Papers by Ryan A. Rossi
LaMP-Cap: Personalized Figure Caption Generation With Multimodal Figure Profiles (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ho Yin Sam Ng, Edward Hsu, Aashish Anantha Ramakrishnan, Branislav Kveton, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Dongwon Lee, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang
| Challenge: | Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure’s key message. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles that provide inputs and profiles for each figure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides inputs and profiles for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. |
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering (2025.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating information across multiple modalities are suboptimal for multi-page, multimodal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive iterative framework that balances information gain and uncertainty reduction at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures relevant multimodal content and achieves strong performance on complex QA tasks. |
CachePrune: Teaching LLMs What Not to Follow via KV-Cache Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Rui Wang, Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Ryan A. Rossi, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models exhibit critical vulnerability to indirect prompt injection attacks, where instructions injected within in the prompt context can override the user's intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural pruning algorithm that prunes neurons associated with instruction-following during KV cache encoding of the prompt context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces the attack success rate while preserving the model's ability to follow user instructions. |
Follow the Flow: Fine-grained Flowchart Attribution with Neurosymbolic Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Vivek Gupta, Dinesh Manocha
| Challenge: | Flowcharts are a critical tool for visualizing decision-making processes, but their non-linear structure and complex visual-textual relationships make it difficult to interpret them using LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Fine-grained Flowchart Attribution to trace components grounding a flowchart referring LLM response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent mitigates visual hallucinations in LLM answers over baselines by 10–14% on a FlowExplainBench dataset. |
Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes (2025.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Isabel O. Gallegos, Ryan Aponte, Ryan A. Rossi, Joe Barrow, Mehrab Tanjim, Tong Yu, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Deonna Owens, Jiuxiang Gu
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit harmful social biases, but they are often difficult to train and modify. |
| Approach: | They leverage the zero-shot capabilities of large language models to reduce stereotyping . they introduce a technique called zero- shot self-debiasing to reduce bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique reduces stereotyping across nine different social groups while relying on the LLM itself and a simple prompt. |
Test-Time Strategies for More Efficient and Accurate Agentic RAG (2026.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
Abhinav Sharma, Brian Zhang, Deepti Guntur, Zhiyang Zuo, Shreyas Chaudhari, Wenlong Zhao, Franck Dernoncourt, Puneet Mathur, Ryan A. Rossi, Nedim Lipka
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face challenges with complex, multi-hop questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate contextualization module and de-duplication module to improve the accuracy of retrieved documents and to reduce the number of turns by 10.5%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a 5.6% increase in EM score and reduces the average number of turns by 10.5% compared to the baseline. |
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning and continual learning methods compress visual representations and emphasize task alignment over visual retention. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-decoupled gradient descent (MDGD) that regulates gradient updates to preserve effective rank of visual features and explicitly disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces visual forgetting and improves visual retention . it disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment and preserves effective rank . |
Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval over Text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yongjia Lei, Haoyu Han, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Mahantesh M Halappanavar, Jiliang Tang, Yu Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for textual and structural retrieval ignore mutual reinforcement and only use structural retrievals for text-rich Graph Knowledge Bases (TG-KBs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Mixture of Structural-and-Textual Retrieval to retrieve textual and structural knowledge via a Planning-Reasoning-Organizing framework. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework performs better than existing methods in analyzing TG-KBs and integrating structural trajectories for candidate reranking. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Octopus: Gated Selective Attention for Memory-Bounded Long-Context Inference in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Subquadratic architectures rely on aggressive state compression that degrades performance on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that confers fixed-memory inference onto pretrained Transformers . they use a learnable module that enforces an adaptive sparsity policy over the context history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art linearized baselines on the GSM8K benchmark by over 36 points under identical memory constraints. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
Structured Uncertainty guided Clarification for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to clarifying tasks fail when user instructions are ambiguous or incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a principled formulation of structured uncertainty that operates directly over tool parameters and their domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves when2call accuracy and training-time sample efficiency. |
Lizard: An Efficient Linearization Framework for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chien Van Nguyen, Huy Huu Nguyen, Ruiyi Zhang, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Puneet Mathur, Viet Dac Lai, Haoliang Wang, Jayakumar Subramanian, Ryan A. Rossi, Trung Bui, Nikos Vlassis, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen
| Challenge: | Existing linearization frameworks that rely on softmax attention with quadratic time and memory complexity pose significant computational and memory bottlenecks for long-context applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearization framework that transforms pretrained Transformer-based Large Language Models into subquadratic architectures that closely approximate softmax attention while preserving model quality. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 9.4 - 24.5 points on the 5-shot MMLU benchmark and demonstrating superior associative recall. |
AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tiankai Yang, Yi Nian, Li Li, Ruiyao Xu, Yuangang Li, Jiaqi Li, Zhuo Xiao, Xiyang Hu, Ryan A. Rossi, Kaize Ding, Xia Hu, Yue Zhao
| Challenge: | Anomaly detection (AD) is an important machine learning task with many real-world uses, including fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and industrial monitoring. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates how large language models (LLMs) can help with NLP anomaly detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform zero-shot detection without tasks-specific training, data augmentation and model selection, and it can suggest unsupervised AD models. |
Decomposition-Enhanced Training for Post-Hoc Attributions in Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Sriram Balasubramanian, Samyadeep Basu, Koustava Goswami, Ryan A. Rossi, Varun Manjunatha, Roshan Santhosh, Ruiyi Zhang, Soheil Feizi, Nedim Lipka
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extractive QA struggle in multi-hop, abstractive, and semi-extractive settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prompts models to produce answer decompositions as intermediate reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and matches or exceeds state-of-the-art frontier models. |
Risk-Controlled Event-Driven Cascading Updates for Knowledge Graph Consistency Restoration (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge Graphs (KGs) typically treat updates as independent facts . factual, localized updates can contradict and invalidate previously correct knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework for cascading KG update identification that leverages conformal prediction to provide reliable uncertainty guarantees over the cascade as a whole. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides reliable uncertainty guarantees over the cascade as a whole . it integrates large language models to enrich event representations with world knowledge. |
VisDoM: Multi-Document QA with Visually Rich Elements Using Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for document QA for visually rich documents outperform unimodal and long-context LLMs by 12-20%. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation approach that integrates visual and textual retrieval with linguistic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms unimodal and long-context LLM benchmarks for document QA by 12-20%. |
CulturaX: A Cleaned, Enormous, and Multilingual Dataset for Large Language Models in 167 Languages (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Thuat Nguyen, Chien Van Nguyen, Viet Dac Lai, Hieu Man, Nghia Trung Ngo, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Thien Huu Nguyen
| Challenge: | Existing training datasets for large language models are often not fully disclosed. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual dataset with 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages . they use a pipeline of multiple stages to achieve the best quality for model training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is cleaned and deduplicated to achieve the best quality for model training . lack of transparency has hindered research on attributing and addressing hallucination and bias issues . 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages are used to train multilingual LLMs . |
Disambiguation in Conversational Question Answering in the Era of LLMs and Agents: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Mehrab Tanjim, Yeonjun In, Xiang Chen, Victor Bursztyn, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Guang-Jie Ren, Vaishnavi Muppala, Shun Jiang, Yongsung Kim, Chanyoung Park
| Challenge: | Existing literature on ambiguity and disambiguation with Large Language Models (LLMs) ambiguities are a fundamental challenge in human-AI interactions due to complexity and flexibility of human language. |
| Approach: | They propose to define key terms and concepts and categorize various disambiguation approaches enabled by LLMs and provide a comparative analysis of their advantages and disadvantages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are compared against different disambiguation approaches and highlight their relevance for future research. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents finetuned with supervised finetuning may over-commit towards seemingly plausible but suboptimal actions due to limited action space exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-taught actioN deliberation framework that allows LLM agents to explicitly deliberate over candidate actions before committing to one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two representative interactive agent tasks and achieves an average 20% improvement over initial finetuning. |
ChartLens: Fine-grained Visual Attribution in Charts (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MLLMs suffer from hallucinations, where generated text fails to align with visual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart attribution algorithm that uses segmentation-based techniques to identify chart objects and employs set-of-marks prompting with MLLMs for fine-grained visual attribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves fine-grained attributions by 26-66% . |
Demystifying the Power of Large Language Models in Graph Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yu Wang, Ryan A. Rossi, Namyong Park, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Danai Koutra, Franck Dernoncourt, Tyler Derr
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for graph discriminative tasks, but their potential for graph structure generation remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate graphs that optimize network properties by injecting domain expertise from network science into the code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates graphs satisfying each property in different domains and compares it with established graph generative models across multiple domains. |
Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate query expansions focus on enhancing textual similarities between search queries and document corpus, overlooking document relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware query expansion framework augmenting LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG) they leverage document texts as rich KG node representations and use document-based relation filtering for their method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG) Extensive experiments on three datasets of diverse domains show the advantages compared against state-of-the-art methods on textual and relational semi-structured retrieval. |
Diversify-verify-adapt: Efficient and Robust Retrieval-Augmented Ambiguous Question Answering (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address ambiguous questions are limited in their efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval augmented generation framework that diversifies and verifies the retrieved passages to encompass diverse interpretations and adapts the most suitable approach tailored to their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy and robustness by handling low quality retrieval issue in ambiguous questions while enhancing efficiency. |