Papers by Shan Chen
DentalGPT: Incentivizing Multimodal Reasoning in Dentistry (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenyang Cai, Jiaming Zhang, Junjie Zhao, Ziyi Zeng, Yanchao Li, Liang Jingyi, Junying Chen, Yunjin Yang, Jiajun You, Shuzhi Deng, null Xieruiqiii, Yuanting Chen, Xiangyi Feng, Jianquan Li, Liangyi Chen, Junwen Wang, Shan Jiang, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Current multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show limited understanding of dental images. |
| Approach: | They propose a dental-specialized multimodal large language model trained via staged multimodal alignment and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on disease classification and dental VQA tasks. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
INFACT: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Induced Faithfulness and Factuality Hallucinations in Video-LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks only evaluate models in clean settings due to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic benchmark that evaluates models in four modes for faithfulness and factuality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates models in four modes: Base (clean), Visual Degradation, Evidence Corruption, and Temporal Intervention for order-sensitive items. |
From Paraphrasing to Semantic Parsing: Unsupervised Semantic Parsing via Synchronous Semantic Decoding (2021.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Bo Chen, Chunlei Xin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Weipeng Zhang, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Synchronous Semantic Decoding (SSD) can achieve state-of-the-art unsupervised semantic parsing performance on multiple datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method which solves the semantic gap and the structure gap by leveraging paraphrasing and grammar-constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can solve the semantic gap and structure gap on multiple datasets. |
Semantic-aware Contrastive Learning for More Accurate Semantic Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing use Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) to train discriminative semantic parses. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware contrastive learning algorithm which can learn to distinguish fine-grained meaning representations and take the overall sequence-level semantic into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on two standard datasets and gets state-of-the-art performance over existing methods. |
TruthReader: Towards Trustworthy Document Assistant Chatbot with Reliable Attribution (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Document assistant chatbots are empowered with extensive capabilities by Large Language Models (LLMs) however, they suffer from hallucinations that are difficult to verify in the context of given documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a document assistant chatbot with reliable attribution that enables users to seek relevant information from given documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates answers with detailed inline citations, which can be attributed to the original document paragraphs, facilitating verification of factual consistency of the generated text. |
Measuring Pointwise 𝒱-Usable Information In-Context-ly (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a new learning paradigm that has gained popularity along with the development of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt a recently proposed hardness metric, pointwise V-usable information (PVI), to an in-context version. |
| Outcome: | The proposed hardness metric is compared with the original model and is more efficient because it requires only a few exemplars and does not require fine-tuning. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool. |
CLaSp: In-Context Layer Skip for Self-Speculative Decoding (2025.acl-long)
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Longze Chen, Renke Shan, Huiming Wang, Lu Wang, Ziqiang Liu, Run Luo, Jiawei Wang, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for drafting Large Language Models require additional modules to be trained, which can be challenging to implement and ensure compatibility across various LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an in-context layer-skipping strategy for self-speculative decoding that uses a plug-and-play mechanism to skip intermediate layers of the verify model to construct a compressed draft model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a speedup of 1.3 1.7 on LLaMA3 series models without altering the original distribution of the generated text. |
RaaS: Reasoning-Aware Attention Sparsity for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Wenrui Huang, Weidong Wang, Zhenwen Li, Tiancheng Hu, Zhixia Liu, Xusheng Chen, Tao Xie, Yizhou Shan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various domains, but their large-scale deployment faces a major obstacle: the high computational cost of long-sequence inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that retains key-value vectors until they are no longer needed to solve reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves high accuracy with O(L) time but O(N) memory complexities. |
LM2Protein: A Structure-to-Token Protein Large Language Model (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins are critical for various molecular functions, relying on their precise tertiary structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to integrate protein 3D structural data within a sequence processing framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high sequence recovery in inverse folding and protein-conditioned RNA design. |
Dashboard2Code: Evaluating Multimodal Models on Reconstructing Interactive Dashboards (2026.acl-long)
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Tianhao Niu, Ziyu Han, Qiguang Chen, Shiqi Zhou, Baocai Shan, Hengjie Fang, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to generate static visualizations focus on static charts and interactive dashboards. |
| Approach: | They propose a dashboard2code task that requires a model to explore an interactive dashboard, acquire feedback from its own interactions and generate code that reproduces the target dashboard. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 180 carefully designed and manually verified dashboard–code pairs spanning three difficulty levels and covering eight common real-world interaction patterns. |
MR. Judge: Multimodal Reasoner as a Judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Effective reward modeling is especially valuable in reinforcement learning (RLHF) . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for empowering general-purpose MLLMs judges with strong reasoning capabilities by using multiple-choice problem models instead of directly assigning scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o on VL-RewardBench and improves performance on MM-Vet by up to 7.7%. |
When Raw Data Prevails: Are Large Language Model Embeddings Effective in Numerical Data Representation for Medical Machine Learning Applications? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yanjun Gao, Skatje Myers, Shan Chen, Dmitriy Dligach, Timothy Miller, Danielle Bitterman, Matthew Churpek, Majid Afshar
| Challenge: | Numerical data is pivotal for medical questions and answers, but tabular data is not fully integrated into LLMs. |
| Approach: | They examine the effectiveness of vector representations from last hidden states of LLMs for medical diagnostics and prognostics using electronic health record data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representations outperform those using raw numerical EHR data in medical diagnostics and prognostics. |
SmartTrim: Adaptive Tokens and Attention Pruning for Efficient Vision-Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Wangchunshu Zhou, Haichao Zhu, Jiafeng Liang, Liping Shan, Ming Liu, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that SmartTrim accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive acceleration framework which prunes redundant token representations and attention heads within each layer of the original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates the original model by 2-3 times with minimal performance degradation across vision-language tasks. |
EffiQA: Efficient Question-Answering with Strategic Multi-Model Collaboration on Knowledge Graphs (2025.coling-main)
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Zixuan Dong, Baoyun Peng, Yufei Wang, Jia Fu, Xiaodong Wang, Xin Zhou, Yongxue Shan, Kangchen Zhu, Weiguo Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
A Self-Evolving LLM Agent Framework for Role-Based Norm Compliance in Healthcare (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems treat roles as static prompts and rely on one-shot safety filters . a self-evolving LLM agent is proposed that learns from role-based social experience . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving LLM agent that learns from role-based social experience and explicitly models communicator-level individual traits informed by prior communication questionnaires and clinical literature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent learns from role-based social experience and models communicator-level individual traits informed by prior communication questionnaires and clinical literature. |
DAST: Context-Aware Compression in LLMs via Dynamic Allocation of Soft Tokens (2025.findings-acl)
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Shaoshen Chen, Yangning Li, Zishan Xu, Yongqin Zeng, Shunlong Wu, Xinshuo Hu, Zifei Shan, Xin Su, Jiwei Tang, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing semantic vector-based compression methods do not account for the intrinsic information density variations between context chunks, instead allocating soft tokens uniformly across context chunk. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the LLM's intrinsic understanding of contextual relevance to guide compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on long context tasks. |
GRPO-CARE: Consistency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent reinforcement learning approaches have advanced reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to multimodal LLMs remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that eliminates KL penalties and rewards consistency . they propose GRPO-CARE, which outperforms standard GR PO, with a base reward for accuracy and an adaptive bonus for consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms standard GRPO on the most difficult evaluation level and reasoning consistency test benchmarks. |
Language Models are Surprisingly Fragile to Drug Names in Biomedical Benchmarks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jack Gallifant, Shan Chen, Pedro Moreira, Nikolaj Munch, Mingye Gao, Jackson Pond, Leo Anthony Celi, Hugo Aerts, Thomas Hartvigsen, Danielle Bitterman
| Challenge: | Medical knowledge is context-dependent and requires consistent reasoning across various natural language expressions of semantically equivalent phrases. |
| Approach: | They create a robustness dataset to evaluate performance differences on medical benchmarks . they swap brand and generic drug names using physician expert annotations based on medical terminology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows a consistent performance drop of 1-10% on medical benchmarks. |
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage (2026.acl-long)
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Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan, Zeyu Zheng, Mengyue Yang, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models that judge only final answers. |
| Approach: | They summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents . goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables finer credit assignment, richer diagnostics, and improved robustness. |
WorldMedQA-V: a multilingual, multimodal medical examination dataset for multimodal language models evaluation (2025.findings-naacl)
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João Matos, Shan Chen, Siena Kathleen V. Placino, Yingya Li, Juan Carlos Climent Pardo, Daphna Idan, Takeshi Tohyama, David Restrepo, Luis Filipe Nakayama, José María Millet Pascual-Leone, Guergana K Savova, Hugo Aerts, Leo Anthony Celi, An-Kwok Ian Wong, Danielle Bitterman, Jack Gallifant
| Challenge: | Existing multiple-choice question and answer (QA) datasets are text-only and available in a limited subset of languages and countries. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual, multimodal benchmarking dataset to evaluate multimodal/vision language models in healthcare. |
| Outcome: | The WorldMedQA-V includes 568 labeled multiple-choice QAs paired with 568 medical images from four countries. |
Sparse Autoencoder Features for Classifications and Transferability (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) provide potential for uncovering structured, human-interpretable representations in Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They analyze SAEs for interpretable feature extraction from Large Language Models in safety-critical classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms hidden-state and BoW models while demonstrating cross-lingual toxicity detection and visual classification tasks. |
When Models Reason in Your Language: Controlling Thinking Language Comes at the Cost of Accuracy (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) with thinking traces have shown strong performance on English reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate two leading LRMs with thinking traces on established benchmark XReasoning and propose directions for future research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models often revert to English or produce fragmented reasoning in other languages, revealing a substantial gap in the capability of thinking in non-English languages. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
CFSP: An Efficient Structured Pruning Framework for LLMs with Coarse-to-Fine Activation Information (2025.coling-main)
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Yuxin Wang, MingHua Ma, Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Shan Liping, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing LLM pruning works focus on unstructured pruning, which typically requires special hardware support for a practical speed-up. |
| Approach: | They propose a network pruning framework that leverages both coarse and fine-grained activation information as an importance criterion to guide pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing pruning methods on diverse models across sparsity budgets. |
Ambiguous Learning from Retrieval: Towards Zero-shot Semantic Parsing (2023.acl-long)
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Shan Wu, Chunlei Xin, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Cao Liu, Jiansong Chen, Fan Yang, Guanglu Wan, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsers require a large amount of training data which is expensive and difficult to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a supervised retrieval system based on pretrained language models . they propose ambiguous supervision to improve the precision and coverage of the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art zero-shot parsing methods in ambiguous supervision. |
Learning to Compose Representations of Different Encoder Layers towards Improving Compositional Generalization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models struggle with compositional generalization (CG) a crucial property of human language learning is its compositional globalization (GC), the algebraic ability to understand and produce a potentially infinite number of novel combinations from known components. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) extension which learns to compose representations of different encoder layers dynamically for different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on two comprehensive and realistic benchmarks, which empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. |