Papers by Peng Xia
HGCLIP: Exploring Vision-Language Models with Graph Representations for Hierarchical Understanding (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Object categories are typically organized into a multi-granularity taxonomic hierarchy . traditional uni-modal approaches focus primarily on image features, revealing limitations in complex scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines vision-language models with a deeper exploitation of the hierarchy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements on 11 diverse visual recognition benchmarks. |
LearnAlign: Data Selection for LLM Reinforcement Learning with Improved Gradient Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Shipeng Li, Zhiqin Yang, Shikun Li, Xiaobo Xia, Hengyu Liu, Xinghua Zhang, Gaode Chen, Dong Fang, Ying Tai, Zhe Peng
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a key technique for enhancing LLMs’ reasoning abilities, yet its data inefficiency remains a major bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a gradient-alignment-based method which intelligently selects the learnable and representative training reasoning data for RLVR post-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method significantly reduces training data requirements while improving performance. |
CoCoID: Learning Contrastive Representations and Compact Clusters for Semi-Supervised Intent Discovery (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to intent discovery cluster novel intents with prior knowledge from intent-labeled data in a semi-supervised way. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised intent discovery framework CoCoID with two components . they propose to discriminate user utterance representation learning and intra-cluster knowledge distillation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art intent discovery models by over 1.4 ACC and ARI points and 1.1 NMI points across four datasets. |
SimpleOCR: Rendering Visual Questions to Teach MLLMs to Read (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Peng, Peng Xia, Ding Zhong, Kaide Zeng, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Jiaqi Liu, Ruiyi Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | MLLMs lack visual grounding mechanism to read text embedded in images, or rely on parametric shortcuts . despite strong OCR capabilities, models suffer performance degradation of 12.7% in the VQ setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play training strategy that invalidates shortcuts in text prompts . they propose 'vq' setting where text queries are rendered directly onto images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy surpasses the base model by 5.4% and GRPO based on original images by 2.7% on four representative OOD benchmarks. |
RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical large vision language models often generate inaccurate and irrelevant answers that do not align with established medical facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for controlling factuality risk through calibrated selection of the number of retrieved contexts and a preference dataset to fine-tune the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 20.8% on three medical VQA datasets. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zijie Liu, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Qingyu Chen, Kaidi Xu, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks. |
Planning with Diffusion Models for Target-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for directing conversations toward specific targets generate dialogue plans in a step-by-step sequential manner and suffer from compounding errors and myopic actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages diffusion models to enable non-sequential dialogue planning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs non-myopic lookahead exploration and optimizes action strategies over a long horizon through non-sequential dialogue planning. |
Towards Faithful Industrial RAG: A Reinforced Co-adaptation Framework for Advertising QA (2026.acl-industry)
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Wenwei Li, Ming Xu, Tianle Xia, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA in industrial environments are inherently relational and often updated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes retrieval and generation through two components: Graph-aware Retrieval and evidence-constrained reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on an internal advertising QA dataset show consistent gains across expert-judged dimensions including accuracy, completeness, safety, and URL validity. |
MedVerse: Efficient and Reliable Medical Reasoning via DAG-Structured Parallel Execution (2026.acl-long)
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Jianwen Chen, Xinyu Yang, Peng Xia, Arian Azarang, Yueh Z Lee, Gang Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Beidi Chen, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large reasoning models have broadened the capabilities of medical artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph process based on Petri Net theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning framework improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9%. |
LCAN: A Label-Aware Contrastive Attention Network for Multi-Intent Recognition and Slot Filling in Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-intent utterances processing remains a persistent challenge due to intricate intent-slot dependencies and semantic ambiguities. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-aware contrastive attention network (LCAN) that integrates label-based attention and contrastive learning strategies to improve semantic understanding and generalization in multi-intent scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves intent recognition and slot filling performance in multi-intent dialogue systems. |
Search-P1: Path-Centric Reward Shaping for Stable and Efficient Agentic RAG Training (2026.acl-industry)
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Tianle Xia, Ming Xu, Lingxiang Hu, Yiding Sun, Wenwei Li, Linfang Shang, Liqun Liu, Peng Shu, Huan Yu, Jie Jiang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances large language models by incorporating external knowledge, yet traditional singleround retrieval struggles with complex multistep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces path-centric reward shaping for agentic RAG training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing methods with an average accuracy gain of 7.7 points. |
Unsupervised Morphological Paradigm Completion (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | a task of generating morphological paradigms is a challenging unsupervised task for natural language processing systems . acuidados y acciones del idioma es a problem in linguistic annotators. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of unsupervised morphological paradigm completion using raw text and a lemma list. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms trivial baselines on 14 typologically diverse languages with ease and higher accuracy than minimally supervised systems. |
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Tianyi Tang, Hu Yiwen, Bingqian Li, Wenyang Luo, ZiJing Qin, Haoxiang Sun, Jiapeng Wang, Shiyi Xu, Xiaoxue Cheng, Geyang Guo, Han Peng, Bowen Zheng, Yiru Tang, Yingqian Min, Yushuo Chen, Jie Chen, Ranchi Zhao, Luran Ding, Yuhao Wang, Zican Dong, Xia Chunxuan, Junyi Li, Kun Zhou, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings. |
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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He Zhu, Tianrui Qin, King Zhu, Heyuan Huang, Yeyi Guan, Jinxiang Xia, Hanhao Li, Yi Yao, Ningning Wang, Pai Liu, Tianhao Peng, Xin Gui, Li Xiaowan, Yuhui Liu, Xiangru Tang, Jian Yang, Ge Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Changwang Zhang, Jun Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects. |
Hierarchical Bi-Directional Self-Attention Networks for Paper Review Rating Recommendation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for review rating prediction ignore hierarchies among data . paper review rating predictions are important for improving paper review process . |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical bi-directional self-attention Network framework for paper review rating prediction and recommendation . they leverage hierarchical structure of paper reviews with three levels of encoders . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be used to make an effective decision-making tool for the academic paper review process. |
Modeling Uncertainty in Composed Image Retrieval via Probabilistic Embeddings (2025.acl-long)
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Haomiao Tang, Jinpeng Wang, Yuang Peng, GuangHao Meng, Ruisheng Luo, Bin Chen, Long Chen, Yaowei Wang, Shu-Tao Xia
| Challenge: | Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) combines text and reference images to search for images . metric learning methods that focus on point embeddings fail to capture uncertainty in input data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures uncertainty in images and queries by Gaussian distributions in latent space rather than fixed points. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework quantifies quality and semantic uncertainties . it can handle polysemy and ambiguity in search intentions, authors say . |
SAPIENT: Mastering Multi-turn Conversational Recommendation with Strategic Planning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods train RL-based agents with greedy action selection or sampling strategy and suffer from suboptimal conversational planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Monte Carlo Tree Search-based CRS framework called SAPIENT . it consists of a conversational agent and a communication planner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets. |