Papers by Paul He
Less is More: Pretrain a Strong Siamese Encoder for Dense Text Retrieval Using a Weak Decoder (2021.emnlp-main)
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Shuqi Lu, Di He, Chenyan Xiong, Guolin Ke, Waleed Malik, Zhicheng Dou, Paul Bennett, Tie-Yan Liu, Arnold Overwijk
| Challenge: | Dense retrieval requires high-quality text sequence embeddings to support effective search in the representation space. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-learning method that pre-trains the autoencoder using a weak decoder to push the encoder to provide better sequence representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts the effectiveness and few-shot ability of dense retrieval models on web search, news recommendation, and open domain question answering. |
TableFormer: Robust Transformer Modeling for Table-Text Encoding (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tables models require linearization of the table structure, where row or column order is encoded as an unwanted bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and structurally aware table-text encoding architecture TableFormer where tabular structural biases are incorporated completely through learnable attention biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms strong baselines on SQA, WTQ and TabFact table reasoning datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SQ. |
PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu
| Challenge: | PRESTO dataset contains 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants to study some of the more challenging aspects of parsing realistic conversations. |
| Outcome: | The dataset contains 550K contextual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
Tensor Product Generation Networks for Deep NLP Modeling (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using Tensor Product Representations (TPRs) we propose a new architecture for natural language processing based on the principle that hypothesis space for learning includes network hypotheses that are independently known to be suitable for performing the target task. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tensor Product Generation Network (TPGN) which is capable of carrying out TPR computation but uses unconstrained deep learning to design its internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baselines on the COCO dataset and can interpret internal representations and operations. |
Pointwise Mutual Information as a Performance Gauge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve language models' performance do not exploit this phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual information to select and construct prompts that improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that the mutual information between a context and a question is an effective gauge for language model performance. |
Uncovering Hidden Correctness in LLM Causal Reasoning via Symbolic Verification (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to causal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a symbolic verification framework that checks whether LLM-generated causal expressions are derivable from a given causal graph using do-calculus and probability theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can recover correct answers that would otherwise be marked incorrect due to superficial differences. |