Level Problems are Effective LLM Evaluators (2024.findings-acl)
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Yiming Huang, Zhenghao Lin, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Shuai Lu, Fangyu Lei, Yaobo Liang, Yelong Shen, Chen Lin, Nan Duan, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about their capabilities and the potential data contamination problem. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models in solving recent competition-level programming problems in Codeforces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has experienced a cliff-like decline in problems after September 2021, which shows the potential data contamination and the challenges for any existing LLM to solve unseen complex reasoning problems. |
Concise Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Wu, Jingze Shi, Bingheng Wu, Jiayi Zhang, Xiaotian Lin, Yizhang Zhu, Zhaoyang Yu, Bang Liu, Chenglin Wu, Nan Tang, Yuyu Luo
| Challenge: | Human experts tackle difficult math problems by identifying and executing a few pivotal steps rather than listing every intermediate thought. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for producing training data that mirrors concise human reasoning by rewriting a problem's solution to retain only the essential steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms models trained on 800k long CoT and cuts training and inference costs. |