Papers by Rui Xie
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| Challenge: | Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to let PLMs infer the shared properties of similes by probing textual corpora and human-designed questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms pre-trained language models on simile interpretation tasks while still underperforming humans. |
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| Challenge: | MLLMs are deployed on limited image-text pairs, which makes them more vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting of their original abilities during safety fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play strategy that detects harmful visual inputs and transforms harmful ones into harmless ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates the risks posed by malicious visual inputs without compromising the original performance of MLLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on an external router to assign tokens to experts, resulting in suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an MoE variant that performs "expert-autonomous routing" by pre-designating a fraction of neurons within each expert as "routing neurons" they pre-train UoE models with up to 3B parameters and show they outperform traditional MoEs with matched efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with 3B parameters and provides valuable insights into expert-autonomous selection and the broader routing mechanisms of MoE models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing certified robustness methods for certifying input-specific text perturbations have shown promise in certifyling UTPs, but masking only adversarial words can eliminate the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to certify a language model’s robustness against UTPs by using random smoothing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high certified accuracy under extensive masking and achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious exploitation, but are often rejected and limited harmfulness is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO). |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks, but they face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to recognize relational relationships with a few support samples are limited for unlimited queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective framework that uses relation descriptions as external knowledge to enhance the model’s comprehension of the relation semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while being robust against various NOTA rates. |
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| Challenge: | evidence from deployed systems suggests that language models interact through a shared data ecosystem. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data pollination to investigate stability dynamics under synthetic data training to investigate model collapse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can mitigate model collapse observed in recursive training, and improve performance across benchmarks. |
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| 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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
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| Challenge: | GUI automation is a key challenge in dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free GUI agent that integrates two mechanisms to explore trajectories in GUIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-explorer shows significant improvements over existing agents. |
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| 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 . |
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| Challenge: | Trending topics bring in a new channel for poisoning attacks, resulting in negative impacts on society. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based multi-agent system to simulate trending topics in social media . they propose a time-aware interaction mechanism, centralized message dissemination, and an interactive system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system simulates trending topics under poisoning attacks on social media platforms. |
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| Challenge: | Current methods embed factual knowledge into continuous vector space and apply geometric operations to learn potential patterns in temporal knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph completion method that uses two geometric operations to learn missing facts in temporal graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing temporal knowledge graph embedding models. |
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| Challenge: | Achieving consistent high-quality machine translation across diverse domains remains a challenge due to limited and imbalanced parallel training data available in various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain Chain of Thought technique that uses the multi-domain intelligence of LLMs to improve translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in translation accuracy and domain robustness over traditional fine-tuning on a small dataset of four domains. |
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| Challenge: | We examine the pre-training dynamics of language models, focusing on their ability to copy text from preceding context. |
| Approach: | They propose that Transformer-based language models develop copying abilities similarly to grokking . they argue that the connection between groking and context copying can improve in-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model development is similar to grokking, but the speed is independent of tokens trained. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking methods that use large language models often generate subtle factual errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-checking framework that uses extracted knowledge graphs to enhance text representation. |
| Outcome: | GraphCheck outperforms existing specialized fact-checkers on seven benchmarks spanning general and medical domains . Graph Neural Networks process extracted knowledge graphs as a soft prompt, enabling efficient fact- checking in a single inference call. |
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies solve this challenge by updating benchmarks with newly collected data, but they fail to guarantee contamination-free evaluation as the newly collected knowledge may contain pre-existing knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated anti-leakage benchmarking framework that builds and updates benchmarks without human labor instead of using newly collected data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces the cost of benchmark maintenance to accommodate emerging LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have shown that distinguishing text generated by Large Language Models from human-written text is challenging for humans and often no better than random guessing. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive case study to determine the upper bound of human detection accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The findings challenge previous conclusions on human detection accuracy across languages and domains. |
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| Challenge: | a large number of machine-generated texts are often hard to distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text . this raises concerns about potential misuse, especially within educational and academic domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that can detect whether a text is human-written or machine-generated . they use a fine-grained classification schema to identify the use of machine-generated text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text . it can detect attempts to obfuscate the fact that a text was machine- generated . |
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| Challenge: | Text analysis of tabular data relies on two core operations: summarization for corpus-level theme extraction and tagging for row-level labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances output stability by constraining the model’s latent reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves stability by constraining the model's latent reasoning trajectory. |
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| Challenge: | EmoCharacter evaluates emotional fidelity of role-playing agents in dialogues . current evaluations focus on personality fidelity, tone imitation, and knowledge consistency . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess emotional fidelity of role-playing agents in dialogues using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures emotional fidelity of role-playing agents and the characters they portray. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by adversarially perturbed examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable defense module PlugAT to provide robust predictions by adding a few trainable parameters to the model inputs while keeping the original model frozen. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves robustness over several strong baselines whilst training only 9.1% parameters. |
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| Challenge: | Document-level relation extraction requires inter-sentence reasoning capabilities to capture local and global contextual information for multiple relation facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize the interaction between sentences and potential relation instances via a Graph Enhanced Dual Attention network (GEDA) . they also propose a simple yet effective regularizer based on the natural duality of the S2R and R2S attentions, whose weights are also supervised by the supporting evidence of relation instances during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performance on an existing large-scale dataset while the predictions can be interpretable and easily observed. |
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| Challenge: | Fact-checking long-form text is challenging, and breaking it down into multiple atomic claims is not cost-effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent-based framework that integrates evidence retrieval and claim verification in an iterative manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces large language model (LLM) costs by an average of 7.6 times and search costs by 16.5 times while retaining the same performance. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) depend on vast amounts of text data sourced from the Internet for their training. |
| Approach: | They propose a new alignment paradigm that reformulates risky queries into highly relevant yet harmless ones before feeding them into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach eliminates the high costs of training base LLMs and achieves a promising balance of harmlessness and helpfulness. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research observes a phenomenon in large language models called the "reversal curse" when dealing with two entities, LLMs excel in handling sequences in the form of "aRb" but when asked "who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" the LLM exhibits considerable confusion and fails to provide a as the answer . |
| Approach: | They conduct the first-ever study of how the reversal curse happens in large language models . they find that LLMs excel in handling sequences in the form of "aRb" but struggle to provide a satisfactory answer when asked "who is Mary Lee Pfeiffer's son?" |
| Outcome: | The proposed study shows that the reversal curse can stem from specific training objectives . the study also shows that a reverse query can be difficult to understand . |
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented large language models excel in various NLP tasks but are not always helpful when the knowledge required is absent in the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to determine whether the model is knowledgeable on a query via inspecting the (contextualized) pre-trained token embeddings of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach performs better than previous approaches on various benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions . this is a challenge for generating reliable responses and building user trust . |
| Approach: | They propose a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism and two metrics to quantify this inconsistency . they also develop a framework that teaches large language models to maintain original correct judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the general capabilities of large language models by allowing them to maintain original correct judgments. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal summarization with multimodal output (MSMO) lack reference images for training, and exposure of image captions during training is inconsistent with MSMO’s task settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a coarse-to-fine image-text alignment mechanism to identify the most relevant sentence of each image in a document, resembling the role of image captions in capturing visual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method sets up state-of-the-art on all intermodality and intramodality metrics and improves on image recommendation precision. |
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| 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. |
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new paradigm for pre-trained language models that can make predictions for unseen inputs without updating parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enables a model to augmented copies of a demonstration by leveraging their deep feature distribution and a logit calibration mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the average and worst-case accuracy across diverse PLMs and tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Concepts in knowledge graphs (KGs) are far from complete in existing knowledge graph models. |
| Approach: | They propose to equip a PLM-based extractor with a knowledge-guided prompt to alleviate concept bias by removing spurious co-occurrence correlations from existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompt can alleviate concept bias and improve the performance of existing models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate high quality responses rely on future text . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical duality learning for dialogue to simulate human cognitive ability . they utilize hierarchically dualities at token hierarchy and utterance hierarchy to simulate duality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate high quality responses that connect both previous and follow-up dialogues. |
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking methods focus on verification of individual facts, overlooking logical dependencies . a recent study shows that text containing logical errors may still be misjudged as factual . |
| Approach: | They propose a content–logic coupled factuality evaluation paradigm that conceptualizes factual dimension along two complementary dimensions: content factualism and logic factuity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm bridges the gap between factual verification and content factuality . it incorporates the logical dimension and a logic-aware metric to expose and penalize logical fallacies. |
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| 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 . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform relation extraction are feature-based or kernel-based, but the results of our study show that they can improve the performance of a baseline model with more than 10% absolute increase in F1-score. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task architecture which jointly trains a model to perform relation identification with cross-entropy loss and relation classification with ranking loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on ACE 2005 Chinese and English corpus and significantly improves the performance of a baseline model with more than 10% increase in F1-score. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence in LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use confidence scores to determine model answer quality and encourage model to try again until it reaches satisfactory confidence level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve entity translation in Neural machine translation still suffer from inaccurate translation of entities due to the lack of entity training instances. |
| Approach: | They propose an extract-and-tend approach to enhance entity translation in NMT by extracting entities from a dictionary and attending to them with a prefix. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on En-Zh and En-Ru show that the proposed approach improves translation accuracy and translation quality. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation, serving as the foundation for advanced persona simulation and Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that treats psychological patterns as interacting causal forces and synthesizes 113 scenarios where 2-5 patterns reinforce, conflict, or modulate each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Qwen3-32B on multi-pattern dynamics despite 4 fewer parameters. |
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| Challenge: | BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences. |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs focus on the representation and reasoning of general factual knowledge, while there are significant deficiencies in the understanding and reasoning for emotional knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense knowledge graph that can be used to represent emotional knowledge by combining theories from psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4-Turbo in the emotion-related tasks. |