Papers by Rong Li
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability. |
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| Challenge: | a toolkit for speech translation is available for free and provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use NeurST to facilitate speech translation research for NLP researchers . they show experimental results for different benchmark datasets which can be regarded as reliable baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides reliable benchmarks for speech translation research. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on aspect-level sentiment analysis focus on extracting aspect terms and sentiment polarities separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal joint learning approach with auxiliary cross-modal relation detection for multi-dimensional aspect-level sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can obtain all aspect-level sentiment polarities dependent on the jointly extracted specific aspects. |
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| Challenge: | Text-to-speech (TTS) has advanced from generating natural-sounding speech to enabling fine-grained control over speech attributes. |
| Approach: | They provide a review of controllable TTS methods from traditional control techniques to emerging approaches using natural language prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are based on models, strategies, and features, and summarize challenges, datasets, and evaluations. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events. |
| Approach: | They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on adversarial attack to improve performance of NLSM tasks has not been done. |
| Approach: | They propose a general two-stage training framework to enhance neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack on NLSM datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) lag behind human performance in IRCD. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite fewer parameters. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
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| Challenge: | Automatic Chinese irony detection often lacks labeled benchmark datasets . despite its pervasive nature, irony is a trope whose actual meaning differs from what is literally enunciated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese benchmark dataset for automatic Chinese irony detection to provide a benchmark for machine learning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes more than 8.7K posts, collected from Weibo, a micro blogging platform. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models with statistical bias are prone to memorized correlations . large pre-trained models such as BERT have revolutionized the model development paradigm in natural language processing . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to tackle the problem from a causal perspective using a latent space interpolation approach. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that CAT achieves substantial performance improvement over SOTA across different downstream tasks, including sentence classification, natural language inference and question answering. |
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| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models for rapid task adaptation without fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns fine-tuning gradients between entire training set and selected examples to enable in-context learning and fine-uning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms random selection on large LLMs from 4-shot to 128-shot scenarios across 9 datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for speech translation focus on using additional data from MT and automatic speech recognition (ASR). |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method for end-to-end speech-totext translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a popular benchmark MuST-C. |
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| Challenge: | Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging. |
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| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) is a major area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stop and open-source QA repository for question answering . it supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension . they say it will facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing focus on prompts and localized feedback. |
| Approach: | They build a controlled multi-agent sandbox that instantiates a small standup comedy community and allows it to manipu-late whether public reception is generated, logged, and fed back into later rounds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves craft/clarity and social response with occasional increases in aggressive humor. |
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| Challenge: | Sentence embedding models are typically trained using contrastive learning (CL) using human annotations directly or by repurposing other annotated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generative language models to generate CL data using annotated data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous best unsupervised method by 1.8 points and SimCSE, a strong supervised baseline by 0.3 points on the semantic text similarity (STS) benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Human values are inherently diverse, making it insufficient to align LLMs solely with general preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible paradigm for individual preference alignment that disentangles preference representation from text generation in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces aligned quality and better than PEFT-based methods while reducing training time for each new individual preference by 80% to 90%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for diverse generative reasoning struggle to generate multiple unique and plausible results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model based on expert-prefix mixtures and task-oriented latent space adaptation for diverse generative reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three types of generative reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios. |
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| Challenge: | Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensed process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM by distilling crucial information from long sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extends the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing it to focus on relevant information from very long sequences. |
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| Challenge: | Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem . |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. |
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| 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%. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, including their emerging role in mitigating threats to human life, infrastructure, and the environment during natural disasters. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios to provide valuable insights for the research community and practitioners . |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | a joint exaction method can be used to extract document-level event records . it avoids inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint exaction method that can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues . they propose eType-Role1-Roul2 as the edge type to reveal which tokens play argument roles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning knowledge Graphs are incomplete and therefore need well-pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep reinforcement learning based model which incorporates LSTM and Graph Attention Mechanism as the memory components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can get rid of the pretraining process and achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with the other models. |
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| Challenge: | Cantonese is an influential Chinese variant with a large population of speakers worldwide. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review Cantonese's progress in linguistics and NLP . it will introduce transformer-based pre-training methods for a wide range of downstream tasks . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will present the main challenges for Cantonese NLP in relation to Cantonesian language idiosyncrasies of colloquialism and multilingualism. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text ranking are based on intuition, but their estimated transferability may not align well with the objectives of text ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to compute expected rank as transferability, explicitly reflecting the model’s ranking capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant improvements over previous classification-oriented TE methods, human intuition, and ChatGPT with minor time consumption. |
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| Challenge: | Existing debate datasets neglect important labels for argument mining, generation, and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Evaluation Dataset for Computational Argumentation that includes key arguments and key rhetorical figures, debater roles, modal words, debate results and transcripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers 600 debates about 318 topics from Chinese debate competitions. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on the compositionality of vision-language models (VLMs) however, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntactical bias score to quantify GVLMs' syntaktical bias . they propose 'SADE' task to assess GVLs's robustness against inclination toward syntical correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on evaluation metrics and current benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to code question answering use bi-modal and unimodal pretraining to align text and code representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-agnostic contrastive pre-training approach to improve alignment of text and code representations of current code language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits significant performance improvements across a wide range of code retrieval benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have been proved vulnerable to adversarial texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse Chinese phonetic and glyph features into pre-trained models by using a more comprehensive adversarial graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in significant ways on a wide range of tasks while remaining accurate on benign texts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn speech representations for end-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate the representation discrepancy between modalities by mixing up the representation sequences of different modality inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy and improves on a strong baseline on eight translation directions. |
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| Challenge: | Existing ST methods perform poorly when only a limited amount of parallel data are available for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a Word-Aligned COntrastive learning method for low-resource speech-to-text translation that bridges word-level representations for both speech and text modalities via contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the best baseline by 9+ BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel ST data. |
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| Challenge: | Currently, evaluation criteria and methods used for jailbreak effectiveness are inconsistent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure jailbreak effectiveness using a model that filters out jailbreak noise while preserving the original malicious question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods on a challenging benchmark containing 330 human-labeled, non-rejected jailbreak instances. |
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| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes . |
| Approach: | They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models . |
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| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality. |