Papers by Pei Liu
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| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have extensive world knowledge, but often generate inaccurate geospatial knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluation of large language models to mitigate hallucinations . they use Kahneman-Tversky Optimization to align LLMs with their reality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework uncovers hallucinations in 20 advanced LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are fast but require expensive pre-training . a new approach to scale large language models into MoEs reduces inference costs . |
| Approach: | They propose an analytical post-training framework that rapidly restructures FFNs into sparse MoE architectures using only a small calibration dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on a small calibration dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
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| Challenge: | Documents with rich layouts are a significant portion of enterprise corpora and document AI is still a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight extension to traditional large language models for reasoning over visual documents that takes into account both textual semantics and spatial layout. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing large language models on 14 out of 16 datasets and generalizes well to 4 out of 5 previously unseen datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. |
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| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a directive, client-centered counseling approach for eliciting clients' motivation for behavioral change. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-LLM agent framework for controllable MI dialogue generation . therapist and client agents generate MI-coded utterances guided by MI codes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate fluent dialogues with minimal intervention time and a high level of evaluation. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for recommendation explanation evaluation lack item diversity and user preferences data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark based on Amazon e-commerce categories with implicit preferences . they propose two novel automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic evaluation benchmark outperforms existing methods in a variety of domains. |
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
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| Challenge: | Most venture capital investments fail, while a few deliver outsized returns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes relational evidence across sources . they propose combining information-gain-driven retriever and knowledge base to ground reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves +5.9% F1 and +22.1% Precision@5 over state-of-the-art baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant but subtle weaknesses, such as mistakes in instruction-following or coding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to automatically expose weaknesses in Large Language Models (LLMs) they use three LLM-powered agents to perform comprehensive weakness identification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is more effective than untargeted data augmentation methods like Self-Instruct to identify weaknesses in LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods require training a separate adapter for each user, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-time updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework that maps a user's profile directly to a full set of adapter parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based personalization and OPPU while using substantially fewer computational resources at deployment. |
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown exceptional capabilities of generalist models . however, their applicability and effectiveness in specific domains like finance needs a better understanding . |
| Approach: | They conduct empirical studies to compare the performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 on financial text analytical problems using eight benchmark datasets from five categories of tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on a wide range of financial text analytical tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language model-based agents focus on evaluation benchmarks without training support. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese shopping simulation environment that uses large language models to train agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly in a large-scale and challenging shopping environment in China. |
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| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for natural language generation (NLG) tasks face the challenges on generalization ability and interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that evaluates natural language generation tasks as an instruction-style question answering task and utilizes instruction-tuned pre-trained language models without training on evaluation datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance in untrained metrics for evaluating text summarization and dialogue generation, which exhibits strong dimension-level / task-level generalization ability and interpretability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets suffer from outdated and insufficient challenging content, neglecting human-like reasoning, and limited reliability due to single-LLM generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent data generation framework that integrates reasoning-dense filters, multiagent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations to ensure the reliability and quality of the dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and quality of the 2,000-synthesized datasets by integrating reasoning-dense filters, multi-agent collaboration, and human mathematicians’ evaluations. |
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| Challenge: | Conceptualizer is a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph between source language concepts and sets of target language strings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph between source language concepts and sets of target language strings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has good alignment accuracy across all languages and on 32 Swadesh concepts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to mimic human social intelligence, but most studies focus on static self-report or performance-based tests. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess LLMs' ability to understand and manage intentions by mapping their ability to infer the intentions of others in a game setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses LLMs' ability to understand and manage intentions in a game setting. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches aggregate demonstrations from all classes into a shared, task-level context vector, capturing global task information but without explicitly preserving fine-grained, class-conditional semantic distinctions. |
| Approach: | They propose a class-conditional context vector extension to implicit in-context learning that explicitly models class-specific contextual information by constructing separate context vectors for each class. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension outperforms task-level context vector baselines and achieves higher average accuracy than conventional few-shot learning on most models. |
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| Challenge: | Tool-calling agents are increasingly deployed in real-world customer-facing workflows . but most studies on tool-callers focus on idealized settings with general, fixed, and well-specified tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-calling agent-based data pipeline that converts trajectories into user-facing tasks with controlled intent adaptations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can be used to study tool use under three scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents. |
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| Challenge: | Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters . |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on intent-related models fails to capture long-term dependencies in user behavior and fails to effectively utilize item relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential recommendation framework that combine temporal variability with position encoding that has extrapolation properties to encode sequences, thereby expanding the model’s view of user behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three real datasets by 0.8% to 14.7% compared to baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models are often not well aligned with human intents, which requires additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Black-Box Prompt Optimization (BPO) to perform alignments on large language models that are not well aligned with human intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and is model-agnostic. |
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| Challenge: | Current instruction tuning relies on teacher models or human intervention to generate and refine the instructions and responses for training, which are costly, non-sustainable, and may lack diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a human/model-free compositional data synthesis method that can create rich and diverse augmentations from existing instruction tuning data to enhance large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over benchmarks and reduces training costs by 80% compared with original instruction tuning. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into agentic frameworks to assist individual users in completing diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulation environment with a plug-and-play proactive AI mediator . they use a socio-cognitive evaluation framework to measure consensus changes, intervention latency, mediator effectiveness and intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a generic baseline in multi-party negotiation scenarios while being 77% faster in response. |
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| Challenge: | Current neural response generation models generate responses directly, omitting unstated implicit knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative approach to externalize implicit commonsense knowledge and use it to generate responses. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that TBS models outperform end-to-end RG models on most automatic metrics and generate more informative, specific, and commonsense-following responses. |
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| Challenge: | In-context machine translation (MT) with large language models can take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-context machine translation (MT) with large language models to take advantage of linguistic resources such as grammar books and dictionaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can take advantage of dictionaries and grammar books, but its performance is poor for many lowresource languages. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for calculating distinct scores have evident biases that assign higher penalties to longer sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale the number of distinct tokens based on their expectations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric removes evident biases in the original distinct score . the proposed meter correlates better with human judgment in evaluating response diversity . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for event extraction focus on sentence-level event extraction, but they lack a broader view of the document context. |
| Approach: | They build graphs with candidate event filler extractions enriched by sentential embeddings as nodes and use graph attention networks to identify event regions in a document and aggregate event information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs well on two languages and shows that it is faster than previous methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event reason extraction are far from resolving this problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to extract causal explanations from document-level texts . they use a dataset FinReason for evaluation to provide Reasons annotation for financial events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task performs better than existing methods on a dataset of 8,794 documents, 12,861 financial events and 11,006 reason spans. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) have limited ability to conduct induction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable LLMs to teach themselves induction through deduction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on two induction benchmarks and shows that it can be used to teach induction through deduction. |
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) is a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to augment cross-lingual machine reading comprehension by combining knowledge from multiple language branch models into a single model for all target languages. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two CLMRC benchmarks show the proposed method is effective and robust to data noises. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets labeled for one task hinder multi-task learning . task-specific data make models learn task-related leakage features rather than meaningful knowledge that could generalize to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to jointly label large-scale NLP dataset MATINF . it contains 1.07 million question-answer pairs with human-labeled categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is applicable for classification, question answering, and summarization. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work has addressed problems in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and human-aligned evaluation. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset of scientific texts and evaluate it using an explainable equation generation workflow using automatic metrics and human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves moderate performance on lexical and syntactic similarity, but struggles with semantic accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Translationese is a linguistic property that is often introduced in the translation process that is different from those of original texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use synthesized translations and translations in the wild to evaluate T-index's generalizability in cross-domain settings and its validity against human judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure can generalize to unseen genres, authors, and language pairs. |
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| Challenge: | Current intent detection work experiments with minor intent categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses query-to-query and query- to-metadata approaches to retrieve intents from metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on query-to-query (Q2Q) and query- to-metadata (Q 2M) approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose unique safety challenges due to their integration of visual and textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to disentangle risks through step-by-step reasoning within multimodal inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves safety alignment in MLLMs by fine-tuning and iterative Reinforcement Learning from AI feedback. |
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models are often criticized for failures that happen without competency awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that extends conventional NMT with a self-estimator to translate a source sentence and estimate its competency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs on translation tasks intact and on quality estimation tasks better than existing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Synthetic data generation is a promising approach to enhance reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework based on the Socratic questioning strategy . they use socratic questions to deepen the thinking process and broaden it to motivate self-reflection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on math and code generation tasks while maintaining affordable costs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP evaluations lack the ability to generate informative critiques in pointwise grading and pairwise comparison especially without references. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can acquire pointwise grading critiques with pseudo references and revise these critiques via multi-path prompting to obtain informative evaluation data in different tasks and settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all open-source models and even GPT-4 in system-level correlations of pointwise grading. |
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models neglect to consider linguistic knowledge of texts . existing models neglect linguistic information, which is important for sentiment analysis . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that introduces word-level linguistic knowledge into pre-trained models to enhance sentiment analysis by querying SentiWordNet to acquire sentiment polarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains state-of-the-art performance on a variety of sentiment analysis tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Evidence-intensive reports often produce fluent but under-supported drafts . eviReport is an evidence-grounded workflow for automated long-form report generation . |
| Approach: | They propose an evidence-tracked workflow that organizes corpus evidence into compact, traceable units and retrieves query-relevant subgraphs into retrieval-ready packages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed workflow outperforms baselines in factual coverage, factual accuracy and visual evidence integration. |
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms struggle with this challenge due to catastrophic forgetting or gradient conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a conflict-aware molecular language model merging framework that generates multiple constraints moleculaire as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multiple constraints molecular as a cooperative game among property-specific fine-tune models (expert models) it minimizes conflicts among properties by exploring the optimal combination of the importance of the task parameter and relative fusion weights of each expert (fusion coefficient). |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on colexification patterns relies on annotated word lists, limiting scalability and usefulness in NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to train multilingual graphs from colexification patterns using an unannotated parallel corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve high recall on CLICS and transfer learning in multilingual graphs. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o. |