Papers by Qing Cheng
Token Prepending: A Training-Free Approach for Eliciting Better Sentence Embeddings from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on prompt engineering to extract sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) but these models are mostly decoder-only and the earlier tokens in the sentence cannot attend to the latter, resulting in biased encoding of sentence information and cascading effects on the final decoded token. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play and training-free technique that prepends each layer’s decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer’ s input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can significantly improve the performance of existing prompt-based sentence embedding methods across different LLMs while incurring negligible additional inference cost. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
From Model-centered to Human-Centered: Revision Distance as a Metric for Text Evaluation in LLMs-based Applications (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for large language models yield numerical scores that ignore user experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric that suggests revision edits that mimic the human writing process . their results show that the metric offers more insightful feedback and distinguishes between texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric can provide a self-explained text evaluation result in a human-understandable manner beyond the context-independent score. |
Aggregating Multiple Heuristic Signals as Supervision for Unsupervised Automated Essay Scoring (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automated Essay Scoring (AES) aims to evaluate the quality score of input essays without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to evaluate the quality of input essays . they use multiple heuristic quality signals as pseudo-groundtruths to train a neural AES model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on eight prompts of ASPA dataset compared with previous unsupervised methods . |
Focusing Condition: Inference-Time Self-Contrastive Steering Elicits Better Conditional Text Embeddings in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting conditional text embeddings from large language models (LLMs) relying on prompts often fails to produce high-quality conditional embeddables, resulting in degradation of quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method that constructs unconditional general text embeddings and uses them to refine conditional text embeds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of prompt-based methods on clustering, Semantic Textual Similarity, and triplet alignment datasets. |
Temporal Working Memory: Query-Guided Segment Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Understanding (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xingjian Diao, Chunhui Zhang, Weiyi Wu, Zhongyu Ouyang, Peijun Qing, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Multimodal foundation models have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory, which selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The module retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. |
Contrastive Prompting Enhances Sentence Embeddings in LLMs through Inference-Time Steering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on prompt engineering to encode the full semantics of a sentence into the embedding of the last token. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that introduces an extra auxiliary prompt to elicit better sentence embedding . they propose to use the hidden state of the token as the sentence embedded in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can improve performance of existing prompt-based methods on STS tasks and downstream classification tasks. |
TurnBack: A Geospatial Route Cognition Benchmark for Large Language Models through Reverse Route (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hongyi Luo, Qing Cheng, Daniel Matos, Hari Krishna Gadi, Yanfeng Zhang, Lu Liu, Yongliang Wang, Niclas Zeller, Daniel Cremers, Liqiu Meng
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models have limited evaluation of their geospatial cognition . a unified framework for evaluating geospcial cognition in LLMs remains absent . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the geospatial route cognition of Large Language Models . they propose 'pathbuilder' tool for converting natural language instructions into navigation routes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and metrics evaluate 9 state-of-the-art LLMs on route reversal task. |
A Symmetric Local Search Network for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Emotion-cause pair extraction are not effective because of their lack of annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a new task which aims at extracting the potential clause pairs of emotions and corresponding causes in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the ECPE corpus. |
CostBench: Evaluating Multi-Turn Cost-Optimal Planning and Adaptation in Dynamic Environments for LLM Tool-Use Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on task completion, but neglect a crucial capability: the ability to devise and adjust cost-optimal plans in response to changing environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable, cost-centric benchmark to evaluate agents’ economic reasoning and replanning abilities. |
| Outcome: | Evaluating leading open-sourced and proprietary models on CostBench reveals a substantial gap in cost-aware planning . |
GraDaSE: Graph-Based Dataset Search with Examples (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods address ad hoc dataset search, but dataset search presents in diverse and complex forms. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based approach to retrieve relevant datasets from textual queries . they identify provenance-based and topic-based relationships to construct a diagram . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms strong baselines on two test collections. |
Fine-Grained Features-based Code Search for Precise Query-Code Matching (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to locate code snippets from databases represent the semantics of code and query by averaging the features of each token and word. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained code search model that consists of a cross-modal encoder, mapping layer and classification layer to capture fine-granular interactions between code and query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms existing methods across multiple programming language datasets. |
Improving Domain Generalization for Prompt-Aware Essay Scoring via Disentangled Representation Learning (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing AES models are either prompt-specific or prompt-adaptive and cannot generalize well on “unseen” prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-aware neural AES model to extract comprehensive representation for essay scoring, including both prompt-invariant and prompt-specific features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts comprehensive representation for essay scoring, including both prompt-invariant and prompt-specific features. |
ProtoVQA: An Adaptable Prototypical Framework for Explainable Fine-Grained Visual Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Visual Question Answering (VQA) is increasingly used in diverse applications where models must provide accurate answers and explanations that humans can easily understand and verify. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified prototypical framework that learns question-aware prototypes that serve as reasoning anchors and applies spatially constrained matching to ensure that the selected evidence is coherent and semantically relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields faithful, fine-grained explanations while maintaining competitive accuracy. |
AEA: Adaptive Expert Allocation Improves Sentence Embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts LLM (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts models allocate a fixed number of experts uniformly across all layers and tokens, ignoring inter-layer and inter-token heterogeneity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Expert Allocation framework that performs layer-wise and token-wise expert allocation to enhance embedding quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding quality across multiple MoE models. |
Logical Structure as Knowledge: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Structured Logical Knowledge Density Estimation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhen Bi, Zhenlin Hu, Xueshu Chen, Mingyang Chen, Cheng Deng, Yida Xue, Zhen Wang, Qing Shen, Ningyu Zhang, Jungang Lou
| Challenge: | Existing data-centric paradigms equate quality with factuality or diversity and ignore the internal logical complexity of training samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a density-aware re-cognizing optimization strategy that prioritizes high-density logical samples to align training with the model's reasoning boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms existing methods and improves reasoning performance without increasing total data volume. |
Multi-Prompting Decoder Helps Better Language Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Pre-trained Language Models to downstream tasks are limited by their inference APIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prompting decoding framework that query PLMs with multiple prompts . they propose to query Plms with optimal transport for hidden states and calibrated decoding for class scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple natural language understanding datasets under the few-shot setting. |