Papers by Nan Yin
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. |
UserAdapter: Few-Shot User Learning in Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Adapting a model to a handful of personalized data is challenging, authors say . standard fine-tuning requires hundreds of millions of parameters for each user . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight method that clamps millions of parameters of a Transformer model and optimizes a tiny user-specific vector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on Yelp and IMDB datasets and reduces the number of parameters added for each user. |
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. |
Evidence-Aware Inferential Text Generation with Vector Quantised Variational AutoEncoder (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for inferential text generation ignore context that is not explicitly provided . Existing models ignore background knowledge that provides crucial evidence to generate inferences . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically finds evidence for an event from a large text corpus and leverages it to guide the generation of inferential texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates inferential texts from a large text corpus and uses evidence to guide it. |
A Survey on Efficient Large Language Model Training: From Data-centric Perspectives (2025.acl-long)
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Junyu Luo, Bohan Wu, Xiao Luo, Zhiping Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Rong-Cheng Tu, Nan Yin, Yifan Wang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | achieving data-efficient post-training of Large Language Models is a key research question. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of data-efficient LLM post-training methods from a data-centric perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods cover data selection, data quality enhancement, synthetic data generation, data distillation and compression, and self-evolving data ecosystems. |
Question Generation from SQL Queries Improves Neural Semantic Parsing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using question generation, we learn a semantic parser with 30% of the supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question generation to learn a semantic parser with less supervised training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the state-of-the-art model with less training data. |
ProQA: Structural Prompt-based Pre-training for Unified Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)
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Wanjun Zhong, Yifan Gao, Ning Ding, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Ming Zhou, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing QA research on question answering is focused on specific question types, knowledge domains, or reasoning skills. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified QA paradigm that solves various tasks through a single model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves QA-centric ability on 11 QA benchmarks. |
Nested-Refinement Metamorphosis: Reflective Evolution for Efficient Optimization of Networking Problems (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in network algorithm design but suffer from inefficient iterative coding and high computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to iteratively refine task descriptions and metamorphosis on algorithms to generate more effective solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Nested-Refinement Metamorphosis outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance and efficiency. |
PromISe: Releasing the Capabilities of LLMs with Prompt Introspective Search (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models use uniform manual prompts, resulting in underestimation of performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt introspective search framework that integrates self-introspect and self-refine to unlock the capabilities of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly boosts the performance of 12 well-known LLMs compared to baseline methods. |
UniXcoder: Unified Cross-Modal Pre-training for Code Representation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models for programming languages have demonstrated great success on code intelligence . however, such pre-tried models are sub-optimal for auto-regressive tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified cross-modal pre-trained model for programming language that leverages cross-module contents like AST and code comment to enhance code representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on most code-related tasks and compares with existing models on zero-shot code-to-code search. |
Reasoning Over Semantic-Level Graph for Fact Checking (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact checking use string concatenation or fusing features of isolated evidence sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method suitable for reasoning about the semantic-level structure of evidence . they use graph convolutional network and graph attention network to exploit the structure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves claim verification accuracy and FEVER score on a benchmark dataset. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
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Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
Efficient PRM Training Data Synthesis via Formal Verification (2026.findings-acl)
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Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for constructing PRM training data rely on human annotation or sampling-based labeling methods that require repeated LLM calls. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes PRM training data by annotating step-level error labels using formal verification tools such as Z3 and Isabelle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes PRM training data from formal logic and theorem proving tasks without human annotation or additional LLM calls. |
Coupling Retrieval and Meta-Learning for Context-Dependent Semantic Parsing (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a context-aware retrieval model and a meta-learning paradigm are used for context-dependent semantic parsing . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval model and a meta-learner to incorporate retrieved datapoints as context-dependent semantic parsing evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better than retrieve-and-edit baselines on CONCODE and CSQA datasets. |
Analytical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-naacl)
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Wanjun Zhong, Siyuan Wang, Duyu Tang, Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Yining Chen, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models with implicit reasoning ability struggle to solve analytical reasoning of text. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to analyze text and use it to perform reasoning over it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms pre-trained models on an analysis of the Law School Admission Test dataset. |
Neural Deepfake Detection with Factual Structure of Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deepfake detection typically represent documents with coarse-grained representations, but they struggle to capture factual structures of documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based model that captures factual structures of documents for deepfake detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves strong base models built with RoBERTa on two public deepfake datasets. |
LogicalFactChecker: Leveraging Logical Operations for Fact Checking with Graph Module Network (2020.acl-main)
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Wanjun Zhong, Duyu Tang, Zhangyin Feng, Nan Duan, Ming Zhou, Ming Gong, Linjun Shou, Daxin Jiang, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact checking textual statements are not yet available. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network approach capable of leveraging logical operations for fact checking . they use a textual statement and semi-structured tables to generate a program from it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on TABFACT dataset . it derives a program (a.k.a. logical form) of the statement in semantic parsing manner . |
NUWA-XL: Diffusion over Diffusion for eXtremely Long Video Generation (2023.acl-long)
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Shengming Yin, Chenfei Wu, Huan Yang, Jianfeng Wang, Xiaodong Wang, Minheng Ni, Zhengyuan Yang, Linjie Li, Shuguang Liu, Fan Yang, Jianlong Fu, Ming Gong, Lijuan Wang, Zicheng Liu, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing work generates long videos segment by segment sequentially, which is inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a Diffusion over Difference architecture for eXtremely Long video generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture reduces the average inference time from 7.55min to 26s (94.26%) and generates high-quality long videos with both global and local coherence. |
MAR: Matching-Augmented Reasoning for Enhancing Visual-based Entity Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with visual-based entity questions (VEQA) MLLM can identify A, but may refrain from answering due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses vector representations to analyze visual-based entity questions (VEQA) they use visual cues and textual information to integrate visual cus and visual information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves visual-based entity question answering (VEQA) it can identify faces, names, and alignments within visual objects, and then derive the answer over this matching graph. |
TRACE: An Experiential Framework for Coherent Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multihop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) treat each reasoning step independently and fail to leverage experience from prior explorations, leading to fragmented reasoning and redundant exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies LLM-driven contextual reasoning with exploration prior integration to enhance coherence and robustness of multihop KGQA. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on multiple KGQA benchmarks show that TRACE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |