Papers by Ran Li
SumSurvey: An Abstractive Dataset of Scientific Survey Papers for Long Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing need for long document summarization datasets with 16k input is causing problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze salient information in long document summarizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models and LLMs in the distribution form of salient information and the distribution of salinal information is an indicator of quality. |
Boosting Multi-modal Keyphrase Prediction with Dynamic Chain-of-Thought in Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qihang Ma, Shengyu Li, Jie Tang, Dingkang Yang, null Chenshaodong, Yingyi Zhang, Chao Feng, Ran Jiao
| Challenge: | Multi-modal keyphrase prediction (MMKP) aims to produce concise, informative phrases that capture the essence of cross-modal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use vision-language models to generate conclusive phrases using multiple modalities of input information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods on absence and unseen scenarios and overestimate model capability due to overlap in training tests. |
LinguaLens: Towards Interpreting Linguistic Mechanisms of Large Language Models via Sparse Auto-Encoder (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior research on linguistic mechanisms of large language models is limited by coarse granularity, limited analysis scale, and narrow focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for analyzing the linguistic mechanisms of large language models based on Sparse Auto-Encoders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts Chinese and English linguistic features across four dimensions . it uncovers intrinsic representations of linguistic knowledge in LLMs and can control outputs . |
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Shuyue Guo, Yizhi LI, Linzheng Chai, Zhengmao Ye, Shukai Liu, Yuyang Song, Jiajun Wu, Che Liu, Tianyu Zheng, Siwei Wu, Leo L, Xudong Ma, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Yan Xing, Jianzhou Wang, Mingjie Tang, Aishan Liu, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu, Weifeng Lv, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters. |
Can Language Models Capture Human Writing Preferences for Domain-Specific Text Summarization? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies employ large language models as auxiliary tools for humancentered NLP. |
| Approach: | They construct a model to capture human writing preferences by fine-tuning pre-trained models with data and designing prompts to optimize the output of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures human writing preferences through the dimensions of length, content depth, tone & style, and summary format. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Simin Chen, Yiming Chen, Zexin Li, Yifan Jiang, Zhongwei Wan, Yixin He, Dezhi Ran, Tianle Gu, Haizhou Li, Tao Xie, Baishakhi Ray
| Challenge: | In the era of evaluating large language models, data contamination is an increasingly prominent concern . static benchmarking has been used for evaluation, but there are limitations of *dynamic* benchmarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *static* benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight a critical gap in the evaluation of LLMs. |
ConNER: Consistency Training for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing consistency training methods for named entity recognition (NER) are likely to violate the consistency hypothesis or focus on coarse-grain consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a consistency training framework for cross-lingual named entity recognition that leverages unlabeled target-language data and dropout-based consistency training on labeled source-language datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on translation-based consistency training on unlabeled target-language data and dropout-based consistent training on labeled source-language datasets. |
Fine-Tuning Language Models with Differential Privacy through Adaptive Noise Allocation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language models can memorize detailed information and patterns, but raise privacy concerns . ANADP reduces the performance gap between regular and DP fine-tuning while maintaining the privacy constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allocates additive noise based on the importance of model parameters to reduce the performance gap between regular fine-tuning and traditional DP fine- tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm narrows the performance gap between regular fine-tuning and traditional DP fine- tuning while maintaining privacy constraints. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that scaling test-time compute can also effectively improve reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic method to efficiently predict scaling performance and identify the best prompting strategy under large sampling times. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the scaling performance of majority voting on large language models. |
MELM: Data Augmentation with Masked Entity Language Modeling for Low-Resource NER (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) tasks have limited amount of labeled data . data augmentation methods suffer from token-label misalignment, which leads to unsatsifactory performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that explicitly injects NER labels into sentence context and generates high-quality augmented data with novel entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on low-resource tasks. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors for Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generalize in open-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect LLM-generated text with exceptional generalization to unseen domains by reinforcing LLMs’ inherent rewriting tendencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods by 23.04% in AUROC, 35.10% for out-of distribution tests, and 48.66% under adversarial attacks. |
GroundingGPT: Language Enhanced Multi-modal Grounding Model (2024.acl-long)
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Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Dong Zhang, Hang Song, YiQing Cai, Qi Qi, Ran Zhou, Junting Pan, Zefeng Li, Vu Tu, Zhida Huang, Tao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal large language models focus on capturing global information while neglecting the fine-grained local information in multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end language enhanced multi-modal grounding model that performs fine-grained grounding tasks for image, video and audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive fine-grained understanding of multi-modal inputs while maintaining or improving its global comprehension capabilities. |
Context-Aware Adapter Tuning for Few-Shot Relation Learning in Knowledge Graphs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict instances for missing relations on knowledge graphs are limited by their limited training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware adapter for few-shot relation learning in KGs . they propose tunable relation adaptation and contextual information for each relation . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmark KGs validate the superiority of RelAdapter over state-of-the-art methods. |
Improving Self-training for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Contrastive and Prototype Learning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to bridge the linguistic gap between self-training and monolingual named entity recognition (NER) however, due to sub-optimal performance on target languages, the pseudo labels are noisy and limit the overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine representation learning and pseudo label refinement in one coherent framework to improve self-training for cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) on multiple transfer pairs. |
MindAgent: Emergent Gaming Interaction (2024.findings-naacl)
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Ran Gong, Qiuyuan Huang, Xiaojian Ma, Yusuke Noda, Zane Durante, Zilong Zheng, Demetri Terzopoulos, Li Fei-Fei, Jianfeng Gao, Hoi Vo
| Challenge: | Large foundation models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete complex tasks that require extensive collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a gaming-based infrastructure that evaluates LFMs' planning and coordination capabilities in the context of gaming interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed infrastructure can be deployed in a customized VR version of Cuisineworld and adapted in the “Minecraft” domain. |
SimRAG: Self-Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Adapting Large Language Models to Specialized Domains (2025.naacl-long)
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Ran Xu, Hui Liu, Sreyashi Nag, Zhenwei Dai, Yaochen Xie, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Yang Li, Joyce C. Ho, Carl Yang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances the question answering abilities of large language models (LLMs) however, adapting general-purpose RAG systems to specialized fields poses unique challenges due to distribution shifts and limited access to domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that equips large language models with joint capabilities of question answering and question generation for domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets across three different domains verify the efficacy of SimRAG over baselines by 1.2%–8.6%. |
NumNet: Machine Reading Comprehension with Numerical Reasoning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing numerical MRC models are weak in numerical reasoning, such as addition, subtraction, sorting and counting. |
| Approach: | They propose a numerical MRC model that integrates numerical reasoning into existing MRC models and achieves an EM-score of 64.56% on the DROP dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all existing machine reading comprehension models by considering the numerical relations among numbers on the DROP dataset. |
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (P19-3)
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| Challenge: | NeuralClassifier is a toolkit for hierarchical multi-label text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for neural hierarchical multi-label text classification . they use a variety of text encoders to implement the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with reported results in the literature. |
STANKER: Stacking Network based on Level-grained Attention-masked BERT for Rumor Detection on Social Media (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text classification are limited in performance, resulting in poor rumor detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese microblogs to detect rumors using pre-trained language models and auxiliary features such as comments to mask co-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on Weibo20 and three existing social media datasets. |
Learning to Recover from Multi-Modality Errors for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models suffer from multi-modality problem . despite their autoregressivity, most NMT models suffer with slow decoding speed . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-autoregressive model which generates a translation as a sequence of segments while each segment is predicted token-by-token. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 4 times speedup while maintaining comparable performance. |
RAFT: Realistic Attacks to Fool Text Detectors (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable fluency across tasks, but their unethical applications are unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a grammar error-free black-box attack that exploits LLM embeddings at the word-level while preserving original text quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack compromises all detectors across domains and is transferable across source models. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion from Pretrained Language Models with Knowledge Constraints (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual knowledge graph completion do not align with mKGC tasks because of their English-centric bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pretrained language models to solve queries in different languages by reasoning a tail entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous SOTA on Hits@1 and Hits @10 by 12.32% and 16.03% on public datasets. |
Revisiting Self-training for Few-shot Learning of Language Model (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Unlabeled data are useful for few-shot learning of language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based few-shot learner that uses unlabeled data to fine-tune language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on six sentence classification and six sentence-pair classification benchmarking tasks. |
FaGANet: An Evidence-Based Fact-Checking Model with Integrated Encoder Leveraging Contextual Information (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence-based fact-checking efforts are time-consuming and challenging . however, relying on surface patterns of claims makes it difficult to identify subtle connections between claims and evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that leverages sentence-level attention and graph attention network to enhance accuracy and fusing claims and evidence information for accurate identification of even well-disguised data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy and state-of-the-art in the evidence-based fact-checking task. |
EquiBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models’ Reasoning about Program Semantics via Equivalence Checking (2025.emnlp-main)
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Anjiang Wei, Jiannan Cao, Ran Li, Hongyu Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ziheng Wang, Yuan Liu, Thiago S. F. X. Teixeira, Diyi Yang, Ke Wang, Alex Aiken
| Challenge: | EquiBench is a new benchmark to evaluate large language models' ability to reason about program semantics . Unlike natural language, code is executable. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models through equivalence checking . EquiBench consists of 2400 program pairs across four languages and six categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 2400 program pairs across four languages and six categories. |
QCRD: Quality-guided Contrastive Rationale Distillation for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |