Papers by Qi Xuan
DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA benchmarks that provide fixed answers to debatable questions are inadequate for evaluating their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 2,941 debatable questions to assess their ability to provide comprehensive answers to inherently debatably asked questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on 2,941 debatable questions accompanied by human-annotated partial answers that capture a variety of perspectives. |
The Confidence Dichotomy: Analyzing and Mitigating Miscalibration in Tool-Use Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a fundamental pillar of trustworthiness is calibration, which refers to an agent’s ability to express confidence that reliably reflects its actual performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes task accuracy and calibration, supported by a holistic benchmark of reward designs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves calibration across tool types and shows that trained agents achieve superior calibration and exhibit robust generalization from local training environments to noisy web settings and to distinct domains such as mathematical reasoning. |
Code-Switching Information Retrieval: Benchmarks, Analysis, and the Limits of Current Retrievers (2026.findings-acl)
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Qingcheng Zeng, Yuheng Lu, Zeqi Zhou, Heli Qi, Puxuan Yu, Fuheng Zhao, Hitomi Yanaka, Weihao Xuan, Naoto Yokoya
| Challenge: | a new study examines the performance of code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . code-witching is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon in global communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate code-switching IR in monolingual contexts . they propose CS-MTEB, which measures performance declines of up to 27% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that code-switching performance is degraded by 27% . the proposed benchmark is based on a dataset of mixed-language queries . |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Haofei Yu, Keyang Xuan, Fenghai Li, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, Jiaxuan You
| Challenge: | Existing research systems often design and use agentic workflows to perform research tasks such as ideation, scientific coding, review writing, and tree-based search. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source codebase, an interactive web demonstration, and a PyPI Python package to make state-of-the-art auto-research pipelines broadly accessible to every researcher and developer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework adapts easily to new tools and supports iterative growth. |
Improving Robustness of Language Models from a Geometry-aware Perspective (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that removing the norm-bounded projection and increasing search steps in adversarial training can significantly improve robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose friendly adversarial data augmentation and geometry-aware adversarial training to achieve stronger robustness using fewer search steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can obtain stronger robustness using fewer steps than existing methods. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Merge then Realign: Simple and Effective Modality-Incremental Continual Learning for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced their versatility as they integrate a growing number of modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple MCL paradigm that addresses forgetting and misalignment . they propose 'MErge then ReAlign' to extend existing models to more modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is easy to deploy and highly reusable in the MLLM community. |
Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to quantify uncertainty are limited in vision-language models . however, current models display notable miscalibration across diverse tasks and settings . |
| Approach: | They evaluate verbalized confidence in vision-language models using visual reasoning . they propose a prompting strategy that improves confidence alignment in multimodal settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves confidence alignment across multimodal settings. |
EVIDENCEMINER: Textual Evidence Discovery for Life Sciences (2020.acl-demos)
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Xuan Wang, Yingjun Guan, Weili Liu, Aabhas Chauhan, Enyi Jiang, Qi Li, David Liem, Dibakar Sigdel, John Caufield, Peipei Ping, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | EVIDENCEMINER is a web-based system that allows users to query a natural language statement and retrieve textual evidence from a background corpora for life sciences. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based system that lets users query a natural language statement and automatically retrieves textual evidence from a background corpora for life sciences. |
| Outcome: | EVIDENCEMINER is a web-based system that lets users query a natural language statement and automatically retrieves textual evidence from a background corpora for life sciences. |
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weihao Xuan, Rui Yang, Heli Qi, Qingcheng Zeng, Yunze Xiao, Aosong Feng, Dairui Liu, Yun Xing, Junjue Wang, Fan Gao, Jinghui Lu, Yuang Jiang, Huitao Li, Xin Li, Kunyu Yu, Ruihai Dong, Shangding Gu, Yuekang Li, Xiaofei Xie, Felix Juefei-Xu, Foutse Khomh, Osamu Yoshie, Qingyu Chen, Douglas Teodoro, Nan Liu, Randy Goebel, Lei Ma, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Shijian Lu, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Irene Li
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
MDIT-Bench: Evaluating the Dual-Implicit Toxicity in Large Multimodal Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have raised concerns about model toxicity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to measure the toxicity gap between models and their hard level to determine whether they can handle dual-implicit toxicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle dual-implicit toxicity effectively on 13 prominent LMMs, but its performance drops significantly in hard level. |
Efficiently Selecting Response Generation Strategies for Synthetic Data Construction by Self-Aligned Perplexity (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using a small sample of data, we find that perplexity is suboptimal in characterizing “familiarity” . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that assesses a small subset of generated data to estimate suitability for a specific target LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method assesses a small subset of generated data to estimate suitability for a specific target LLM. |