Papers by Sheng Sun
ZoFia: Zero-Shot Fake News Detection with Entity-Guided Retrieval and Multi-LLM Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited by knowledge cutoff and can generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework that uses a hierarchical salience and saliency-calibrated minimum margin of relevance algorithm to extract core entities accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods on two public datasets. |
CortexDebate: Debating Sparsely and Equally for Multi-Agent Debate (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the reasoning performance of LLMs suffer from two major shortcomings: too lengthy input contexts and overconfidence dilemma. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to debating among LLM agents using a sparse debator graph . they use a module called McKinsey-based Debate Matter to optimize the debators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been well demonstrated across eight datasets from four task types. |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
StraGo: Harnessing Strategic Guidance for Prompt Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Bin Zhu, Zineng Zhou, Xiaodi Sun, Sheng Yang, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt optimization often lead to prompt drifting, wherein newly generated prompts canadversely impact previously successful cases while addressing failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate prompt drifting by integrating in-context learning to formulate specific, actionable strategies for prompt optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach mitigates prompt drifting by leveraging insights from both successful and failed cases to identify critical factors for achieving optimization objectives. |
Inner Thinking Transformer: Leveraging Dynamic Depth Scaling to Foster Adaptive Internal Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Junyuan Shang, Zhenyu Zhang, Yanxi Xie, Jiawei Sheng, Tingwen Liu, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints . challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient spikes across layers, exposing stress points . |
| Approach: | They propose an inner thinking transformer that reimagines layer computations as implicit thinking steps. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that ITT outperforms Transformer/Loop variants in 11 benchmarks. |
On Measures of Biases and Harms in NLP (2022.findings-aacl)
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Sunipa Dev, Emily Sheng, Jieyu Zhao, Aubrie Amstutz, Jiao Sun, Yu Hou, Mattie Sanseverino, Jiin Kim, Akihiro Nishi, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that natural language processing (NLP) technologies propagate societal biases about demographic groups associated with attributes such as gender, race, and nationality. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for harms and questions to help practitioners understand biases . they propose measurable measures to detect and mitigate biased groups . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a framework for harms and questions for practitioners to answer to guide the development of bias measures. |
Tailoring Rumor Debunking to You: Diversifying Chinese Rumor-Debunking Passages with an LLM-Driven Simulated Feedback-Enhanced Framework (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-checking lack coherence and context, whereas abstractive methods lack cohesion and context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages . they propose to use a generative AI framework to generate context-sensitive responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages by iteratively refining outputs based on simulated user feedback. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
ViDove: A Translation Agent System with Multimodal Context and Memory-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Yichen Lu, Wei Dai, Jiaen Liu, Ching Wing Kwok, Zongheng Wu, Xudong Xiao, Ao Sun, Sheng Fu, Jianyuan Zhan, Yian Wang, Takatomo Saito, Sicheng Lai
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Machine Translation (MT) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation agent system designed for multimodal input that leverages visual and contextual background information to enhance the translation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation agent achieves significantly higher translation quality in subtitle generation and general translation tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. |
AMPO: Automatic Multi-Branched Prompt Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Sheng Yang, Yurong Wu, Yan Gao, Zineng Zhou, Bin Zhu, Xiaodi Sun, Jian-Guang Lou, Zhiming Ding, Anbang Hu, Yuan Fang, Yunsong Li, Junyan Chen, Linjun Yang
| Challenge: | Existing prompt engineering techniques are limited to producing single flow instructions, struggling with handling diverse patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that iteratively develops a multi-branched prompt using failure cases as feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results across five tasks and demonstrates significant optimization efficiency due to adoption of a minimal search strategy. |
Aligning Large Multimodal Models with Factually Augmented RLHF (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiqing Sun, Sheng Shen, Shengcao Cao, Haotian Liu, Chunyuan Li, Yikang Shen, Chuang Gan, Liangyan Gui, Yu-Xiong Wang, Yiming Yang, Kurt Keutzer, Trevor Darrell
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are built across modalities and the misalignment between two modality can result in "hallucination" . developing LMMs faces challenges such as a lack of data and a limited number of data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that augments the reward model with additional factual information such as image captions and ground-truth multi-choice options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the LLaVA-Bench dataset with the 96% performance level of the text-only GPT-4 and an improvement of 60% on MMHAL-BENCH over other baselines. |
from Benign import Toxic: Jailbreaking the Language Model via Adversarial Metaphors (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have exposed the risk of Large Language Models (LLMs) generating harmful content by jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits AdVersArial meTAphoR to induce LLMs to calibrate harmful metaphors for jailbreaking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can successfully jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging the AdVersArial meTAphoR (AVATAR) framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rate across multiple advanced LLMs. |
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts . |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks . |
Confusion is the Final Barrier: Rethinking Jailbreak Evaluation and Investigating the Real Misuse Threat of LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yu Yan, Sheng Sun, Zhe Wang, Yijun Lin, Zenghao Duan, Zhifei Zheng, Min Liu, Zhiyi Yin, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have been developed to deal with real-world crimes, but it remains unclear whether they internalize authentic knowledge or are forced to simulate toxic language patterns. |
| Approach: | They construct knowledge-intensive Q&A to investigate misuse threats of Large Language Models in terms of dangerous knowledge possession, harmful task planning utility, and harmfulness judgment robustness. |
| Outcome: | The findings raise concerns that jailbreak success is often attributable to a hallucination loop between jailbroken LLM and judger LLM . |