Papers by Rui Peng
Enhancing Medical Dialogue Generation through Knowledge Refinement and Dynamic Prompt Adjustment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) struggle to identify relevant medical knowledge and generate accurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical dialogue system that integrates knowledge refining and dynamic prompt adjustment to improve medical knowledge and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art systems in both generation quality and medical entity accuracy. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| 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. |
QiMeng-PRepair: Precise Code Repair via Edit-Aware Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Changxin Ke, Rui Zhang, Jiaming Guo, Yuanbo Wen, Li Ding, Shuo Wang, Xuyuan Zhu, Xiong Peng, Di Huang, Zidong Du, Xing Hu, Qi Guo, Yunji Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to program repair are based on correctness alone. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that mitigates over-editing and improves repair accuracy by generating buggy programs and re-edits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves repair precision by 31.4% under fix1@1, a metric that considers repair correctness and extent, and significantly increases decoding throughput when combined with speculative editing. |
FinChain: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Chain-of-Thought Financial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhuohan Xie, Daniil Orel, Rushil Thareja, Dhruv Sahnan, Hachem Madmoun, Fan Zhang, Debopriyo Banerjee, Georgi Nenkov Georgiev, Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Jimin Huang, Jinyan Su, Aaryamonvikram Singh, Rui Xing, Rania Elbadry, Chen Xu, Haonan Li, Fajri Koto, Ivan Koychev, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yuxia Wang, Salem Lahlou, Veselin Stoyanov, Sophia Ananiadou, Preslav Nakov
| 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. |
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. |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner (2022.findings-naacl)
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Danilo Neves Ribeiro, Shen Wang, Xiaofei Ma, Rui Dong, Xiaokai Wei, Henghui Zhu, Xinchi Chen, Peng Xu, Zhiheng Huang, Andrew Arnold, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved high performance on various natural language benchmarks, but the explainability of their output remains elusive. |
| Approach: | They propose an architecture called iterative retrieval-generation reasoner that generates an entailment tree that explains a given hypothesis by using premises from C. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on premise retrieval and entailment tree generation with around 300% gain in overall correctness. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
Word Sense Disambiguation with Knowledge-Enhanced and Local Self-Attention-based Extractive Sense Comprehension (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is one of the most challenging tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract the right sense from a sentence context . they propose to incorporate additional examples and definitions of related senses in WordNet . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance than baseline models on public benchmark datasets. |
GBT: Generative Boosting Training Approach for Paraphrase Identification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase Identification (PI) is a fundamental natural language understanding task with non-trivial challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative Boosting Training approach for Paraphrase Identification (PI) they use a seq2seq model to perform DA on misclassified instances periodically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art PI models on English and Chinese PI tasks with good efficiency and effectiveness. |
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhiheng Xi, Rui Zheng, Yuansen Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei, Minlong Peng, Mingming Sun, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage. |
Logic-Consistency Text Generation from Semantic Parses (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text generation from semantic parses is challenging due to the complexity of the inner logic and the lack of automatic evaluation metrics for logic consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for logic consistent text generation from semantic parses that employs iterative training procedures and quality control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances logic consistency and human evaluation on two benchmark datasets. |
A2ATS: Retrieval-Based KV Cache Reduction via Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and Query-Aware Vector Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhui He, Junna Xing, Nan Wang, Rui Xu, Shangyu Wu, Peng Zhou, Qiang Liu, Chun Jason Xue, Qingan Li
| Challenge: | Long context large language models (LLMs) pose significant challenges for efficient serving due to the large memory footprint and high access overhead of KV cache. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based method to reduce the memory footprint of LLMs . they propose Windowed Rotary Position Embedding and query-aware vector quantization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve lower performance degradation with lower overhead compared to existing methods . it can reduce the memory footprint and access overhead of long context large language models . |
Ex3: Automatic Novel Writing by Extracting, Excelsior and Expanding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generating long-term texts using artificial intelligence has always been a challenge . however, the generated novels exhibit poor logical coherence and appeal in their plots and deficiencies in character and event depiction, ultimately compromising the overall narrative quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for extracting excelsior and expanding from novel data to generate arbitrarily long novels using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality long-form novels with a high level of logical coherence and appeal despite the use of large language models. |
TingIS: Real-time Risk Event Discovery from Noisy Customer Incidents at Enterprise Scale (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | a 5minute downtime for an incident could result in a loss of 40 million dollars and erosion of user trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage event unification engine that synergizes efficient indexing techniques with Large Language Models (LLMs) to make informed decisions on event merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baseline methods in routing accuracy, clustering quality, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio. |
Unified Low-Resource Sequence Labeling by Sample-Aware Dynamic Sparse Finetuning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Semantic Role Labeling are examples of sequence labeling problems that require finetuning to the target format. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic sparse finetuning strategy that selectively focuses on a fraction of parameters, informed by feedback from highly regressing examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance in low-resource settings and in extreme low-level settings. |
XRICL: Cross-lingual Retrieval-Augmented In-Context Learning for Cross-lingual Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on English datasets, and it is unclear whether large language models can serve as competitive semantic parsers for other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns to retrieve relevant English exemplars for a given query to construct prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns to retrieve relevant English exemplars for a given query to construct prompts. |
GALLa: Graph Aligned Large Language Models for Improved Source Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Programming languages have rich semantics that are represented by graphs and not available from the surface form of source code. |
| Approach: | They propose to use graph neural networks and cross-modal alignment technologies to inject structural information of code into LLMs as an auxiliary task during finetuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on five code tasks with six different baseline LLMs, while incurring no cost at inference time. |
ROSE: Robust Selective Fine-tuning for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the lack of adversarial robustness in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning approach that conducts selective updates when adapting pre-trained models to downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves adversarial robustness on downstream tasks . it eliminates spurious updates, leading to flatter and wider optima than the conventional method . |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
Aspect Is Not You Need: No-aspect Differential Sentiment Framework for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to classify aspects with aspect sentiment bias are hard to find . |
| Approach: | They propose a no-aspect differential sentiment framework for the ABSA task that eliminates aspect sentiment bias and uses differential sentiment loss instead of cross-entropy loss to better classify the sentiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be combined with almost all traditional ABSA methods. |
CharTide: Data-Centric Chart-to-Code Generation via Tri-Perspective Tuning and Inquiry-Driven Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Kuang He, Jiayi Hu, Ping Yu, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Peng Hou, Anxiang Zeng, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to chart-to-code generation are constrained by data-centric limitations . authors present a new framework that redesigns both training and alignment data . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric framework that redesigns both training and alignment data for chart-to-code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source baselines and is competitive with GPT-5. |
Target Really Matters: Target-aware Contrastive Learning and Consistency Regularization for Few-shot Stance Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | stance detection is a task to identify attitudes from opinions towards certain targets, but it is expensive and time-consuming . stance detector is based on labeled data, but unlabeled data can be collected easier . |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised framework for few-shot stance detection that uses unlabeled data to learn more distinguishable representations for different targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmark datasets. |
SolEval: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Repository-level Solidity Smart Contract Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on Python and Java, neglecting Solidity, the programming language for Ethereum smart contracts. |
| Approach: | They construct a repository-level benchmark for Solidity to evaluate the performance of LLMs on Ethereum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the best performing LLM achieves only 26.29% Pass@10, highlighting room for improvement in Solidity code generation. |
Intent Discovery with Frame-guided Semantic Regularization and Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing intent discovery methods focus on transferring prior knowledge of known intents to unknown ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to use frame knowledge as conceptual semantic guidance to bridge the gap between known intents representation learning and unknown intents clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms solid baselines on two benchmark datasets. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
MetaBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Metabolomics (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxing Lu, Xukai Zhao, J. Ben Tamo, Micky C. Nnamdi, Rui Peng, Shuang Zeng, Xingyu Hu, Jinzhuo Wang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on general text, but their proficiency in specialized scientific domains remains uncharacterized. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the capabilities of large language models in metabolomics research using MetaBench . they found that models perform well on text generation tasks, but cross-database identifier grounding remains challenging . |
| Outcome: | The evaluation of 25 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals distinct performance patterns across metabolomics tasks. |
Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Dependency Parsing (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, most studies on cross-domain parsing focus on unsupervised domain adaptation . however, unsupervised approaches make limited progress due to the intrinsic difficulty of both domain adaptation and parse. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised domain adaptation problem for Chinese dependency parsing by using newly-annotated large-scale domain-aware datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than direct corpus concatenation and multi-task learning. |