Papers by Shaobo Li
Stop Looking for “Important Tokens” in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zichen Wen, Yifeng Gao, Shaobo Wang, Junyuan Zhang, Qintong Zhang, Weijia Li, Conghui He, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Vision tokens in multimodal large language models often dominate computational overhead due to excessive length compared to linguistic modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning method which defines an importance criterion for vision tokens and prunes the unimportant vision token during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can prune 88.9% of vision tokens while maintaining comparable performance. |
How Pre-trained Language Models Capture Factual Knowledge? A Causal-Inspired Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Li, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Zhenhua Dong, Chengjie Sun, Bingquan Liu, Zhenzhou Ji, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as ”Dante was born in [MASK]” . |
| Approach: | They propose to quantitatively measure and evaluate the word-level patterns that PLMs depend on to generate the missing factual words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fills in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts by relying on effective clues or shortcut patterns. |
Data Whisperer: Efficient Data Selection for Task-Specific LLM Fine-Tuning via Few-Shot In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Shaobo Wang, Xiangqi Jin, Ziming Wang, Jize Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Kaixin Li, Zichen Wen, Zhong Li, Conghui He, Xuming Hu, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Using fine-tuning on task-specific data is essential for large language models to be effective in specialized tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages few-shot in-context learning with the model to be fine-tuned. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods with a 3.1-point improvement and a 7.4 speedup on the Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using just 10% of the dataset. |
CoQuIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Quality-Aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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Jiahui Geng, Fengyu Cai, Shaobo Cui, Qing Li, Liangwei Chen, Chenyang Lyu, Haonan Li, Derui Zhu, Alexander Pretschner, Heinz Koeppl, Fakhri Karray
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on functional relevance while neglecting code quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate quality-aware code retrieval . they include fine-grained quality annotations over 42,725 queries and 134,907 code snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that state-of-the-art models fail to separate buggy or insecure code from robust counterparts. |
Disentangle-based Continual Graph Representation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph embedding methods overlook streaming nature of incoming data in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a disentangle-based continual graph representation learning framework inspired by the human’s ability to learn procedural knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art continual graph representation learning framework and alleviate catastrophic forgetting problem. |
Do LLMs Behave as Claimed? Investigating How LLMs Follow Their Own Claims using Counterfactual Questions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks rely on curated datasets that, once public, may be accessed by newer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates counterfactual questions and answers from existing evaluation datasets and uses them to evaluate LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework reduces the risk of data leakage by allowing the LLMs to respond to counterfactual questions and verify their claims. |
Bipartite Graph Pre-training for Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Graph Convolutional Auto-Encoders (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to rank sentences using pre-trained embeddings create a gap due to different optimization objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained embedding process that optimizes informative sentences . they use sentence-word bipartite graphs to model intra-sentential distinctive features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms heavy BERT- or RoBERTa-based sentence ranking methods by providing summary-worthy representations. |
Pre-training Language Models with Deterministic Factual Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that Pre-trained Language Models fail to capture factual knowledge robustly. |
| Approach: | They propose to let PLMs learn the deterministic relationship between context and masked content to improve their ability to capture factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve accuracy and consistency of factual knowledge capturing and boost performance of other knowledge-intensive tasks. |
MelTrim: Coarse-to-Fine Data Pruning for Speech Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Wang, Tianle Niu, Xuan Ouyang, Xintong Li, Zhengkun Ge, Yue Min, Xiaoqian Liu, Hankun Wang, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Unlike image or text classification, speech classification tasks are particularly challenging due to the difficulty in capturing the acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset pruning method that coarsely filters redundant samples using DBSCAN clustering on Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 49.5% improvement in WA on the MEAD dataset and 41.9% reduction in EER on speaker identification tasks. |