Papers by Tao Han
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhicheng Wang, Yufang Liu, Tao Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Congcong Jiang, Ye Chao, Zhencong Han, Ling Wang, Xu Shao, Wenqiu Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning continual tasks do not cache history data, which makes the problem more challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates a small portion of private parameters and learns them with a shared pre-trained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is comparable to existing methods and comparable to those using historical data. |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
DeepSynth-Eval: Objectively Evaluating Information Consolidation in Deep Survey Writing (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongzhi Zhang, Yuanze Hu, Tinghai Zhang, Jia Fu, Tao Wang, Junwei Jing, Zhaoxin Fan, Wei Bi, Ruiming Tang, Han Li, Guorui Zhou, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving towards autonomous agents . retrieval capabilities are well-benchmarked, but post-retrieval synthesis is under-evaluated due to open-ended writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate information consolidation capabilities using survey papers as gold standards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark analyzes the post-retrieval synthesis stage of large language models . it leverages high-quality survey papers as gold standards and reverse-engineers research requests . the proposed benchmark outperforms single-turn generation and reduces hallucinations . |
BPP-Search: Enhancing Tree of Thought Reasoning for Mathematical Modeling Problem Solving (2025.acl-long)
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Teng Wang, Wing Yin Yu, Zhenqi He, Zehua Liu, HaileiGong HaileiGong, Han Wu, Xiongwei Han, Wei Shi, Ruifeng She, Fangzhou Zhu, Tao Zhong
| Challenge: | Existing datasets in operations research domain lack detailed annotations of the modeling process, focusing only on objective values. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation-based tree-of-thought tree-based reasoning algorithm that integrates reinforcement learning into a tree- of-though. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on StructuredOR, NL4OPT, and MAMO-ComplexLP datasets. |
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks. |
“I’ve Decided to Leak”: Probing Internals Behind Prompt Leakage Intents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jianshuo Dong, Yutong Zhang, Liu Yan, Zhenyu Zhong, Tao Wei, Ke Xu, Minlie Huang, Chao Zhang, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit prompt leakage vulnerabilities, raising intellectual property and confidentiality concerns. |
| Approach: | They use probing techniques to capture LLMs’ intent-related internal representations and show that they internalize prompt leakage intents in their hidden states before generating tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probes achieve 90%+ AUROC across all tested models, even when applied to new system prompts and attacks. |
LASA: Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment at the Semantic Bottleneck for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Junxiao Yang, Haoran Liu, Jinzhe Tu, Jiale Cheng, Zhexin Zhang, Shiyao Cui, Jiaqi Weng, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Hongning Wang, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated better safety performance in high-resource languages than in low-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose language-agnostic semantic alignment (LASA) which anchors safety alignment directly in semantic bottlenecks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves safety across all languages: average attack success rate drops from 24.7% to 2.8% on LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and remains within 3–4% across Qwen2.5 and Qwend3 Instruct models (7B–32B). |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
Arxiv Copilot: A Self-Evolving and Efficient LLM System for Personalized Academic Assistance (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for document QA fail to provide personalized and up-to-date information efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose to deploy a self-evolving, efficient LLM system that can offer personalized research services, maintaining a real-time updated database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system saves 69.92% of time after efficient deployment. |
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoliang Liu, Chengkun Cai, Xu Zhao, Han Zhu, Shizhou Huang, Xinglin Zhang, Tao Chen, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Zhang Huaping, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1. |
LoRE-Merging: Exploring Low-Rank Estimation For Large Language Model Merging (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a framework for model merging is proposed without additional training . task vectors from fine-tuned models exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without access to the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models without additional training without additional inputs. |
InfiMM: Advancing Multimodal Understanding with an Open-Sourced Visual Language Model (2024.findings-acl)
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Haogeng Liu, Quanzeng You, Yiqi Wang, Xiaotian Han, Bohan Zhai, Yongfei Liu, Wentao Chen, Yiren Jian, Yunzhe Tao, Jianbo Yuan, Ran He, Hongxia Yang
| Challenge: | InfiMM is a multimodal large language model that adapts to complex vision-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They present a Multimodal Large Language Model that adapts to intricate vision-language tasks using large-scale training data and comprehensive training strategies. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations across a variety of benchmarks underscore InfiMM’s remarkable capability in multimodal understanding. |
RACE: Retrieval-augmented Commit Message Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to automatically generate commit messages are repetitive or redundant. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented neural commit message generation method which treats the retrieved similar commit as an exemplar and leverages it to generate an accurate commit message. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on a large dataset with five programming languages and can boost existing Seq2Seq models in commit message generation. |
Finding the Evidence: Localization-aware Answer Prediction for Text Visual Question Answering (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text VQA systems generate an answer by selecting from optical character recognition (OCR) texts or a fixed vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose a localization-aware answer prediction network that generates the answer and predicts a bounding box as evidence of the generated answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network outperforms existing methods on three benchmark datasets for the text VQA task by a noticeable margin. |
Robust and Scalable Model Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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Yingfa Chen, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Chen Chen, Kuai Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods that ignore contextual knowledge fail to reliably fall back to parametric knowledge when presented with irrelevant context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use contextual knowledge to update and correct LLMs' knowledge by in-context editing instead of retraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on a dataset that contains irrelevant questions. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
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Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Zhe Zhao, Qi Ju, Xuefeng Yang, Rong Tian, Zhu Tao, Haoyan Liu, Han Guo, Xingyu Bai, Weiquan Mao, Yudong Li, Weigang Guo, Taiqiang Wu, Ningyuan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%. |
Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Weng, Han Zheng, Hanyu Zhang, Ej Zhou, Qinqin He, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Zhixuan Chu, Xiting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on how SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interpreting SAE features in safety-critical domains . they train a suite of SAEs with human-readable explanations and systematic evaluations based on pornography, politics, violence, and terror . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interpretation cost by 55% and improves safety-critical features. |
PromptIntern: Saving Inference Costs by Internalizing Recurrent Prompt during Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in fine-tuning large language models have greatly enhanced their usage in domain-specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which internalizes prompt knowledge during model fine-tuning to achieve efficient inference and save costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces input tokens by 90%, accelerates inference by 4.2 times, and reduces monetary inference costs by 88.3%. |
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiahang Lin, Kai Hu, Binghai Wang, Yuhao Zhou, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Shichun Liu, Junzhe Wang, Shihan Dou, Enyu Zhou, Hang Yan, Zhenhua Han, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO. |
Revisiting the Reliability of Language Models in Instruction-Following (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Several benchmarks have been proposed to measure instruction-following accuracy, but these scores do not translate to reliable services in real-world use. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric reliable@k and develop an automated pipeline to generate cousin prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be instantiated with cousin prompts and generates high-quality cousin prompt data. |
RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR). |
LAD-RAG: Layout-aware Dynamic RAG for Visually-Rich Document Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Zhivar Sourati, Zheng Wang, Marianne Menglin Liu, Yazhe Hu, Mengqing Guo, Sujeeth Bharadwaj, Kyu J. Han, Tao Sheng, Sujith Ravi, Morteza Dehghani, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Conventional retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encode content in isolated chunks during ingestion, losing structural and cross-page dependencies, and retrieve a fixed number of pages at inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a Layout-Aware Dynamic RAG framework that encodes content in isolated chunks during ingestion and retrieves a fixed number of pages at inference. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MMLongBench-Doc, LongDocURL, DUDE, and MP-DoxVQA show that LAD-RAG improves retrieval, achieving over 90% perfect recall on average without any top-k tuning, and outperforming baseline retrievers by up to 20% in recall at comparable noise levels. |
ELBA-Bench: An Efficient Learning Backdoor Attacks Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor models are limited in coverage of attack, system integrity and backdoor alignment . ELBA-Bench provides over 1300 experiments encompassing 12 attack methods, 18 datasets, and 12 LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows attackers to inject backdoor through parameter efficient fine-tuning or without fine-uning techniques. |
| Outcome: | ELBA-Bench provides over 1300 experiments encompassing 12 attack methods, 18 datasets, and 12 LLMs. |
A Structure-Aware Generative Adversarial Network for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) is the task of inducing word translations with a learned mapping function that aligns monolingual word embedding spaces in two different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that explicitly captures multiple topological structure information to achieve accurate bilingual lexicon induction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures multiple topological structure information to achieve accurate BLI on a public dataset. |
Mitigating Coordinate Prediction Bias from Positional Encoding Failures (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at general vision-language tasks, but precise coordinate prediction remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, inference-time correction method to correct VPEs . they isolate position-unconditioned tendencies by shuffling VPE and use it to steer digit decoding . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is training-free, inference-time correction method . it effectively rectifies coordinate drift, yielding consistent improvements without retraining . |
FormLM: Recommending Creation Ideas for Online Forms by Modelling Semantic and Structural Information (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | FormLM is a pre-trained language model for creating semi-structured forms where questions and descriptions are organized by predefined structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance pre-trained language model with form structural information to model online forms and recommend form creation ideas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose language models on all tasks, with an improvement by 4.71 on Question Recommendation and 10.6 on Block Type Suggestion in terms of ROUGE-1 and Macro-F1, respectively. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |