Papers by Ruochen Xu
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
ParaTag: A Dataset of Paraphrase Tagging for Fine-Grained Labels, NLG Evaluation, and Data Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets only annotate a binary label for each sentence pair. Existing models only annnotate binary labels for each phrase pair. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel binary paraphrase classification task that annotates the degree of paraphrase between sentences and a new annotation schema that labels the minimum spans of tokens in a sentence that don't have the corresponding paraphrases in the other sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to train an automatic scorer for language generation evaluation. |
Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language processing (NLP) is a vast field, with a wide variety of tasks, languages, and domains. |
| Approach: | They build regression models to predict evaluation score of an NLP experiment . they find that their models can produce meaningful predictions over unseen languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and human experts on 9 different tasks. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Z-Code++: A Pre-trained Language Model Optimized for Abstractive Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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Pengcheng He, Baolin Peng, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Ruochen Xu, Hany Hassan, Yu Shi, Chenguang Zhu, Wayne Xiong, Michael Zeng, Jianfeng Gao, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | Z-Code++ is a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization that uses a two-phase pre-training technique to improve model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the competing models on low-resource summarization tasks in zero-shot and few-shot settings. |
Language Models can be Deductive Solvers (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel language model that internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented language models and few-shot prompting methods on public deductive reasoning benchmarks. |
Fusing Context Into Knowledge Graph for Commonsense Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to combine language modeling and knowledge graphs (KG) lack the context to provide a more precise understanding of the concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use external entity descriptions to provide contextual information for commonsense question answering models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art among non-generative models in OpenBookQA and is the first of its kind in the field. |
In-Context Demonstration Selection with Cross Entropy Difference (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can use in-context demonstrations to improve performance on zero-shot tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-entropy difference method for selecting in-context demonstrations that uses parameter efficient finetuning to train small models on training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline selection methods on a mix-domain dataset and shows that the effectiveness of in-context demonstrations negatively correlates with the perplexity of the test example. |
Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly and require manual evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered framework that automates the entire evaluation process using LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 92.14% correlation with human preferences, surpassing all previous expert-annotated benchmarks without any manual efforts. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
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Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding but their visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning that allows MLLMs to explore textual tokens while visual input remains fixed throughout reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong large models such as GPT-4o on high-resolution benchmarks and improves performance on a series of elaborate high-level benchmarks. |
Low-resource Cross-lingual Event Type Detection via Distant Supervision with Minimal Effort (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, few or no language processing tools or resources exist for most languages . a problem is that there is not enough available training data even in resource-rich languages if the task is complex. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bilingual dictionary to train machine learning in a resource-poor language . they also explore adversarial training of bilingual word representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach gives similar performance in event-type detection tasks. |
UniSumm and SummZoo: Unified Model and Diverse Benchmark for Few-Shot Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark summarization model is being developed to train few-shot summarizers . a large number of summarizing tasks are required to perform well in heterogeneous datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarizing tasks . they propose 'uniSumm' to be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarisation task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models under automatic and human evaluations and achieves comparable results in human evaluation. |
A Hierarchical Network for Abstractive Meeting Summarization with Cross-Domain Pretraining (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of summarizing meetings require complex multi-step pipelines that are intractable. |
| Approach: | They propose an abstractive summary network that adapts to meeting transcripts by hierarchical structure and role vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in both metrics and human evaluation. |
Mixed-Lingual Pre-training for Cross-lingual Summarization (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at producing a summary in the target language for an article in the source language. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-lingual pre-training scheme that leverages both cross-lingual tasks such as translation and monolingual tasks like masked language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the translation and masked language models with no task-specific components and saves memory. |
Leveraging Knowledge in Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense reasoning is a language-agnostic process, but most comprehensive knowledge sources are limited to a small number of languages, especially English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English as a pivot language to integrate commonsense reasoning into models using a translate-retrieve-translate strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the XCSR benchmarks. |
Randomized Smoothing with Masked Inference for Adversarially Robust Text Classifications (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models are brittle against specifically crafted adversarial examples, leading to increasing interest in probing the adversariality of NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that combines randomized smoothing and masked inference to improve the adversarial robustness of NLP systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves adversarial robustness by 2 to 3 times over existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Narrate Dialogues for Better Summarization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on dialogue summarization models focuses on generating concise summaries for multi-party dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose several ways to convert dialogue into a third-person narrative style . they propose to use narration as a valuable annotation for LLMs . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach achieves higher scores on ROUGE and a factual correctness metric. |
Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models often distort or fabricate facts in articles . factual inconsistency is a common problem with abstractive summaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-aware summarization model FASum to extract factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared with existing systems and corrects factual errors via modifying only a few keywords. |
SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yubo Ma, Zhibin Gou, Junheng Hao, Ruochen Xu, Shuohang Wang, Liangming Pan, Yujiu Yang, Yixin Cao, Aixin Sun
| Challenge: | SciAgent surpasses other LLMs with the comparable size by more than 8.0% in absolute accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented scientific reasoning setting that supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets and builds a benchmark to evaluate LLM’s abilities with tool assistance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed setting augments LLMs with scalable toolsets and shifts the focus from pursuing an omniscient problem solver to a proficient tool-user. |
InheritSumm: A General, Versatile and Compact Summarizer by Distilling from GPT (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized the way summarization is generated. |
| Approach: | They propose a summarization model derived from GPT-3.5 through distillation that is compact and has comparable summarizing capabilities to GPT-3. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the established best small models in prefix-tuning and full-data fine-tuned scenarios. |
Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to problem-solving for large language models fail to provide accurate reasoning and factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide reasoning and retrieval processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on domain-knowledge-intensive tasks . it can be used to iterate retrieval and reasoning, and improve retrieval relevance . |
Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer of Word Embedding Spaces (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-lingual word mapping require cross-linguistic supervision, but this is not available for many low resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that learns transformation functions over corresponding word embedding spaces using a distributed distributional matching algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity prediction datasets than other supervised and unsupervised methods. |
LMGQS: A Large-scale Dataset for Query-focused Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Xu, Song Wang, Yang Liu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Pengcheng He, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale datasets for query-focused summarization hinders model development . lack of data limits the ability of QFS models to train robust neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation using a pretrained language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
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Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using Gpt-4 with Better Human Alignment (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Conventional reference-based metrics have low correlation with human judgments, especially for open-ended generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as reference-free NLG evaluators to assess the quality of NLG outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms all previous methods in two generation tasks, and has a Spearman correlation of 0.514 with human on summarization task, and a large variance in human judgments. |
Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that REtrieving from the traINing datA only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve training instances from traINing datA and concatenate them with input to generate output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. |