Papers by Rui Meng
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
Traffic Light or Light Traffic? Investigating Phrasal Semantics in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Phrases are fundamental linguistic units through which humans convey semantics. |
| Approach: | They assess the capacity of API-based large language models to comprehend phrase semantics . they use three human-annotated datasets to analyze their results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms embedding-based methods in phrase semantic reasoning tasks . the proposed model does not show significant advantage over fine-tuned methods . |
Beyond Single Frames: Can LMMs Comprehend Implicit Narratives in Comic Strip? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaochen Wang, Heming Xia, Jialin Song, Longyu Guan, Qingxiu Dong, Rui Li, Yixin Yang, Yifan Pu, Weiyao Luo, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models have demonstrated strong performance on vision-language benchmarks, yet current evaluations focus on single-image reasoning. |
| Approach: | STRIPCIPHER is a benchmark designed to evaluate model ability on understanding implicit narratives in silent comics. |
| Outcome: | STRIPCIPHER is a high-quality, human-annotated dataset featuring fine-grained annotations and comprehensive coverage of varying difficulty levels. |
Turn-PPO: Turn-Level Advantage Estimation with PPO for Improved Multi-Turn RL in Agentic LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has re-emerged as a natural approach for training interactive LLM agents in real-world environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant that operates on a turn-level MDP formulation, instead of the commonly used token-level one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust than the widely used GRPO algorithm and more efficient than token-level MDPs. |
GUIDE: Towards Scalable Advising for Research Ideas (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that provide detailed, constructive feedback on academic papers struggle with review fidelity. |
| Approach: | They explore factors that underlie the development of robust advising systems . large language models have shown remarkable progress in tasks from text generation to code synthesis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models in acceptance rates for self-ranked top-30% submissions to ICLR 2025. |
DocLens: A Tool-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Long Visual Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to localizing evidence from long visual documents fail on a fundamental challenge: evidence localization. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented multi-agent framework that “zooms in” on evidence like a lens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on MMLongBench-Doc and FinRAGBench-V, surpassing even human experts. |
DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI (2024.findings-eacl)
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Jianguo Zhang, Kun Qian, Zhiwei Liu, Shelby Heinecke, Rui Meng, Ye Liu, Zhou Yu, Huan Wang, Silvio Savarese, Caiming Xiong
| Challenge: | DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . existing datasets lack diversity and comprehensiveness, authors say . |
| Approach: | They introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets . DialogStuio aggregates more than 80 diverse dialogue dataset . |
| Outcome: | a new dataset is created to improve the quality and diversity of dialogue datasets . DialogStudio is the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue data . |
An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the generalizability of KPG models with other models by analyzing the most crucial factors that may affect their generalizarability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to predict keyphrases from a set of input sequences, and it can be compared with existing models. |
Learning from Committee: Reasoning Distillation from a Mixture of Teachers with Peer-Review (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have proven to be highly effective in addressing a wide range of complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that asks teachers to identify and explain student’s mistakes and then asks them to provide customized instruction learning data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the chance of teachers guessing incorrectly with flawed rationales, improving instructional data quality. |
Language-Coupled Reinforcement Learning for Multilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Rui Qi, Fengran Mo, Yufeng Chen, Xue Zhang, Shuo Wang, Hongliang Li, Xu Jinan, Meng Jiang, Jian-Yun Nie, Kaiyu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual retrieval-augmented generation (MRAG) use a single-turn retrieval and subsequent optimization to acquire and integrate beneficial external knowledge from multilingual collections. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual search-augmented reinforcement learning framework that integrates a language-coupled Group Relative Policy Optimization into the policy and reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance and is appropriate for various practical scenarios such as constrained training data and retrieval over collections encompassing a large number of languages. |
Interpretable Research Replication Prediction via Variational Contextual Consistency Sentence Masking (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting research replication are insufficient especially for long research papers. |
| Approach: | They propose to build an interpretable neural model which can provide sentence-level explanations and apply weakly supervised approach to leverage large corpus of unlabeled datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can provide sentence-level explanations and leverage large unlabeled datasets to boost interpretability and improve prediction performance. |
Uni-Parser: Unified Semantic Parser for Question Answering on Knowledge Base and Database (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches on semantic parsing suffer from exponential growth of logical form candidates and can hardly generalize to unseen data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified semantic parser for question answering on KB and DB . they define the primitive as the essential element in their framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict logical forms by altering and composing top-ranked primitives with different operations. |
Integrating Transformer and Paraphrase Rules for Sentence Simplification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Current models for sentence simplification adopted ideas from machine translation studies and implicitly learned simplification mapping rules from normal-simple sentence pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model based on a multi-layer and multi-head attention architecture and two innovative approaches to integrate a paraphrase knowledge base for simplification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models for sentence simplification . it seeks to select more accurate simplification rules, the authors show . |
Regularized Context Gates on Transformer for Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Context gates are effective to control the contributions from the source and target contexts in the recurrent neural network (RNN) based neural machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify source and target contexts and introduce a gate mechanism to control the contributions from source and targets in the advanced Transformer architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an averaged gain of 1.0 BLEU score over a strong transformer baseline. |
Bringing Structure into Summaries: a Faceted Summarization Dataset for Long Scientific Documents (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Faceted summarization provides briefings of a document from different perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a faceted summarization benchmark built on Emerald journal articles . they propose faceted models that bring structure into faceted documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on Emerald journal articles and covers a diverse range of domains. |
Ranking and Sampling in Open-Domain Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on positive paragraphs which contain the answer during training, making it disturbed by similar but irrelevant paragraphs during testing. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking model leveraging the paragraph-question and the paragraph relevance to compute a confidence score for each paragraph. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed model advances the state of the art. |
MEraser: An Effective Fingerprint Erasure Approach for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised critical concerns about model ownership and intellectual property protection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for effectively removing backdoor-based fingerprints from LLMs . they propose deleting backdoor fingerprints using a transferable erasure mechanism . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method removes backdoor-based fingerprints while maintaining model performance. |
HPE: Answering Complex Questions over Text by Hybrid Question Parsing and Execution (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end neural networks excel at answering natural language questions but fail on complex ones . a proposed framework for question parsing and execution on textual QA is designed to combine the strengths of neural and symbolic methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for question parsing and execution on textual QA . they parse questions into an intermediate representation and use deterministic rules to translate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings while preserving its underlying reasoning process. |
One Size Does Not Fit All: Generating and Evaluating Variable Number of Keyphrases (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for keyphrase generation do not provide a desideratum for the number of keyphrases in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent generative model that generates multiple keyphrases as delimiter-separated sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on all datasets. |
Unlocking Anticipatory Text Generation: A Constrained Approach for Large Language Models Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown a powerful ability for text generation, but undesired behaviors such as toxicity and hallucinations can manifest. |
| Approach: | They propose to formalize text generation as a future-constrained generation problem to minimize undesirable behaviors and enforce faithfulness to instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective across three tasks, including keyword-constrained generation, toxicity reduction, and factual correctness in question-answering. |
Retrieval-Augmented Multilingual Keyphrase Generation with Retriever-Generator Iterative Training (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on keyphrase generation on non-English languages haven’t been vastly investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented method for multilingual keyphrase generation that leverages keyphrase annotations in English datasets to facilitate generating keyphrases in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on non-English keyphrase generation datasets and the proposed model is scalable. |
General-to-Specific Transfer Labeling for Domain Adaptable Keyphrase Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large distribution shifts among different domains hinder transferability of keyphrase generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline which guides KPG models’ learning focus from general syntactical features to domain-related semantics in a data-efficient manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can produce good quality keyphrases in new domains and achieve consistent improvements after adaptation with limited in-domain annotated data. |