Papers by Qi Tian
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation, but Text-to-SQL datasets often include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. |
| Approach: | They found that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential by augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on Text-to-SQL datasets. |
ParaMac: A General Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation Framework Leveraging Semantic Constraints and Diversifying Mechanisms (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised methods for paraphrase generation are weak in semantic equivalence or expression diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for unsupervised paraphrase generation that employs multi-aspect equivalence constraints and multi-granularity diversifying mechanisms to achieve good semantic equvalence and expressive diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9.1% and 3.3% absolute gains over previous SOTA on Quora and MSCOCO and can improve to 18.0% and 4.6% on GLUE. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers. |
MIKE: A New Benchmark for Fine-grained Multimodal Entity Knowledge Editing (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaqi Li, Miaozeng Du, Chuanyi Zhang, Yongrui Chen, Nan Hu, Guilin Qi, Haiyun Jiang, Siyuan Cheng, Bozhong Tian
| Challenge: | Current benchmarks focus on coarse-grained knowledge, leaving the intricacies of fine-grounded knowledge unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and dataset specifically designed for FG multimodal entity knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark underscoring the complexity of FG knowledge editing in MLLMs. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
ReAttn: Improving Attention-based Re-ranking via Attention Re-weighting (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Attention-based re-ranking methods are highly concentrated a small subset of tokens within a few documents, making others indistinguishable. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-hoc re-weighting strategy that uses attention weights to reduce lexical bias and emphasize distinctive terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces lexical bias and emphasizes distinctive terms across documents, while maintaining a balanced distribution across informative tokens. |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
The Devil is in the Distributions: Explicit Modeling of Scene Content is Key in Zero-Shot Video Captioning (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot video captioning focus on one key aspect of the scene and ignore the rest of the visual input. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel textual prompting strategy for zero-shot video captioning that uses a category-aware retrieval mechanism to promote prompt diversity while ensuring visual relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on in-domain and cross-domain settings. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
Towards Trustworthy Smart Contract Synthesis: A Multi-Agent Framework with Lean-Based Verification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Smart Contracts are the foundation of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), executing financial logic without trusted intermediaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based auto-formalization and verification. |
| Outcome: | LeVer is the first trustworthy smart contract synthesis framework that integrates LLM-based generation with Lean-based auto-formalization and verification. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models with human preferences post pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Supervised Fine-Tuning and Preference Optimization (PO) with two sub-processes defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) |
| Outcome: | The proposed process performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. |
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shuang Cheng, Yihan Bian, Dawei Liu, Yuhua Jiang, Yihao Liu, Linfeng Zhang, Qian Yao, Zhongbo Tian, Wenhai Wang, Qipeng Guo, Kai Chen, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
RethinkingTMSC: An Empirical Study for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that current TMSC systems rely on textual information, and the progress in tackling this task has slowed down. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate both visual and textual information to improve the performance of TMSC by considering multimodal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates both visual and textual information to improve performance. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets. |
GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural semantic parsing are limited by the semantic gap between natural and formal languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified intermediate representation for graph query languages, named GraphQ IR, which has a natural-language-like expression that bridges the semantic gap and formally defined syntax that maintains the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representation can convert user queries into graphQ IR, which can later be losslessly compiled into various downstream graph query languages. |
RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on minimizing distances between words in aligned pairs, while suffering from low discriminative capability to distinguish the relative orders between positive and negative candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking-oriented induction model to learn personalized mapping function for each word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn personalized mapping function for each word on public datasets including rich-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Incremental Transformer: Efficient Encoder for Incremented Text Over MRC and Conversation Tasks (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing encoders that encode incremented inputs have to re-encode the whole text to obtain the encoding of the extended input. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient encoder dedicated for faster encoding of incremented input . it takes only added input as input but attends to cached representations of original input a lower layer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed encoder achieves 6.2x speedup over current encoders . it takes only added input as input but attends to cached representations of original input . |
From Grounding to Manipulation: Case Studies of Foundation Model Integration in Embodied Robotic Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study examines the operational characteristics of different integration strategies for robotics . end-to-end vision-language-action models implicitly unify perception and planning . |
| Approach: | They propose end-to-end vision-language-action models that implicitly unify perception and planning . they also propose modular pipelines using either vision-linguistic models or MLLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks implicitly unify perception and planning, and modular pipelines using either vision-language models or multimodal large language models. |
Learning to Instruct: Fine-Tuning a Task-Aware Instruction Optimizer for Black-Box LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yunzhe Qi, Jinjin Tian, Tianci Liu, Ruirui Li, Tianxin Wei, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He
| Challenge: | Learning to Instruct is a new paradigm for black-box LLMs with inaccessible internal states. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that formulates instruction optimization as an LLM fine-tuning objective for a white-box “instruction engineer” LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in performance and efficiency. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Knowledge Enhancement and Filtering Framework (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge enhancement techniques for pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce noisy entity representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge enhancement filter that integrates external knowledge bases to enhance PLMs' ability to capture entity knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 18 widely used LLMs uncover critical insights: (1) models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps; (2) failures in complex multi-hop tasks stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-module framework that disentangles factual recall and spatial logic from the model's real capabilities in urban environments. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests on 18 widely used LLMs reveal that models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps, and failures in complex multi-hop tasks often stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Ding, Yuhan Chen, Jiayang Lyu, Jiyao Yuan, Qi Zhu, Shuangshuang Tian, Dantong Zhu, Futing Wang, Heyuan Deng, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Tao Lin
| Challenge: | evolving generic Large Language Models into specialized Large Reasoning Models requires effective post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a plasticity-ceiling framework to harness expert trajectories . they establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes stability and premature convergence deficits in synchronized approaches. |
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect. |
Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human–Agent Interaction (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Xiaohua Wang, Jingwen Xu, Zhengkang Guo, Qi Qian, Kaitao Song, Jiakang Yuan, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing systems that use memory as an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage are often static and rely on experience-following tendencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance by adding context into the model's prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prompting and memory masking strategies in multiple scenarios. |