Papers by Sungchul Kim
Advancing Vision-Language Models with Adapter Ensemble Strategies (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | CLIP revolutes vision-language pretraining by using contrastive learning on paired web data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a "adapter ensemble" with traditional machine learning techniques to augment large-scale pretrained vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and derives improvement when the number of ensemble parameters increases. |
LaMP-Cap: Personalized Figure Caption Generation With Multimodal Figure Profiles (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Ho Yin Sam Ng, Edward Hsu, Aashish Anantha Ramakrishnan, Branislav Kveton, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Dongwon Lee, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang
| Challenge: | Figure captions are crucial for helping readers understand and remember a figure’s key message. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles that provide inputs and profiles for each figure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset provides inputs and profiles for personalized figure caption generation with multimodal figure profiles. |
Hallucination Diversity-Aware Active Learning for Text Summarization (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for alleviating hallucinations require costly human annotations . Existing approaches focus on a specific type of hallucinism, which limits their effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect hallucinations from errors in semantic frame, discourse and content verifiability in LLM summarization using HAllucination Diversity-Aware Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the need for costly human annotations to correct hallucinations in LLM outputs. |
Doc-React: Multi-page Heterogeneous Document Question-answering (2025.acl-short)
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Junda Wu, Yu Xia, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Sai Sree Harsha, Akash V Maharaj, Ruiyi Zhang, Victor Bursztyn, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley, Yunyao Li, Ritwik Sinha
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating information across multiple modalities are suboptimal for multi-page, multimodal documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive iterative framework that balances information gain and uncertainty reduction at each step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures relevant multimodal content and achieves strong performance on complex QA tasks. |
Self-Debiasing Large Language Models: Zero-Shot Recognition and Reduction of Stereotypes (2025.naacl-short)
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Isabel O. Gallegos, Ryan Aponte, Ryan A. Rossi, Joe Barrow, Mehrab Tanjim, Tong Yu, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Deonna Owens, Jiuxiang Gu
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit harmful social biases, but they are often difficult to train and modify. |
| Approach: | They leverage the zero-shot capabilities of large language models to reduce stereotyping . they introduce a technique called zero- shot self-debiasing to reduce bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique reduces stereotyping across nine different social groups while relying on the LLM itself and a simple prompt. |
Edge: Enriching Knowledge Graph Embeddings with External Text (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs suffer from sparsity which degrades the quality of representations generated by various methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge graph enrichment framework called Edge to enhance knowledge graphs based on "hard" co-occurrence of words in knowledge graph entities and external text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves "soft" augmentation by combining external text with knowledge graph entities. |
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning and continual learning methods compress visual representations and emphasize task alignment over visual retention. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-decoupled gradient descent (MDGD) that regulates gradient updates to preserve effective rank of visual features and explicitly disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces visual forgetting and improves visual retention . it disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment and preserves effective rank . |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Augment before You Try: Knowledge-Enhanced Table Question Answering via Table Expansion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujian Liu, Jiabao Ji, Tong Yu, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Handong Zhao, Ritwik Sinha, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate external information into a given table neglect the structured nature of the table. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective method to integrate external information into a given table by first building an augmenting table and then generating a SQL query over the two tables to answer the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines on three table QA benchmarks. |
GPT-4 as an Effective Zero-Shot Evaluator for Scientific Figure Captions (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms that generate captions for scientific figures are costly and dependent on author-written captions. |
| Approach: | They constructed a human evaluation dataset that contains human judgments for 3,600 scientific figure captions for 600 arXiv figures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all other models and outperformed undergraduates in achieving a Kendall correlation score of 0.401 with Ph.D. students’ rankings. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
Is Safety Standard Same for Everyone? User-Specific Safety Evaluation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yeonjun In, Wonjoong Kim, Kanghoon Yoon, Sungchul Kim, Mehrab Tanjim, Sangwu Park, Kibum Kim, Chanyoung Park
| Challenge: | Extensive benchmarks evaluate LLM safety relying heavily on general standards . no benchmark datasets exist to evaluate the user-specific safety of LLMs . |
| Approach: | a new benchmark is designed to assess user-specific aspect of LLM safety . authors propose a simple remedy based on chain-of-thought to improve user-specified safety. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the user-specific aspect of LLM safety . the proposed solution improves user-specified safety by chain-of-thought . |
Personalized Federated Learning for Text Classification with Gradient-Free Prompt Tuning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rui Wang, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Sungchul Kim, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Junda Wu, Subrata Mitra, Lina Yao, Ricardo Henao
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (PLMs) are used for personalized federated learning . communication costs are high with large PLMs, and local training is expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for federated learning with pretrained language models . they propose 'discrete local search' and compression mechanism for local training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance compared with baselines. |
Bag of Tricks for In-Distribution Calibration of Pretrained Transformers (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models (PLMs) often predict over-confidently. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ensemble learning and data augmentation to improve confidence calibration for PLMs by combining calibration techniques with a trade-off between accuracy and classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration method improves classification accuracy and confidence in pre-trained language models by combining several calibration techniques. |
Learning Contextualized Knowledge Structures for Commonsense Reasoning (2021.findings-acl)
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Jun Yan, Mrigank Raman, Aaron Chan, Tianyu Zhang, Ryan Rossi, Handong Zhao, Sungchul Kim, Nedim Lipka, Xiang Ren
| Challenge: | Recent knowledge graph (KG) augmented models have achieved notable success on commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a KG-augmented model that contextualizes extracted and generated knowledge by reasoning over both within a single graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on four commonsense reasoning benchmarks and a user study on edge validness and helpfulness. |
Disambiguation in Conversational Question Answering in the Era of LLMs and Agents: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mehrab Tanjim, Yeonjun In, Xiang Chen, Victor Bursztyn, Ryan A. Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Guang-Jie Ren, Vaishnavi Muppala, Shun Jiang, Yongsung Kim, Chanyoung Park
| Challenge: | Existing literature on ambiguity and disambiguation with Large Language Models (LLMs) ambiguities are a fundamental challenge in human-AI interactions due to complexity and flexibility of human language. |
| Approach: | They propose to define key terms and concepts and categorize various disambiguation approaches enabled by LLMs and provide a comparative analysis of their advantages and disadvantages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are compared against different disambiguation approaches and highlight their relevance for future research. |
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of Named Entity Recognition (NER) are trained on large datasets with predefined entity classes, but data of new classes arrives constantly. Existing work on NER relies on the assumption that there exists abundance of labeled data for the training of new class. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot class-incremental learning problem where NER model is trained with only few labeled samples of the new classes without forgetting knowledge of the old ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over existing baselines by reconstructing training data of old classes and real data from the training set. |
Do Large Multimodal Models Solve Caption Generation for Scientific Figures? Lessons Learned from SciCap Challenge 2023 (2026.tacl-1)
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Ting-Yao Hsu, Yi-Li Hsu, Shaurya Rohatgi, Chieh-Yang Huang, Ho Yin Sam Ng, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Tong Yu, Lun-Wei Ku, Clyde Lee Giles, Ting-Hao Huang
| Challenge: | SciCap dataset launched in 2021 aims to generate high-quality captions for scientific figures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the SciCap dataset to develop models for captioning diverse figure types across various academic fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models showed impressive performance on the SciCap dataset and in various vision-and-language tasks. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
Pseudo Outlier Exposure for Out-of-Distribution Detection using Pretrained Transformers (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect out-of-distribution (OOD) samples are overconfident for real-world language applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a surrogate OOD dataset by sequentially masking tokens related to ID classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can train a rejection network with ID and diverse outlier samples but requires additional data collection overhead. |
SAND: Boosting LLM Agents with Self-Taught Action Deliberation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents finetuned with supervised finetuning may over-commit towards seemingly plausible but suboptimal actions due to limited action space exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-taught actioN deliberation framework that allows LLM agents to explicitly deliberate over candidate actions before committing to one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two representative interactive agent tasks and achieves an average 20% improvement over initial finetuning. |
DeCoT: Debiasing Chain-of-Thought for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in Large Language Models via Causal Intervention (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In large language models, external knowledge is required to augment their internal knowledge through prompts, but this does not guarantee that LLMs can identify and use relevant information in the prompts to conduct chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a structural causal model to formally explain the internal knowledge bias of large language models (LLMs) they review the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting from a causal perspective and find that biased information from pretrained models can impair LLMs’ reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables more accurate CoT reasoning and enhances LLM generation on knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Federated Domain Adaptation for Named Entity Recognition via Distilling with Heterogeneous Tag Sets (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a federated domain adaptation approach is used to learn with NER datasets from multiple platforms while not violating data privacy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a distillation approach to facilitate knowledge transfer across platforms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in the clinic domain. |
Knowledge-Aware Query Expansion with Large Language Models for Textual and Relational Retrieval (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate query expansions focus on enhancing textual similarities between search queries and document corpus, overlooking document relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware query expansion framework augmenting LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG) they leverage document texts as rich KG node representations and use document-based relation filtering for their method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework augments LLMs with structured document relations from knowledge graph (KG) Extensive experiments on three datasets of diverse domains show the advantages compared against state-of-the-art methods on textual and relational semi-structured retrieval. |
Diversify-verify-adapt: Efficient and Robust Retrieval-Augmented Ambiguous Question Answering (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address ambiguous questions are limited in their efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval augmented generation framework that diversifies and verifies the retrieved passages to encompass diverse interpretations and adapts the most suitable approach tailored to their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy and robustness by handling low quality retrieval issue in ambiguous questions while enhancing efficiency. |