Papers by Shuang Li

27 papers
SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing frameworks that increase context window do not guarantee robust performance across long input tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables language models to handle extended inputs within limited context windows efficiently.
Outcome: The framework improves performance on long-document question-answering and Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks.
Double Graph Based Reasoning for Document-level Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for document-level relation extraction fail to recognize relations between entities across sentences.
Approach: They propose a method to recognize relations for long paragraphs by a Graph Aggregation-and-Inference Network (GAIN) they propose to use a heterogeneous mention-level graph and an entity-level EG graph to analyze the relationships.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a significant performance improvement (2.85 on F1) over the previous state-of-the-art.
AMO-Bench: Large Language Models Still Struggle in High School Math Competitions (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for mathematical reasoning are becoming less effective due to performance saturation.
Approach: They propose to use a mathematical reasoning benchmark with Olympiad difficulty to evaluate top-tier LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are cross-validated by experts to meet IMO difficulty standards and entirely original problems to prevent performance leakages from data memorization.
LLM Agents in Law: Taxonomy, Applications, and Challenges (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have improved the legal domain, but deployment of standalone models faces significant limitations regarding hallucination, outdated information, and verifiability.
Approach: They present a survey of LLM agents for legal tasks and analyze their architectures . they analyze the transition from standard legal LLMs to legal agents .
Outcome: The proposed architectures bridge the gap between technical capabilities and domain-specific needs.
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities.
Approach: They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine.
A Copy-Augmented Generative Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing open-domain question answering approaches follow a two-stage paradigm retriever then reader.
Approach: They propose a novel reader-based generative approach that incorporates extractive and generative readers.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two benchmark datasets, Natural Questions and TriviaQA.
Evaluating Text Coherence at Sentence and Paragraph Levels (2020.lrec-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing text ordering models have been used to test coherence in NLP for a long time.
Approach: They propose to perform paragraph ordering task and sentence ordering by using four corpora from different domains.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better under certain extreme conditions than the most prevalent metric used before.
How do LLMs’ Preferences Affect Event Argument Extraction? CAT: Addressing Preference Traps in Unsupervised EAE (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to supervised EAE suffer from preference traps due to misalignments between prior knowledge, instructions, or output constraints and LLMs’ preferences.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised EAE framework that handles LLMs' preference traps by targeting their prior knowledge and instructions.
Outcome: The proposed framework matches the best DeepSeek-R1 API model with a significantly lower time cost.
Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing solutions for visual document understanding lack granularity of document textlines.
Approach: They propose a supervised pre-training program to leverage structural knowledge nested in document textlines to achieve fine-grained alignment between visual regions and texts.
Outcome: The proposed system performs better on various VDU tasks in English and Chinese.
On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing DocRE models which perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names.
Approach: They propose a pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline generates entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata.
Dual Slot Selector via Local Reliability Verification for Dialogue State Tracking (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to predict dialogue state from scratch are inefficient and lead to errors . empirical results show that our method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on multi-domain conversations .
Approach: They propose a dual-stage dialogue state tracking method that uses a slot selector and a Slot Value generator to predict the current dialogue state.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 56.93%, 60.73%, and 58.04% joint accuracy on multi-domain conversations.
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Label-Sensitive Reward for Natural Language Understanding (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance, but objective mismatch issues hinder RLHF learning.
Approach: They propose a Reinforcement Learning framework enhanced with Label-sensitive reward to enhance LLMs' alignment and generation capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance on five diverse models across eight tasks.
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools .
Approach: a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator.
Outcome: the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks .
RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to identify semantic relations between entities are time-consuming and labor-intensive.
Approach: They propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) they propose RAPL, which judiciously leverages relation descriptions and real NOTA instances as guidance .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by 2.61% F1 . it generates task-specific NOTA prototypes and refines relation prototypes .
From Trajectories to Graphs: Contract-Checked Editing for Verifier-Guided LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for inference-time search refine single trajectories and lack a reliable mechanism for composing partial solutions across candidates.
Approach: a new method uses a gate-based algorithm to validate a nontrivial edit before invoking the verifier.
Outcome: a new method improves verifier-runnable recombination and accuracy over existing methods . it outperforms execution-guided beam search on Spider and humanEval-MF on MCTS . a contract-checked graph editing improves recompilation and recombines partial solutions .
Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Temporal perception is crucial for Large Language Models to understand the world.
Approach: They propose a temporal-relative ability benchmark to evaluate LLMs' temporal perception . they conduct extensive experiments on popular LLM GPT-4 scenarios .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show a significant performance gap between LLMs and humans in temporal-relative capability.
UCTG: A Unified Controllable Text Generation Framework for Query Auto-Completion (2025.coling-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to control text generation (CTG) are essentially challenging to adapt to various control objectives and constraints, which results in mixed success.
Approach: They propose a unified controllable text generation framework which integrates a control module, a prompt module, and a generation module.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves query accuracy and coherence in tasks with different objectives and constraints.
AMR-based Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have used dependency trees to extract relation between aspects and contexts, but there is a potential mismatch between the dependency tree and sentiment classification as a semantic task.
Approach: They propose to replace the syntactic dependency tree with a semantic structure to capture the relation between an aspect and a context.
Outcome: The proposed model improves ABSA on four public datasets with 1.13% improvement over baselines.
Strengthened Symbol Binding Makes Large Language Models Reliable Multiple-Choice Selectors (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) are a critical area of research in the study of Large Language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose an efficient SFT algorithm for MCQs, termed Point-wise Intelligent Feedback, which constructs negative instances by randomly combing the incorrect option contents with all candidate symbols.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm significantly reduces the model’s selection bias by improving its MCSB capability.
Exploring Reasoning Reward Model for Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for agentic reinforcement learning rely on sparse outcome-based reward for training, leading to suboptimal results.
Approach: They propose an agent-based reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including an explicit reasoning trace and a focused critique.
Outcome: The proposed model produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories including an explicit reasoning trace, a focused critique, and an overall score that evaluates process performance.
Beyond the Granularity: Multi-Perspective Dialogue Collaborative Selection for Dialogue State Tracking (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that task-oriented dialogue systems have attracted growing attention and achieved substantial progress.
Approach: They propose a method that dynamically selects relevant dialogue contents for each slot . they retrieve turn-level utterances and evaluate their relevance to the slot from three perspectives .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on MultiWOZ 2.1 and MultiWOz 2.2 and superior performance on multiple mainstream benchmark datasets.
AnyMAC: Cascading Flexible Multi-Agent Collaboration via Next-Agent Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for multi-agent collaboration rely on static or graph-based topologies lacking flexibility and adaptability.
Approach: They propose a new framework that rethinks multi-agent coordination through a sequential structure rather than a graph structure.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves superior performance while significantly reducing communication overhead.
Enhancing Cross-lingual Natural Language Inference by Soft Prompting with Multilingual Verbalizer (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to cross-lingual natural language inference lack annotated parallel corpora.
Approach: They propose a new prompt learning framework with the Multilingual Verbalizer for XNLI that uses a multilingual verbalizer to align the representations of original and augmented multilingual questions into a unified semantic space with consistency regularization.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods under few-shot and full-shot cross-lingual transfer settings.
Bridging the Gap between Prior and Posterior Knowledge Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue models lack prior and posterior knowledge selection . prior selection module may not learn to select knowledge properly because of lack of posterior information .
Approach: They propose a knowledge distillation-based training strategy to remove the exposure bias of knowledge selection.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets.
A.S.E: A Repository-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Security in AI-Generated Code (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing security evaluation benchmarks lack relevance to real-world AI programming tasks . current LLMs struggle with secure coding, research shows .
Approach: They propose a repository-level evaluation benchmark to assess security of AI-generated code.
Outcome: The proposed framework mirrors real-world AI programming tasks and offers valuable insights into the state of AI code generation.
EdgeInfinite: A Memory-Efficient Infinite-Context Transformer for Edge Devices (2025.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing KV cache optimizations struggle with irreversible token eviction in long-output tasks . alternative sequence modeling architectures prove costly to adopt within established Transformer infrastructures.
Approach: They propose a memory-efficient solution for infinite contexts that integrates compressed memory into Transformer-based LLMs through a trainable memory-gating module.
Outcome: The proposed solution achieves comparable performance to baseline Transformer-based LLMs while optimizing memory consumption and time to first token.
Exploring the Compositional Generalization in Context Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models struggle on the text-to-SQL benchmarks, but we propose a method to improve their generalization ability.
Approach: They propose a method to improve the combinatorial generalization of Text-to-SQL models by aligning previous SQL statements with the input utterance.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the generalization ability of Text-to-SQL models.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations