Papers by Rui Fan

29 papers
Grid Tagging Scheme for Aspect-oriented Fine-grained Opinion Extraction (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Hardware-Aware Parallel Prompt Decoding for Memory-Efficient Acceleration of LLM Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Auto-regressive decoding of Large Language Models results in significant overheads in hardware performance . a novel parallel prompt decoding approach is proposed to overcome these limitations .
Approach: They propose a parallel prompt decoding that uses a single model for speculation and verification.
Outcome: The proposed approach speeds up auto-regressive decoding of large language models 2.49 times . it can be used on mobileLlama to Vicuna-13B on a wide range of benchmarks .
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity.
Approach: They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models.
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become prevalent for aligning large language models with human preferences.
Approach: They propose a preference optimization algorithm that introduces a modulating factor that down-weighs misranked preference pairs and employs focusing strategy that adapts over the course of training.
Outcome: Experiments show that DynamicFocalPO surpasses both DPO and FocalPO on benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using Mistral-Base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B.
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM.
Approach: They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting.
FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks emphasize final numerical answers while neglecting intermediate reasoning steps.
Approach: They propose a symbolic benchmark for verifiable Chain-of-Thought evaluation in finance . FINCHAIN spans 58 topics across 12 financial domains and three difficulty levels .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark aims to bridge symbolic reasoning and factual verification.
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech .
CharacterEval: A Chinese Benchmark for Role-Playing Conversational Agent Evaluation (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: CharacterEval is a benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment in Chinese . authors show that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in role-playing conversation.
Approach: They propose a Chinese benchmark for comprehensive RPCA assessment . they use a dataset of Chinese role-playing dialogues and character profiles .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark demonstrates that Chinese LLMs exhibit more promising capabilities than GPT-4 in Chinese role-playing conversation.
Towards Transferable Personality Representation Learning based on Triplet Comparisons and Its Applications (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for personality analysis treat corpus as a single unit for classification, but this approach presents several challenges.
Approach: They propose a task paradigm for text-based personality representation learning that uses a triplet personality trend comparison dataset to learn single-sentence personality embeddings with desirable metric properties.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly boosts performance across various applications, including personality detection, personality retrieval, and emotion translation prediction.
Empowering Reliable Visual-Centric Instruction Following in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for evaluating instruction-following capabilities focus on verbal instructions in the textual modality.
Approach: They propose to incorporate vision-dependent constraints into instruction design to enable a more rigorous assessment of how well MLLMs align their outputs with both visual input and textual instructions.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark incorporates vision-dependent constraints into instruction design, enabling a more rigorous and fine-grained assessment of how well MLLMs align their outputs with both visual input and textual instructions.
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Learn Few-Shot Spoken Language Understanding in More Practical Scenarios (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing few-shot Spoken Language Understanding models need to be trained on a set of data-rich source domains and adapt to the target domain with a few examples.
Approach: They propose a scenario where only a pre-trained language model and a few labeled examples are used to train few-shot SLU models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on few-shot settings by reducing the number of slot labels and reducing training complexity.
On the Step Length Confounding in LLM Reasoning Data Selection (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing pipelines generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models (LLMs) and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples.
Approach: They propose to use supervised fine-tuning to generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples.
Outcome: Experiments on four LLMs and five evaluation benchmarks show that the proposed approach is effective in mitigating step length confounding problem.
ReAgent: Reversible Multi-Agent Reasoning for Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Hop QA (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multi-hop question answering (QA) is a central challenge in natural language processing . early mistakes can cause errors and undermine the final result, authors say .
Approach: They propose a reversible multi-agent reasoning framework that backtracks to earlier valid states when conflicts arise.
Outcome: Empirical evaluation shows that the framework improves on forward-only benchmarks by 6% . the approach enables agents to backtrack to valid states when conflicts arise .
DSPM-NLG: A Dual Supervised Pre-trained Model for Few-shot Natural Language Generation in Task-oriented Dialogue System (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for few-shot natural language generation are based on a dual correlation between NLG and SLU from the perspective of probability.
Approach: They propose a dual supervised pre-trained model to regularize the pre-training process . they use a probabilistic approach to learn the dual correlation between NLG and SLU .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art models on a few-shot dataset.
LCDS: A Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary Generation System Supporting Source Attribution and Expert Review (2025.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating inaccurate discharge summary content or fabricating information without valid sources.
Approach: They propose a tool for empowering LLMs with Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary generation.
Outcome: The proposed tool identifies the writing logic of discharge summaries and integrates it with EMRs to generate silver discharge summararies.
MMLU-ProX: A Multilingual Benchmark for Advanced Large Language Model Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities.
Approach: They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.
Outcome: The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark.
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Commercial news provides rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph to endorse the risk detection enhancement.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of generalization and semantics and annotation.
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling.
Approach: They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens.
Outcome: The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations.
Feeling Rules in Language Models: Mapping Norms of Emotional Appropriateness Across Roles, Institutions, and Intensity (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks measure whether Large language models recognize emotions . authors: LLMs can be used to validate, but they can still judge anger inappropriately .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to measure whether Large language models validate anger . they use explicit norm judgments and implicit acceptability tests to measure norms .
Outcome: The study finds that large differences in sanctioning thresholds and institutional norm signatures are not reducible to overall strictness.
Exploring the Potential of Large Language Models in Generating Code-Tracing Questions for Introductory Programming Courses (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using large language models, we generate code-tracing questions based on code snippets and descriptions.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate code-tracing questions in introductory programming courses by using GPT4 prompts.
Outcome: The proposed model generates code-tracing questions based on code snippets and descriptions.
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality.
Evaluating Large Language Models on Wikipedia-Style Survey Generation (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have shown that large language models can perform well in general tasks, but their effectiveness and limitations in domainspecific tasks remain unclear.
Approach: They examine the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating succinct survey articles specific to the niche field of NLP in computer science.
Outcome: The LLMs perform better in generating succinct survey articles specific to the niche field of NLP in computer science, compared to human-authored surveys, but they exhibit bias in evaluation.
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors .
Approach: They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors .
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability.
PICD-Instruct: A Generative Instruction Learning Framework for Few-Shot Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have utilized instruction learning frameworks to model intent-slot interdependencies, typically requiring abundant data for effective training.
Approach: They propose a generative framework based on Basic Instructions (BI), Pairwise Interaction Instructions and Contrastive Distinct Instructions to solve these challenges.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public datasets.
ConEntail: An Entailment-based Framework for Universal Zero and Few Shot Classification with Supervised Contrastive Pretraining (2023.eacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for text classification are not universally applicable and lack annotated data.
Approach: They propose a framework for universal zero and few shot classification with supervised contrastive pretraining that can generalize to diverse classification tasks in both zero and many shot settings.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in zero and few shot settings.
Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Syntax-Opinion-Sentiment Reasoning Chain (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Syntactic structures are crucial for capturing aspect-opinion relationships . syntactically based models struggle with linguistic complexities .
Approach: They propose a syntactic-opinion-sentiment reasoning framework that leverages syntaktic information to improve ABSA performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves ABSA performance, though smaller LLMs exhibit weaker performance.
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking leads to better results . a recent study suggests that test-time compute scaling is more effective than model scaling .
Approach: They challenge the assumption that longer thinking yields better results . they show that models exhibit overthinking and marginal returns diminish at higher budgets .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces computation significantly while maintaining comparable accuracy.
One-Dimensional Object Detection for Streaming Text Segmentation of Meeting Dialogue (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current text segmentation models exhibit numerous limitations, such as imbalances in labels that affect the stability of model training and discrepancies between the model’s training tasks (sentence classification) and the actual text segmenting.
Approach: They implement a sliding window-based segmentation method and employ two different levels of sliding window based balanced label strategies to stabilize the training process of the streaming segmentation model.
Outcome: The proposed method is robust, controllable, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations