Papers by Siqi Sun
Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems have difficulties adapting to unseen domains . end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven task-oriented dialogue system that extracts dialogue context information into a natural language query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. |
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
LightningDOT: Pre-training Visual-Semantic Embeddings for Real-Time Image-Text Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models suffer from slow inference speed due to cross-modal attention in transformer architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal approach that accelerates the inference time of ITR by thousands of times . they extract pre-cached feature indexes offline and employ instant dot-product matching online . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models that consume 1000 times magnitude of computational hours using the same features. |
Cluster-Former: Clustering-based Sparse Transformer for Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for encoding long sequences in deep learning suffer from high latency and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a clustering-based sparse Transformer framework to perform attention across chunked sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several major QA benchmarks. |
If an LLM Were a Character, Would It Know Its Own Story? Evaluating Lifelong Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Siqi Fan, Xiusheng Huang, Yiqun Yao, Xuezhi Fang, Kang Liu, Peng Han, Shuo Shang, Aixin Sun, Yequan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) fail to capture these dynamics, focusing on static, open-ended evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess lifelong learning in large language models . they use two episodic datasets rich in narrative structure and character interactions . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLMs show that non-parametric methods outperform parametric ones in managing stateful learning. |
CROWD: Certified Robustness via Weight Distribution for Smoothed Classifiers against Backdoor Attack (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the certification of robustness of NLP models against backdoor attacks have focused on empirical defences against adversarial attacks without formal guarantees. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic mechanism for large-scale models that applies to complex model structures without the need for assessing model architecture or internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic mechanism is tested on a diverse range of datasets and tasks, showing it can be used to mitigat backdoor triggers. |
Contrastive Distillation on Intermediate Representations for Language Model Compression (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress language models use a simple L_2 loss to distill knowledge in the intermediate representations of a large BERT model to a smaller one. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses knowledge distillation to distill knowledge through intermediate layers of the teacher via a contrastive objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the GLUE benchmark. |
TextVerifier: Robustness Verification for Textual Classifiers with Certifiable Guarantees (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a textual classifier must withstand word-level alteration attacks due to inherent vulnerability. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal verification framework with certifiable guarantees on deep neural networks in natural language processing against word-level alteration attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides an approximation of the maximal safe radius with tight bounds . it yields an efficient speed edge and reliable anytime estimation . |
DIALOGPT : Large-Scale Generative Pre-training for Conversational Response Generation (2020.acl-demos)
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Yizhe Zhang, Siqi Sun, Michel Galley, Yen-Chun Chen, Chris Brockett, Xiang Gao, Jianfeng Gao, Jingjing Liu, Bill Dolan
| Challenge: | DIALOGPT is a large, tunable neural conversational response generation model . trained on 147M conversation-like exchanges extracted from Reddit comment chains . |
| Approach: | They present a large, tunable neural conversational response generation model, DIALOGPT . the model is trained on 147M conversation-like exchanges extracted from Reddit comment chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more relevant, contentful and context-consistent responses than baseline systems. |
Cross-Thought for Sentence Encoder Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models to pretrain sentence encoders with large unlabeled corpus are lacking in linguistic information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to pre-training sequence encoder using transformers . they propose to train a Transformer-based sequence encoded over a large set of short sequences based on a set of masked words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art encoders on hotpotQA by improving intermediate information retrieval performance. |
Leveraging Knowledge in Multilingual Commonsense Reasoning (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Commonsense reasoning is a language-agnostic process, but most comprehensive knowledge sources are limited to a small number of languages, especially English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English as a pivot language to integrate commonsense reasoning into models using a translate-retrieve-translate strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art on the XCSR benchmarks. |
Hierarchical Graph Network for Multi-hop Question Answering (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-hop question answering models focus on multi-level reasoning across multiple documents or paragraphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph network that aggregates clues from scattered texts . they use a set of contextual encoders to initialize nodes on different levels of granularity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing multi-hop QA approaches on the HotpotQA benchmark. |
Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models such as BERT have proven to be highly effective for natural language processing tasks, but the high demand for computing resources hinders their application in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress an original large model (teacher) into an equally-effective lightweight shallow network (student) Empirically, this translates into improved results on multiple NLP tasks with a significant gain in training efficiency, without sacrificing model accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the computational cost of training models using the teacher model into a lightweight shallow network. |
Training Data is More Valuable than You Think: A Simple and Effective Method by Retrieving from Training Data (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that REtrieving from the traINing datA only can lead to significant gains on multiple NLG and NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve training instances from traINing datA and concatenate them with input to generate output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on XSum, BigPatent, and CommonsenseQA. |