Papers by Qian Hu
PUNR: Pre-training with User Behavior Modeling for News Recommendation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods use pre-trained language models to produce news vectors and user vectors. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised pre-training paradigm with two tasks for user behavior modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the real-world news benchmark. |
Log-FGAER: Logic-Guided Fine-Grained Address Entity Recognition from Multi-Turn Spoken Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing name entity recognition methods combine pre-trained language models with supervised models such as BiLSTM/LSTM-CRF to perform poorly in a spoken dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-guided fine-grained address recognition method that softly applies the logic rule to improve the accuracy of FGAER. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves fine-grained address entity recognition from multi-turn spoken dialogues. |
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qian Dong, Jia Chen, Qingyao Ai, Hongning Wang, Haitao Li, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented code generation methods fail to accurately fetch the knowledge required for code generation for consecutive code fragments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables large language models to Self-express their information needs to enhance retrieval-augmented code generation methods. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG. |
Solid-SQL: Enhanced Schema-linking based In-context Learning for Robust Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL approaches have overlooked the critical aspect of system robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust text-to-SQL solution that integrates with LLMs . their method achieves SOTA SQL execution accuracy levels of 82.1% and 58.9% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves SOTA SQL execution accuracy levels of 82.1% and 58.9% on the general Spider and Bird benchmarks. |
Query-as-context Pre-training for Dense Passage Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve passage retrieval performance by using context-supervised pre-training are weakly correlated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use query-as-context pre-training to train passage-query pairs . they evaluate the pre-trained models on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves performance on large-scale passage retrieval benchmarks and out-of-domain zero-shot benchmarks. |
TruthReader: Towards Trustworthy Document Assistant Chatbot with Reliable Attribution (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Document assistant chatbots are empowered with extensive capabilities by Large Language Models (LLMs) however, they suffer from hallucinations that are difficult to verify in the context of given documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a document assistant chatbot with reliable attribution that enables users to seek relevant information from given documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates answers with detailed inline citations, which can be attributed to the original document paragraphs, facilitating verification of factual consistency of the generated text. |
SyntaxGym: An Online Platform for Targeted Evaluation of Language Models (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | SyntaxGym is an online platform and open-source framework for targeted syntactic evaluation of neural network language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to make targeted syntactic evaluations accessible to both experts in NLP and linguistics and reproducible across computing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is reproducible across computing environments and standardized following the norms of psycholinguistic experimental design. |
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Fei Zhao, Chengqiang Lu, Yufan Shen, Qimeng Wang, Yicheng Qian, Haoxin Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Zhen Wu, Shangyu Xing, Xinyu Dai
| Challenge: | RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images . |
| Approach: | They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a . |
| Outcome: | The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
Faithful Model Evaluation for Model-Based Metrics (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies do not consider variance change due to metric model errors, which can lead to wrong conclusions. |
| Approach: | They establish the mathematical foundation of significance testing for model-based metrics . they show that metric errors can change the conclusions in certain experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to derive accurate conclusions using model evaluations. |
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yikang Liu, Yeting Shen, Hongao Zhu, Lilong Xu, Zhiheng Qian, Siyuan Song, Kejia Zhang, Jialong Tang, Pei Zhang, Baosong Yang, Rui Wang, Hai Hu
| Challenge: | Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters . |
Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma
| Challenge: | Recent studies have looked into the ability of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc. However, few studies investigate the controllability of large languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare large language models with state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models to find that large language model controls are comparable to smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can meet hard constraints and perform better than state-of-the-art models. |
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. |
Controlled Evaluation of Grammatical Knowledge in Mandarin Chinese Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that structural supervision helps English language models learn generalizations about syntactic phenomena such as subject-verb agreement. |
| Approach: | They train LSTMs, Recurrent Neural Network Grammars, Transformer language models, and Transformer-parameterized generative parsing models on Mandarin Chinese datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models learn aspects of Mandarin Chinese grammar that assess syntactic and semantic relationships. |
MultiPL-MoE: Multi-Programming-Lingual Extension of Large Language Models through Hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MultiPL is a special case of multiple natural languages and requires limited computational resources to generate multilingual code. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend LLMs by combining two paired experts to optimize expert selection at token and segment levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension improves the performance of the base LLMs while retaining the most popular ones using limited computational resources. |
EcoLANG: Efficient and Effective Agent Communication Language Induction for Social Simulation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive ability to role-play humans and replicate complex social dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient agent communication language induction for social simulations that reduces token consumption by over 20%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces token consumption by over 20% while preserving human language. |
Can Small Language Models Help Large Language Models Reason Better?: LM-Guided Chain-of-Thought (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for guiding a language model in reasoning tasks are limited by their tendency to generate low-quality rationales that are repetitive and vacuous. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a lightweight language model for guiding a black-box large LM in reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in answer prediction accuracy. |
SparkRA: A Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Service System Based on Spark Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Dayong Wu, Jiaqi Li, Baoxin Wang, Honghong Zhao, Siyuan Xue, Yanjie Yang, Zhijun Chang, Rui Zhang, Li Qian, Bo Wang, Shijin Wang, Zhixiong Zhang, Guoping Hu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable achievements across various language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a scientific literature LLM and a knowledge service system based on it . they collect scientific literature and then pre-train it using autoregressive training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides literature investigation, paper reading, and academic writing functions. |
FLIRT: Feedback Loop In-context Red Teaming (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Christophe Dupuy, Qian Hu, Shalini Ghosh, Richard Zemel, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta
| Challenge: | Recent work has evaluated the vulnerabilities of large generative models, such as DALL-E, ChatGPT, and GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic red teaming framework that evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates a given black-box model and exposes its vulnerabilities against unsafe and inappropriate content generation. |
Soft Orthogonal Low-Rank Adaptation for Knowledge Sharing in Large Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning (CL) are designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while neglecting knowledge sharing across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting by assigning task-specific parameter subspaces to new tasks . they then leverage attribution scores to evaluate task similarity and employ soft orthogonality between task- specific subspace . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. |
FOCUS: A Fine-Grained Customer-Oriented Sentiment Dialogue Summarization Dataset for Chinese Customer Service (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook fine-grained sentiment dynamics expressed by customers . current methods often exhibit misalignment between aspects and sentiments . |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage approach to building an aspect-aware sentiment dataset . they use a fine-grained customer-oriented Chinese dialogUe summarization dataset based on this scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves faithfulness and interpretability of the proposed dataset. |
MMAPG: A Training-Free Framework for Multimodal Multi-hop Question Answering via Adaptive Planning Graphs (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal question answering models rely on sequential retrieval and reasoning, but this single-path paradigm makes them vulnerable to errors due to misleading intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal multi-hop question answering framework guided by an Adaptive Planning Graph . they propose modality-specific strategies that dynamically adapt to distinct data types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models that rely on training. |
Toward Informal Language Processing: Knowledge of Slang in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have offered a strong potential for natural language systems to process informal language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use movie subtitles to evaluate slang in large language models . they find that smaller LLMs finetuned on the dataset achieve comparable performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to evaluate LLMs on slang detection and identification of regional and historical sources for interpretive insights. |
Resolving Ambiguities in Text-to-Image Generative Models (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ninareh Mehrabi, Palash Goyal, Apurv Verma, Jwala Dhamala, Varun Kumar, Qian Hu, Kai-Wei Chang, Richard Zemel, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta
| Challenge: | ambiguities can lead to misinterpretation and miscommunication in natural language . resolving ambiguity is notoriously hard for machines . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to disambiguate prompts given to generative models by soliciting clarifications from the end user. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates more faithful images better aligned with user intention in the presence of ambiguities. |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Models (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on syntactic knowledge models has not provided a clear picture of the properties required to produce proper syntaktic generalizations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate syntactic knowledge of language models by varying model architectures . they find substantial differences in syntaktic generalization performance by model architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model architectures outperform other architectures on a set of 34 English-language syntactic test suites. |
Re-Align: Aligning Vision Language Models via Retrieval-Augmented Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Xing, Peiran Li, Yuping Wang, Ruizheng Bai, Yueqi Wang, Chan-Wei Hu, Chengxuan Qian, Huaxiu Yao, Zhengzhong Tu
| Challenge: | emergence of large Vision Language Models (VLMs) has broadened the capabilities of single-modal Large Language Model (LLM) but VLMs are prone to significant hallucinations, especially in the form of cross-modal inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new alignment framework that leverages image retrieval to integrate both textual and visual preference signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates hallucinations more effectively than previous methods . it maintains robustness and scalability across a wide range of VLM sizes and architectures . |
ChildEval:WHEN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS MEET CHILDREN’S PERSONALITIES (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in effectively understanding and generating human language, leading to a revolutionary era in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to infer and follow child-centered preferences in long-context conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans five top-level and fourteen sub-level categories covering children’s daily lives and development. |