Papers by Ping Nie
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xin Zhou, Ping Nie, Yiwen Guo, Haojie Wei, Zhanqiu Zhang, Pasquale Minervini, Ruotian Ma, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, but internal mechanisms that contribute to RAG’s effectiveness remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine the internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and examine their ability to improve RAG by examining expert activations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Unleashing the Reasoning Potential of LLMs by Critique Fine-Tuning on One Problem (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Critique Fine-Tuning (CFT) is a promising paradigm for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages critique data generated from a single math problem to improve reasoning accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses one-shot RLVR while requiring 15 to 20 times less compute. |
ACECODER: Acing Coder RL via Automated Test-Case Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent coder models have been driven by supervised fine-tuning, but the potential of reinforcement learning remains unexplored due to the lack of reliable reward data/model in the code domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that generates extensive test-case pairs from existing code data and constructs preference pairs based on pass rates over sampled programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates extensive (question, test-cases) pairs from existing code data and trains them with Bradley-Terry loss. |
SWE-QA-Pro: A Representative Benchmark and Scalable Training Recipe for Repository-Level Code Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Songcheng Cai, Zhiheng Lyu, Yuansheng Ni, Xiangchao Chen, Baichuan Zhou, Shenzhe Zhu, Yi Lu, Haozhe Wang, Chi Ruan, Benjamin Schneider, Weixu Zhang, Xiang Li, Andy Zheng, Yuyu Zhang, Ping Nie, Wenhu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic repository-level code understanding overlook long tail topics and rely on memorized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a repository-level agentic code understanding benchmark that uses long-tail repositories with executable environments to enforce topical balance. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, a Qwen3-8B model trained with the proposed benchmark outperforms GPT-4o by 2.3 points. |
VisualWebInstruct: Scaling up Multimodal Instruction Data through Web Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models struggle with reasoning-focused tasks due to the lack of high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that leverages search engines to create a multimodal multimodal dataset . they use a set of 30,000 seed images to extract HTML data from 700K unique URLs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves the best known performance on MMMU-Pro (40.7), MathVerse (42.6), and DynaMath (55.7). |
VisCoder: Fine-Tuning LLMs for Executable Python Visualization Code Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing instruction-tuning datasets lack execution-grounded supervision and offer limited support for iterative code correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction tuning dataset for Python-based visualization and self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms strong open-source baselines and proprietary models like GPT-4o-mini. |
BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Hosna Oyarhoseini, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep search agents rely on blackbox web search APIs . dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons - authors . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that employs a fixed corpus for controlled retrieval for deep search agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark shows that agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, reasoning-intensive queries. |
XDailyDialog: A Multilingual Parallel Dialogue Corpus (2023.acl-long)
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Zeming Liu, Ping Nie, Jie Cai, Haifeng Wang, Zheng-Yu Niu, Peng Zhang, Mrinmaya Sachan, Kaiping Peng
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for open-domain dialogue modeling limited to a single language . absence of multilingual datasets hinders development of robust open- domain dialog systems . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual parallel open-domain dialog dataset to explore multilingual and cross-lingual open- domain dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to explore multilingual and cross-lingual open-domain dialogs in other languages. |
SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on scientific impact prediction has focused on citation counts and its variants, leaving limited evaluation of models’ capability to reason about other dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-dimensional benchmark for scientific impact prediction spanning 19 fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger models and close-source models in a wide range of fields and measures of scientific impact across 19 fields. |
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
Beyond prompting: Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners by Clustering Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot text classification involve heavy human engineering or complicated self-training pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose to fit unlabeled text with a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model and use class names to cluster them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms prompt-based methods on topic and sentiment datasets and outperformed previous studies significantly on unbalanced datasets. |