Papers by Shirui Pan
BlindGuard: Safeguarding LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems under Unknown Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised defense methods rely on labeled malicious agents to train a supervised model of malicious behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised defense method that learns without requiring any attack-specific labels or prior knowledge of malicious behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects diverse attack types across MAS with various communication patterns while maintaining superior generalizability compared to baselines. |
Beyond Memorization: A Rigorous Evaluation Framework for Medical Knowledge Editing (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods show promising results on general-domain benchmarks, but their effectiveness in the medical domain remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate medical knowledge editing using model-generated rationales as editing targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves editing efficacy and generalization in medical models without full retraining. |
Medical Code Assignment with Gated Convolution and Note-Code Interaction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical code assignment from clinical text is a longstanding challenge due to lengthy semantic information in medical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture the semantic information of medical notes and a note-code interaction to automate medical code assignment from clinical text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on real-world clinical datasets and is on par with light-weighted baselines. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
Fire Burns, Sword Cuts: Commonsense Inductive Bias for Exploration in Text-based Games (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing RL agents are far away from solving text-based games due to their combinatorially large action spaces that hinders efficient exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose an exploration technique that injects external commonsense knowledge, via a pretrained language model, into the agent during training when the agent is the most uncertain about its next action. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits improvement on the collected game scores during the training in four out of nine games from Jericho. |
How Far are We from Robust Long Abstractive Summarization? (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization has made tremendous progress in recent years . however, even under a short document setting, abstractive models often generate summaries that are repetitive, ungrammatical, and factually inconsistent with the source. |
| Approach: | They perform fine-grained human annotations to evaluate long document abstractive summarization systems and develop factual consistency metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more relevant summaries but not factual ones. |
Leveraging Information Bottleneck for Scientific Document Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract salient sentences from document are unsupervised and rely on graph-based methods for sentence ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised extractive approach to document level summarization based on the Information Bottleneck principle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be extended to a multi-view framework by different signals. |
Explainable and Fine-Grained Safeguarding of LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Bi-Level Graph Anomaly Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Junjun Pan, Yixin Liu, Rui Miao, Kaize Ding, Yu Zheng, Quoc Viet Hung Nguyen, Alan Wee-Chung Liew, Shirui Pan
| Challenge: | Existing graph anomaly detection methods rely on coarse sentence-level information and overlook fine-grained lexical cues, limiting their reliability and real-world applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable and fine-grained safeguarding framework for detecting malicious agents in multi-agent systems (MAS) to incorporate both coarse and fine lexical information for anomalous agent identification. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across diverse MAS topologies and attack scenarios demonstrate robust detection performance and strong interpretability of XG-Guard. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Shrinking Embeddings for Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on binary relational KGs where each fact is represented by a triple. |
| Approach: | They propose a geometric hyper-relational KG embedding method that explicitly models qualifier monotonicity, qualifier implication, and qualifier mutual exclusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmarks of hyper-relational KGs. |
LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenjin Liu, Haoran Luo, Xin Feng, Xiang Ji, Lijuan Zhou, Rui Mao, Jiapu Wang, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal general intelligence (GI) are result-oriented and do not evaluate the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal benchmark for evaluating legal GI in large language models . they use recent legal cases and exam questions to create multiple-choice questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack a systematic evaluation of the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs) the results show that even the best LLMs lagging behind human legal professionals. |
Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion methods ignore inconsistent representation spaces between natural language and graph structures, leading to duplicate works and time-consuming processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances LLMs for KGC via structure-aware alignment-tuning to align graph embeddings with the natural language space through multi-task contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two KGC tasks across four benchmark datasets. |
Understanding the Information Propagation Effects of Communication Topologies in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies for communication topology design often overlook why and when sparse and dense topologies help or hinder collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology design approach that balances error suppression and beneficial information propagation by fusing connectivity patterns from dense and sparse graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed topology design achieves superior performance across tasks with sparse and dense graphs. |