Papers by Philip S. Yu
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| Challenge: | Current scientific reasoning models struggle with generalization across domains and fall short of multimodal perception. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal large language models to integrate text, images, and other modalities to enhance scientific reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can integrate text, images, and other modalities and improve reasoning across disciplines. |
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| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to identify uniability based on column representations are insufficient to reveal latent relational features to describe column relation between pair of columns. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised table union search framework called AutoTUS to learn column relational representations in a multi-stage manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the SOTA baseline and on real-world datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Contract review is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and costly . a benchmark is proposed to detect potential legal conflicts . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for legal provision recommendation and conflict detection for contract auto-reviewing which aims to recommend the legal provisions related to contract clauses and detect possible legal conflicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task recommends legal provisions related to contract clauses and detects legal conflicts. |
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| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular data generation require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a new in-context learning framework to prompt a fixed LLM with in-constitut examples to enhance the in-text learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms random selection strategies on five real-world tabular datasets and reduces error rate by 42.2% on fidelity metric. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work adopts data augmentation techniques to generate pseudo-annotated sentences . existing methods neither preserve semantic consistency of original sentences nor preserve syntax structure of sentences when expressing relations using seq2seq models, resulting in less diverse augmentations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dedicated augmentation technique for relational texts, named GDA, which uses two complementary modules to preserve both semantic consistency and syntax structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can bring 2.0% F1 improvements in three datasets under low-resource setting. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research on emotion recognition in conversation does not reach a consensus on classification theories . despite this, there is no clear consensus on how to recognize previously unseen emotions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a prototype-based emotion transfer framework that can be used in real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows promise but still faces key challenges in the field of emotion recognition in conversation. |
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for collaborative filtering are limited by their computational demands and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate pre-trained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs. |
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| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
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| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deploy large language models (LLMs) into RecSys have limited prompt length, unstructured item information, and un-constrained generation of recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy-guided recommendation framework that empowers LLMs with category information in a systematic approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves recommendation quality compared to zero-shot approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for LLM unit test generation focus on function-level code rather than on more practical, challenging multi-file codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-file-level benchmark for unit test generation covering Python, Java, and JavaScript. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that most LLMs exhibit moderate performance on MultiFileTest, highlighting the benchmark’s inherent difficulty. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for fake news detection capture domain-shared semantic features but fail to generalize well due to poor adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable structure knowledge transfer between multiple domains . they compare content-only and propagation-rich data to preserve structural patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn semantic and structural features across domains. |
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| Challenge: | Multilingual LLMs have achieved remarkable benchmark performance, but continue to underperform on non-Latin script languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate phonemic transcriptions as complementary signals to induce script-invariant representations by integrating phonemic and orthographic transcriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance for Latin and non-Latin script languages, with 12.6% performance improvement and 15.1% performance improvement compared to randomized ICL retrieval. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on distinguishing fully watermarked text from non-watermarked text, overlooking real-world scenarios where LLMs generate only brief segments within longer documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect watermarked segments in large documents using an anomaly extraction method and a local traversal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between detection accuracy and computational efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract relation facts from limited labeled corpora are laborintensive to obtain . Existing approaches use self-training to generate pseudo labels that will cause gradual drift problem or leverage meta-learning scheme which does not solicit feedback explicitly. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gradient Imitation Reinforcement Learning method to encourage pseudo label data to imitate gradient descent direction on labeled data and bootstrap its optimization capability through trial and error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method handles two major scenarios in low-resource relation extraction when no unlabeled data is available. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes. |
| Approach: | This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems . |
| Outcome: | The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings. |
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| Challenge: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models (LLMs) current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed and potentially sub-optimal learning trajectory. |
| Approach: | a framework for efficient instruction tuning is proposed to address the issue of curriculum rigidity . current methods rely on static heuristic difficulty metrics and fail to adapt to evolving capabilities . |
| Outcome: | Efficient instruction tuning aims to enhance the ultimate performance of large language models . current methods suffer from the curriculum rigidity, resulting in a fixed learning trajectory . |
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| Challenge: | Existing literature primarily addresses this problem through external interventions such as retrieval augmentation and prompt engineering at the input or output level. |
| Approach: | They find that LLMs can still produce hallucinated outputs when using structured external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models fail to ground the provided knowledge, causing the model to revert to parametric memory. |
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| Challenge: | Existing augmentation techniques manipulate words in the original text that break the semantic coherence of the text, or exploit generative models that ignore preserving entities in the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Entity-to-Text based data augmentation technique called EnTDA to add, delete, replace or swap entities in the original text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique generates semantically coherent and entity preserving texts on thirteen NER tasks and two settings. |
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| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) is crucial for large language models without costly retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for recurrent knowledge identification and fusion that enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer. |
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| Challenge: | In-context learning methods that use self-generated annotations do not scale to many-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework analogous to semi-supervised learning that uses self-generated annotations instead of ground truth labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ground truth ICL under zero-shot, few-shot and many-shot settings. |
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| Challenge: | Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to resolve conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on LoCoMo and LongDialQA. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models’ performance as correctors on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) remains unsatisfactory due to the challenging nature of the task. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework EXAM that uses LLMs as explainers to enhance CGEC small models and a novel evaluation method SEE that utilizes LLM as evaluators to bring more reasonable evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the performance of LLMs on Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) task. |
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to creating layout-aware, interactive academic webpages are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset and evaluation framework for assessing academic webpage generation that incorporates rule-based metrics like Connectivity, Completeness and PaperQuiz. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines like template-based webpages and arXiv/alphaXivo versions while maintaining low cost. |
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| Challenge: | Recent supervised deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance, but there are two other considerations that are important. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised aspect extraction model using general-purpose embeddings and domain-specific embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods without supervision and achieves very good results. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) watermarking is radioactive and enables the detection of watermarks inherited by student models when trained on the outputs of watermarked teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of watermark removal attacks that allow student models to perform untraceable knowledge distillation while avoiding watermark inheritance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks eliminate inherited watermarks while maintaining knowledge transfer efficiency and low computational overhead. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection rely on spurious correlations, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal incongruities via contrastive learning for multimodal sarcasm detection by using three views to drive multi-view learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it is more generalizable than existing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) are limited in labeled resources and domain shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive domain adaptation knowledge distillation approach to adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains by employing three components to achieve superior domain adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains even if they are diverse in terms and writing styles. |
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| Challenge: | Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer . despite recent advances in cross-linguistic research, most studies have restricted themselves to two major assumptions . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts to capture contact between these languages . they propose to use a benchmark dataset to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows for enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-linguistic transfer. |
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal large language models have been used for processing and understanding information from diverse modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the audio-visual capabilities of multi-modal large language models . they focus on effectiveness, efficiency, generalizability, and robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models exhibit strong zero-shot and few-shot generalization abilities . their success relies heavily on the vision modality, which impairs performance when visual input is corrupted or missing. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used dependency trees to extract relation between aspects and contexts, but there is a potential mismatch between the dependency tree and sentiment classification as a semantic task. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace the syntactic dependency tree with a semantic structure to capture the relation between an aspect and a context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves ABSA on four public datasets with 1.13% improvement over baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that decomposes error detection into three phases with specialized agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization on real-world educational data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for short product title generation only consider textual information from long titles . MM-GAN incorporates image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual info from original long titles. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal generative adversarial network for short product title generation in E-commerce . they incorporate image information and attribute tags from product, as well as textual information from original long titles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a large-scale E-commerce dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning. |
| Approach: | They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual natural language inference lack annotated parallel corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a new prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer for XNLI that uses a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings. |
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| Challenge: | Scene graphs are used in cross-modal tasks such as image retrieval, image captioning, and visual question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that iterates between nodes prediction and edges prediction . they frame scene graph modification as a graph expansion task by introducing incremental structure expanding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the state-of-the-art model by large margins on four benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are used to review academic papers, but are susceptible to textual adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the robustness of large language models as automated reviewers in the presence of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is robust against textual adversarial attacks, the authors argue . their findings highlight the importance of addressing adversarials to ensure integrity of scholarly communication. |
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| Challenge: | Existing training-based model editing methods struggle to incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses geometric relationships to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework avoids updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model’s generalization ability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods suffer from the gradual drift problem, where noisy pseudo labels are incorporated during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses pseudo labels to assess quality on unlabeled samples . they use a relation label generation network to learn from successful and failed attempts . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show the proposed method can improve on two public datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing deep research frameworks lack adequate evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with open-domain evaluation and a stage-wise safety benchmark to address this oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves defense success rates by 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to assist with driving decisions, but they face limitations in perception and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs and their applications . they analyze agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM agents engage with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human intervention and improves safety and efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step. |
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on modeling the retrieved textual knowledge but this may not be able to accurately identify complex relations. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve multimodal relation extraction information based on object, sentence, and whole image . they propose to synthesize the object-level, image-level and sentence-level information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal relation extraction. |