Papers by Shang Ma
Interpretable Safety Alignment via SAE-Constructed Low-Rank Subspace Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work has shown that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures . Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) consistently underperforms full fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on safety benchmarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a safety alignment system that disentangles safety-relevant directions into monosemantic features and constructs an interpretable safety subspace from SAE directions. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model achieves 99.6% safety rates across multiple model families and scales . low-rank Adaptation consistently underperforms full fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on safety benchmarks compared with previous methods . |
PsyScam: A Benchmark for Psychological Techniques in Real-World Scams (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | PTs are employed by scammers to manipulate victims and cause lasting psychological trauma. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to capture the PTs employed in real-worldscam reports and investigate how LLMs can be utilized to generate variants of scams based on the pts and the contexts provided by thesescams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate variants of scams based on the PTs employed in real-world scam reports and the contexts provided by these scams. |
BASS: Batched Attention-optimized Speculative Sampling (2024.findings-acl)
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Haifeng Qian, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Sungsoo Ha, Mingyue Shang, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Ramesh Nallapati, Sudipta Sengupta, Xiaofei Ma, Anoop Deoras
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful method to improve latency and throughput in hosting large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a batched speculative decoding system that generates sequences at an average speed of 5.8ms per token and a batch size of 8 at a 2.15 speed-up over optimized regular decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art latency and speed-up over optimized regular decoding. |
Pair-Based Joint Encoding with Relational Graph Convolutional Networks for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims to extract emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task called emotion-cause pair extraction to extract emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can extract emotion clauses and cause clauses, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on the Chinese benchmark corpus. |
A Span-based Dynamic Local Attention Model for Sequential Sentence Classification (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentence classification ignore latent segment structure of document, in which contiguous sentences have coherent semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based dynamic local attention model that captures structural information by supervised dynamic local focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets. |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
Joint Constrained Learning with Boundary-adjusting for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) aims to identify the document’s emotion clauses and corresponding cause clauses. |
| Approach: | They propose a constrained learning framework with boundary-adjusting for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction that summarizes prior rules and forces the model to take them into consideration in optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive results compared with state-of-the-art methods on unbalanced data and proves robustness on unbalancing data. |
Unraveling and Mitigating Safety Alignment Degradation of Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Qin Liu, Chao Shang, Ling Liu, Nikolaos Pappas, Jie Ma, Neha Anna John, Srikanth Doss, Lluis Marquez, Miguel Ballesteros, Yassine Benajiba
| Challenge: | LLaVA-7B demonstrated a decline in safety alignment ability on multi-modal inputs compared to its LLM backbone. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to recover alignment ability from LLM backbone while preserving functional capabilities of VLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers alignment ability that is inherent in the LLM backbone with minimal impact on fluency and linguistic capabilities of pre-trained VLMs. |
Few-Shot Data-to-Text Generation via Unified Representation and Multi-Source Learning (2023.acl-long)
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Alexander Hanbo Li, Mingyue Shang, Evangelia Spiliopoulou, Jie Ma, Patrick Ng, Zhiguo Wang, Bonan Min, William Yang Wang, Kathleen McKeown, Vittorio Castelli, Dan Roth, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation focus on specific types of structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides a unified representation that can handle various forms of structured data such as tables, knowledge graph triples, and meaning representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot and few-shot scenarios and can adapt to new structured data. |
Preserving Commonsense Knowledge from Pre-trained Language Models via Causal Inference (2023.acl-long)
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Junhao Zheng, Qianli Ma, Shengjie Qiu, Yue Wu, Peitian Ma, Junlong Liu, Huawen Feng, Xichen Shang, Haibin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies attribute catastrophic forgetting to fine-tuning, and they retain pre-trained knowledge indiscriminately without identifying what knowledge is transferable. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified objective for fine-tuning to retrieve the causality back from pre-trained data and use it to mitigate negative transfer while preserving knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fine-tuning methods on commonsense QA datasets and can be implemented as a plug-in module to inflate the performance of existing QA models. |
CodeFort: Robust Training for Code Generation Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yuhao Zhang, Shiqi Wang, Haifeng Qian, Zijian Wang, Mingyue Shang, Linbo Liu, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Baishakhi Ray, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Xiaofei Ma, Anoop Deoras
| Challenge: | Existing research efforts to improve code generation models are inadequate . code generation model performance is degraded under small perturbations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve the robustness of code generation models by generalizing code perturbations to enrich training data and enabling various robust training strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework increases pass rates and robustness drop rate against code-syntax perturbations. |
MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers (2026.acl-long)
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Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments sparse-attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. |
Enhancing Agentic Textual Graph Retrieval with Synthetic Stepwise Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Ge Chang, Jinbo Su, Jiacheng Liu, Pengfei Yang, Yuhao Shang, Huiwen Zheng, Hongli Ma, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating textual graphs with LLMs are limited by symbolic inference and high annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual graph reasoning framework that integrates textual diagrams with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 15.6% accuracy and 17.2% in F1 score on three common datasets. |