Papers by Nan Yan
RAGEval: Scenario Specific RAG Evaluation Dataset Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Kunlun Zhu, Yifan Luo, Dingling Xu, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Shuo Wang, Yishan Li, Nan Zhang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for RAG systems are lacking due to high costs of data construction and lack of factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate RAG systems in specialized scenarios . they propose three new metrics to evaluate LLM-generated responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms zero-shot and one-shot methods in terms of clarity, safety, conformity, and richness of generated samples. |
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets. |
Enhancing Answer Boundary Detection for Multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve machine reading comprehension performance on low resource languages are limited due to the lack of sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a mixed MRC task to translate the question to other languages and build cross-lingual question-passage pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task improves on two cross-lingual MRC datasets. |
ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing sequence-to-sequence models are optimized for future n-gram prediction and n stream self-attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised objective called future n-gram prediction and the proposed n stream self-attention mechanism to optimize the model for sequence-to-sequence learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on CNN/DailyMail, Gigaword, and SQuAD 1.1 benchmarks compared to the models using the same scale pre-training corpus. |
CONE: An Efficient COarse-to-fiNE Alignment Framework for Long Video Temporal Grounding (2023.acl-long)
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Zhijian Hou, Wanjun Zhong, Lei Ji, Difei Gao, Kun Yan, W.k. Chan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Mike Zheng Shou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work on video temporal grounding for long videos is limited by existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-guided window selection strategy and a coarse-to-fine mechanism to speed up inference for long videos. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates inference time by 2x on Ego4D-NLQ and 15x on MAD while keeping SOTA results. |
Low-code LLM: Graphical User Interface over Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)
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Yuzhe Cai, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Zehua Wang, Yaobo Liang, Tao Ge, Chenfei Wu, WangYou WangYou, Ting Song, Yan Xia, Nan Duan, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Low-code LLM is a visual programming interface that allows users to incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-LLM interaction framework that incorporates low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables users to incorporate ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
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 . |
Control Image Captioning Spatially and Temporally (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate image captions with user intention are still under exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that connects Contrastive constraints and Attention Guidance in a loop manner and engages explicit spatial and temporal constraints to the generating process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on a trace-controlled image captioning task. |
Summarizing Medical Conversations via Identifying Important Utterances (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques to the medical field is a prevailing trend nowadays and has great potential in many applications, such as key information extraction in medical literature. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a hierarchical encoder-tagger model to generate medical conversation summarization by identifying important utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and models and adds conversation-related features to improve 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. |
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. |
Monotonic Paraphrasing Improves Generalization of Language Model Prompting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in zero-shot decision making and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end decoding strategy that paraphrases given prompts or instructions into their lower perplexity counterparts based on an ensemble of a paraphrase LM for prompt rewriting, and a target LM that constrains the generation for lower perxity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can efficiently paraphrase the original prompt without altering its semantic meaning while decreasing the perplexity of each generation as calculated by the target LM. |
Knowledge-Augmented Question Error Correction for Chinese Question Answer System with QuestionRAG (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with input errors, often failing to interpret user intent or altering the original question’s structure (over-correction). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses reinforcement learning to address misinterpretation and over-correction by integrating external knowledge with the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unlocks the full potential of LLMs for the question correction task. |
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. |
GLGE: A New General Language Generation Evaluation Benchmark (2021.findings-acl)
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Dayiheng Liu, Yu Yan, Yeyun Gong, Weizhen Qi, Hang Zhang, Jian Jiao, Weizhu Chen, Jie Fu, Linjun Shou, Ming Gong, Pengcheng Wang, Jiusheng Chen, Daxin Jiang, Jiancheng Lv, Ruofei Zhang, Winnie Wu, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Multi-task benchmarks focus on a range of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks without considering the Natural Language Generation (NLG) models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task benchmark for evaluating the generalization capabilities of NLG models across eight language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on GLUE and Su-perGLUE for English and several other languages. |
RikiNet: Reading Wikipedia Pages for Natural Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using Wikipedia pages to answer open-domain questions remains challenging in natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which reads Wikipedia pages for natural question answering . it uses a dynamic paragraph dual-attention reader and a cascaded answer predictor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the human model on the Natural Questions dataset . it achieves 74.3 F1 and 57.9 F1 on long-answer and short-answer tasks . |
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
| Challenge: | Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chart question answering (ChartQA) tasks are a critical part of visualization charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart question answering task that uses MLLMs to analyze charts . they propose 'Chain-of-Charts' textual prompt strategy that directs attention to visual elements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance by 14.41% and 80% in low-level ChartQA tasks. |
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. |
Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets under the question answering scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training algorithm generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. |
Constructing a Chinese Medical Conversation Corpus Annotated with Conversational Structures and Actions (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that patients' advocacy for antibiotic treatment is consequential on antibiotic over-prescribing. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze a manually transcribed corpus of medical dialogue in Chinese pediatric consultations with annotation of conversational structures and actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus can shed light on ways to improve physician-patient communication in order to reduce antibiotic over-prescribing. |
Diverse, Controllable, and Keyphrase-Aware: A Corpus and Method for News Multi-Headline Generation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for news headline generation focus on producing a single short sentence . et al., 2017; Gehrmann e.t., 2018; Zhong ee., 2019) focus on single-headline generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate multiple headlines with keyphrases of user interests . they propose generating multiple keyphrase-relevant headlines using a transformer decoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in terms of quality and diversity. |
Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build LLMs with stacking are limited by their information coverage and low fault tolerance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to iteratively generate new queries from an input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on open-domain question answering benchmarks. |
Tell Me How to Ask Again: Question Data Augmentation with Controllable Rewriting in Continuous Space (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation techniques for natural language processing tasks are difficult to design. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable rewriting based question data augmentation method for machine reading comprehension, question generation and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates high-quality, high-quality question data samples on machine reading comprehension, question generation, and question-answering natural language inference tasks. |