Papers by Sun Ao
Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method for training LLMs on long sequences with high throughput and memory efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint compared to baseline methods . it trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs . |
ConRPG: Paraphrase Generation using Contexts as Regularizer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for paraphrase generation lack reliable supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised paradigm for paraphrase generation based on contextual language models, candidate filtering and paraphrase model training based upon the selected candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing paraphrase generation methods in supervised and unsupervised setups. |
APB: Accelerating Distributed Long-Context Inference by Passing Compressed Context Blocks across GPUs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Sun Ao, Hao Zhou, Jie Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Long-context inference is crucial for advancing large language models, but its prefill speed remains a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient long-context inference framework that leverages multi-host approximate attention to enhance prefill speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves speedups of 9.2, 4.2, and 1.6 without any degradation in performance. |
Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
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Yuan Yao, Bowen Dong, Ao Zhang, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Leyu Lin, Maosong Sun, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning framework that reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on text classification and question answering tasks and prevents unstable tuning problems in low-resource settings. |
PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances on self-supervised learning have led to powerful vision-language pre-training models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework that reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks and also improves on position insensitive tasks. |
CuMA: Aligning LLMs with Sparse Cultural Values via Demographic-Aware Mixture of Adapters (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have a global audience, so alignment must extend to cultural resonance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that frames alignment as a conditional capacity separation problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms both dense baselines and semantic-only MoEs on three large language models. |
APB-V: Accelerating Long-Video Understanding via Sequence-Parallelism-aware Approximate Attention (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxiang Huang, Mingye Li, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Weilin Zhao, Ao Sun, Ziqi Yuan, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-video inference use compression or sparse attention . existing methods restrict LMMs from handling longer, more complex videos . |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-parallel framework with optimized attention that accelerates long-video inference across multiple GPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delivers speedups of 12.72x, 1.70x, and 1.18x over FlashAttn, ZigZagRing, and APB without significant performance loss. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
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Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Scaling Laws or Threshold Effects: Exploring the Optimal Vocabulary Size for Balancing Performance and Efficiency in Low-Resource Languages (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | vocab expansion scaling laws are well-established for high-resource languages, but they remain unverified in low-resourced settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale trilingual vocabulary for languages with 140 to 195,000 tokens . they find that BBPE follows a "decline-then-rise" pattern, whereas BPE improves monotonically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed configuration reduces pre-training duration by over 71% across 1.5B to 8B models while improving downstream performance. |
XToM: Exploring the Multilingual Theory of Mind for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Chunkit Chan, Yauwai Yim, Hongchuan Zeng, Zhiying Zou, Xinyuan Cheng, Zhifan Sun, Zheye Deng, Kawai Chung, Yuzhuo Ao, Fan Yixiang, Cheng Jiayang, Ercong Nie, Ginny Wong, Helmut Schmid, Hinrich Schuetze, Simon See, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of ToM in LLMs are limited to English, neglecting the linguistic diversity that shapes human cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that evaluates ToM across five languages . they find that models excel in multilingual language understanding, but their ToM performance varies across languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs across five languages and incorporates diverse task scenarios. |
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. |
ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | ChineseBERT model incorporates glyph and pinyin information of Chinese characters into pretraining . proposed model achieves new performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a ChineseBERT model that incorporates glyph and pinyin information into pretraining . the glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a character, and the pinyink embeddment characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves new performance boosts over baseline models with fewer training steps. |
Making Flexible Use of Subtasks: A Multiplex Interaction Network for Unified Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies aim to integrate multiple sub-tasks into a unified ABSA model but suffer from major disadvantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning approach to make use of sub-tasks for a unified ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can work well when some sub-tasks are absent, and the interactive relations among subtasks not adequate. |
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task . |
| Approach: | They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs. |
Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In spite of impressive results of neural networks, the huge model size has hindered their applications in cases where computation and memory resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for layer-wise pruning using mutual information based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy offers greater speedup and higher performance than weight-based pruning methods. |
Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure sentence similarity face limited dataset size and training-test gap . existing methods lack large-scale labeled datasets with labeles that are labor-intensive and expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures sentence similarity by comparing probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over baselines under supervised and unsupervised settings. |