Papers by Ningyu Xu
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
Constraining Sequential Model Editing with Editing Anchor Compression (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit hallucinations due to incorrect or outdated knowledge embedded in their parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to constrain the deviation of the parameter matrix during sequential editing by selecting editing anchors that are important in encoding new relations without deviating too much from the original matrix. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework minimizes deviations caused by model editing while retaining over 70% of the general abilities. |
CKnowEdit: A New Chinese Knowledge Editing Dataset for Linguistics, Facts, and Logic Error Correction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | CKnowEdit is the first-ever knowledge editing dataset designed to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese knowledge editing dataset to correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset highlights the challenges that LLMs face in mastering Chinese . CKnowEdit can correct linguistic, factual, and logical errors in Chinese, the authors show . |
PRGC: Potential Relation and Global Correspondence Based Joint Relational Triple Extraction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyi Zheng, Rui Wen, Xi Chen, Yifan Yang, Yunyan Zhang, Ziheng Zhang, Ningyu Zhang, Bin Qin, Xu Ming, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Recent methods for extracting entities and relations from unstructured texts suffer from limitations, such as redundancy of relation prediction and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint relational triple extraction framework based on Potential Relation and Global Correspondence (PRGC) they propose overlapping triples for relation prediction and relation-relational alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks with higher efficiency and consistent performance gain on complex scenarios of overlapping triples. |
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning . they propose augmentation, evaluation frameworks to measure contextual forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
Beyond Prompt Engineering: Robust Behavior Control in LLMs via Steering Target Atoms (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research has explored the use of sparse autoencoders (SAE) to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that isolates and manipulates disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety by using sparse autoencoders to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to isolate and manipulate disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety in large reasoning models. |
Towards Realistic Low-resource Relation Extraction: A Benchmark with Empirical Baseline Study (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extract relational facts from text are limited in their ability to learn from limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt-based methods with few-shot labeled data to evaluate performance . data augmentation technologies and self-training are also proposed to generate more labeles in-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well in low-resource settings with 8 relation extraction datasets. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors pose significant risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior serving as a foundation for future research. |
Schema-adaptable Knowledge Graph Construction (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) tasks rely on static information extraction with a closed set of pre-defined schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a static knowledge Graph Construction task that extracts entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing methods but still has room for improvement . it can extract entity, relation, and event based on dynamically changing schema graph without re-training . |
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Honghao Gui, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Runnan Fang, Lei Li, Zhen Bi, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github. |
Are Structural Concepts Universal in Transformer Language Models? Towards Interpretable Cross-Lingual Generalization (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have implicitly transfer knowledge across languages, but not all languages have such generalization capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning-based method to learn to align conceptual spaces of different languages to enhance cross-lingual generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with state-of-the-art methods and narrows the performance gap between languages. |
Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Shumin Deng, Peng Wang, Xiang Chen, Jia-Chen Gu, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, we can understand knowledge mechanisms in LLMs for learning, storage, utilization, and evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) they examine utilization, evolution, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) they hope to help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to analyze the evolution of parametric knowledge in LLMs. |
EasyEdit2: An Easy-to-use Steering Framework for Editing Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Shuxun Wang, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Mengru Wang, Xinle Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities, however, they may still generate unreliable or unsafe outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The framework is designed to enable plug-and-play adjustability for controlling Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
Cross-Linguistic Syntactic Difference in Multilingual BERT: How Good is It and How Does It Affect Transfer? (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has demonstrated considerable cross-lingual syntactic ability, but it is not well understood what leads to this variation and whether it fairly reflects difference between languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual BERT to enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer of syntactic knowledge between different languages by generating grammatical relations in 24 different languages. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the distance between the distributions of different languages is highly consistent with the syntactic difference in terms of linguistic formalisms. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |