Papers by Rui Dai
L2Dir: Integrating L_2-Norm and Directional Alignment for Unsupervised Contrastive Representation Learning in Multimodal Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyu Zong, Rui Dai, Hongzhu Yi, Yuanxiang Wang, Zhenghao Zhang, Zhenyu Guan, Yujia Yang, Bingkang Shi, Yueyang Ding, Xiangxiang Chu, Kaikui Liu, Jungang Xu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal representation learning focus on directional alignment and embedding magnitudes (L2-norm) however, these methods often fail to account for the intrinsic role of L2-norm in the contrastive process. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that optimizes L2-norm alignment and Directional consistency jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves consistent and significant performance gains over established baselines across 95 tasks using UniIR and VLM2Vec-V2 frameworks. |
Optimizing RAG Rerankers with LLM Feedback via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current reranking models are optimized on static human annotations in isolation, decoupled from the downstream generation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that directly aligns reranking with LLM's generation quality. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that RRPO outperforms strong baselines. |
Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (AFOE) aims to extract aspect terms and opinion terms from review text in the form of opinion pairs or opinion triplets. |
| Approach: | They propose a grid-based AFOE tagging scheme to address the task in an end-to-end fashion only with one unified grid tracking task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tagging scheme outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised defense methods rely on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised model of malicious behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects diverse attack types across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to baselines. |
SCE: Semantic Consistency Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multihop reasoning fail to address the problem of spurious paths . existing approaches neglect the internal semantic consistency of the reward function . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates semantic consistency into the reward function to guide multi-hop reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and facilitates more interpretable reasoning paths. |
A Sequence-to-Structure Approach to Document-level Targeted Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received wide attention in NLP for nearly two decades . previous studies focused on sentence-level ABSA, but document-level research has not received enough attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sequence-to-Structure approach to address the document-level targeted sentiment analysis task, which aims to extract the opinion targets consisting of multi-level entities from a review document and predict their sentiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on six domains on the document-level targeted sentiment analysis task. |
ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rui Wang, Bohao Li, Xiyang Dai, Jianwei Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Zhen Xing, Yifan Yang, Dongdong Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt image-focused models for video understanding have not been successful in analyzing long video sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a video instruction dataset that outperforms existing video instruction data for fine-tuning MLLMs by incrementally increasing input context length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on video benchmarks and outperformed proprietary models on VideoMME even with a compact 7B model. |
DrKGC: Dynamic Subgraph Retrieval-Augmented LLMs for Knowledge Graph Completion across General and Biomedical Domains (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to predict missing triples in knowledge graphs . current approaches encode graph context in textual form, which fails to exploit its potential . |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to predict missing triples in knowledge graphs by leveraging existing triples and textual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns structural embeddings and logical rules within the KG and extracts a subgraph for each query guided by the learned rules. |
A Survey on In-context Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for natural language processing . large language models (LLMs) demonstrate the ability to learn from a few examples . |
| Approach: | They propose to explore ICL to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to evaluate and extrapolate the ability of large language models. |
Position Paper: Data-Centric AI in the Age of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xinyi Xu, Zhaoxuan Wu, Rui Qiao, Arun Verma, Yao Shu, Jingtan Wang, Xinyuan Niu, Zhenfeng He, Jiangwei Chen, Zijian Zhou, Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Hieu Dao, Lucas Agussurja, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Xiaoqiang Lin, Wenyang Hu, Zhongxiang Dai, Pang Wei Koh, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
| Challenge: | a paper proposes a data-centric perspective of AI research, focusing on large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric viewpoint of AI research, focusing on large language models . they propose four scenarios centered around data, including data curation, attribution, knowledge transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed research focuses on large language models with data centric benchmarks . the proposed benchmarks can be used to develop new data curation methods . |
Understanding the Information Propagation Effects of Communication Topologies in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies for communication topology design often overlook why and when sparse and dense topologies help or hinder collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology design approach that balances error suppression and beneficial information propagation by fusing connectivity patterns from dense and sparse graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology design achieves superior performance across tasks with sparse and dense graphs. |
LLaTiSA: Towards Difficulty-Stratified Time Series Reasoning from Visual Perception to Semantics (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current research hinders the development of unified Time Series Reasoning Models (TSRMs) time series data are a fundamental modality for capturing the temporal dynamics of complex systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a time series reasoning model that integrates visualized patterns with precision-calibrated numerical tables to enhance the temporal perception of Vision-Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models and exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization across diverse tasks and real-world scenarios. |