Papers by Tao Lei
Dolphin: Moving Towards Closed-loop Auto-research through Thinking, Practice, and Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiakang Yuan, Xiangchao Yan, Bo Zhang, Tao Chen, Botian Shi, Wanli Ouyang, Yu Qiao, Lei Bai, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that AI-assisted research methods can improve research efficiency . a closed-loop framework is used to enhance the automation level of scientific research . |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop LLM-driven framework to enhance the automation level of scientific research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the efficiency of scientific research by improving data analysis, accelerating computation, and fostering novel idea generation. |
Corpus-Steered Query Expansion with Large Language Models (2024.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show query expansions generate hypothetical documents that answer queries as expansions. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus-steered query expansion to promote incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. |
| Outcome: | et al. analyzed corpus-based Query Expansion (CSQE) using LLMs to generate hypothetical documents that answer the query. |
Adversarial Domain Adaptation for Duplicate Question Detection (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen the rise of community question answering forums . duplicate questions easily become ubiquitous as users often ask the same question, possibly in a slightly different formulation, making it difficult to find the best (or one correct) answer. |
| Approach: | They propose to use domain adaptation to detect duplicate questions in forums . they find that domain adaptation improves performance over multiple pairs of domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves 5.6% over the best baseline across multiple pairs of domains. |
Nutri-bullets Hybrid: Consensual Multi-document Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating comparative summaries that highlight similarities and contradictions in input documents are lacking large parallel training data for their training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating comparative summaries that highlight similarities and contradictions in input documents by using a neural interpretation of traditional concept-to-text generation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with conventional methods in the domain of nutrition and health, where the existing models lack large parallel training data. |
Simple Recurrent Units for Highly Parallelizable Recurrence (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | recurrent neural networks scale poorly due to the intrinsic difficulty in parallelizing their state computations. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple recurrent unit that provides expressive recurrence and allows highly parallel implementation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5—9x speed-up over cuDNN-optimized LSTM on classification and question answering datasets and delivers stronger results than LS and convolutional models. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Decomposition for Enhancing Attention: Improving LLM-based Text-to-SQL through Workflow Paradigm (2024.findings-acl)
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Yuanzhen Xie, Xinzhou Jin, Tao Xie, Matrixmxlin Matrixmxlin, Liang Chen, Chenyun Yu, Cheng Lei, Chengxiang Zhuo, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | In-context learning of large-language models has achieved remarkable success in the field of natural language processing . however, the single-step chain-of-thought prompting approach faces challenges such as attention diffusion and inadequate performance in complex tasks like text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow paradigm method to enhance the attention and problem-solving scope of large-language models through decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three datasets and improves the upper limit of LLM-based approaches. |
ThinkQE: Query Expansion via an Evolving Thinking Process (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | LLM-based methods often generate narrowly focused expansions that overlook these desiderata. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time query expansion framework that promotes exploration and result diversity . ThinkQE encourages deeper and comprehensive semantic exploration and a corpus-interaction strategy that iteratively refines expansions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior approaches on diverse web search benchmarks. |
KLMo: Knowledge Graph Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Fine-Grained Relationships (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pretrained language models focus on entity information and ignore fine-grained relationships between entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate KG into the language learning process to obtain a KG-enhanced pretrained Language Model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on several knowledge-driven tasks, such as entity typing and relation classification, compared with the state-of-the-art knowledge-enhanced PLMs. |
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. |
DeepKE: A Deep Learning Based Knowledge Extraction Toolkit for Knowledge Base Population (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Ningyu Zhang, Xin Xu, Liankuan Tao, Haiyang Yu, Hongbin Ye, Shuofei Qiao, Xin Xie, Xiang Chen, Zhoubo Li, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge extraction tools are not complete due to emerging entities and relations in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source knowledge extraction toolkit DeepKE that supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports low-resource, document-level and multimodal scenarios in the knowledge base population. |
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Zehan Wang, Ke Lei, Chen Zhu, Jiawei Huang, Sashuai Zhou, Luping Liu, Xize Cheng, Shengpeng Ji, Zhenhui Ye, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio. |
| Approach: | They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning. |
Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)
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Jia Li, Xuyuan Guo, Lei Li, Kechi Zhang, Ge Li, Jia Li, Zhengwei Tao, Fang Liu, Chongyang Tao, Yuqi Zhu, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Currently, long-context language models are limited by the lack of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU to evaluate LCLMs' long code comprehension ability for practical applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that current LCLMs are limited in their long code understanding ability, particularly when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows. |
Autocorrect in the Process of Translation — Multi-task Learning Improves Dialogue Machine Translation (2021.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation models are not able to translate dialogues in real life scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning method to identify omission and typos and utilize context to translate dialogue utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality by 3.2 BLEU over baselines and recovers omitted pronouns by 47.16%. |
Interactive Classification by Asking Informative Questions (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification rely on a single user input and do not interact with the user to reduce ambiguity and improve the final prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a limited form of interaction to natural language intent classification . they add binary or multi-choice questions to the system to ask missing information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be bootstrapped without interaction data and is scalable to two domains. |
Autoregressive Knowledge Distillation through Imitation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive models are ubiquitous in natural language processing due to the sequential nature of text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression technique for autoregressive models driven by an imitation learning perspective on knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other distillation algorithms on translation and summarization tasks while increasing inference speed 14 times. |
Enhancing Lexicon-Based Text Embeddings with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on general-purpose text embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce the first lexicon-based embeddings that consolidates the vocabulary space through token embeddation clustering to handle the issue of token redundancy in LLM vocabularies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms dense embeddings on the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) it also supports efficient dimension pruning without any specialized objectives like Matryoshka Representation Learning. |
Secoco: Self-Correcting Encoding for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) is a challenging field due to the wide variety of noises in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly deals with noisy inputs for robust neural machine translation by introducing self-correcting predictors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can correct noisy inputs and delete specific errors with the translation decoding process. |
PAMN: Multi-phase Correlation Modeling for Contrast-Enhanced 3D Medical Image Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D medical imaging models focus on spatial features, neglecting phase-specific progression detailed in clinical reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fuses imaging phases with clinical text to enhance 3D medical image retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a phase-series dataset of 12,230 hospital CT scans. |
Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language modeling are based on task-related instructions or prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) using meta-task prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality sentences without fine-tuning . it excels on STS benchmarks and in downstream tasks, surpassing models with similar prompts . |
CoTrust: Privacy-Preserving Collaboration Between Large and Small Language Models in Trusted Execution Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) provide powerful text generation capabilities, but accessing sensitive user inputs raises privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving collaborative inference framework that combines large language models with small language models inside TEE to preserve privacy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoTrust outperforms unconstrained LLMs on multiple question answering and summarization benchmarks while maintaining strong privacy protection. |
UniKeyphrase: A Unified Extraction and Generation Framework for Keyphrase Prediction (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream methods that ignore the diversity among keyphrases or weakly capture the relation between tasks implicitly ignore keyphrase diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel end-to-end learning framework that jointly learns to extract and generate keyphrases by exploiting latent semantic relation between extraction and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms mainstream methods on a benchmarked document on keyphrase prediction. |
Training Language Models with Memory Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training memory-augmented language models only introduce mem-ories at testing time or represent them using a separately trained encoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a training approach that directly takes in-batch examples as accessible memory and new methods for memory construction and data batching that are used for adapting to different sets of memories at testing time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces perplexity from 18.70 to 15.37 on multiple language modeling and machine translation benchmarks. |
Structured Pruning of Large Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in language modeling have led to remarkable improvements on a variety of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a generic, structured pruning approach by parameterizing each weight matrix and adaptively removing rank-1 components during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms unstructured pruning and block pruning on language modeling tasks while achieving speedups during training and inference. |
Retrieval-Augmented Retrieval: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot Retriever (2024.findings-acl)
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Tao Shen, Guodong Long, Xiubo Geng, Chongyang Tao, Yibin Lei, Tianyi Zhou, Michael Blumenstein, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Large-scale retrieval is indispensable in information-seeking tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledgegrounded dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model (LLM) to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query’s in-domain candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method breaks brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifts the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. |
Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation (2024.acl-long)
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Songju Lei, Xize Cheng, Mengjiao Lyu, Jianqiao Hu, Jintao Tan, Runlin Liu, Lingyu Xiong, Tao Jin, Xiandong Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal speech synthesis is a key challenge due to the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets and freezes the video modality extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9% with single-modality audio. |
Unsupervised Dense Retrieval with Relevance-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Dense retrievers have impressive performance, but their demand for abundant training data limits their application scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses unlabeled data to construct pseudo-positive examples from unlabelled data and then contrastively weighs the contrastive loss of different pairs according to the estimated relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the SOTA unsupervised Contriever model on BEIR and open-domain QA retrieval benchmarks and is a good few-shot learner. |
When Attention Meets Fast Recurrence: Training Language Models with Reduced Compute (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are difficult to train because of the growing computation time and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a highly-efficient architecture that combines fast recurrence and attention for sequence modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a Wiki-103 and Billion Word datasets using 1.6 days of training on an 8-GPU machine. |
ODA: Observation-Driven Agent for integrating LLMs and Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate large language models and knowledge graphs with LLMs often ignore the rich cognitive potential inherent in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose an observation-driven agent framework that integrates KG reasoning abilities via global observation and integrates it into the action and reflection modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on several datasets and achieves 12.87% and 8.9% accuracy improvements. |
EventWiki: A Knowledge Base of Major Events (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge bases focus on static entities such as people, locations and organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge base resource called EventWiki which concentrates on major events . they show that EventWiki is a very useful resource for information extraction regarding events in NLP . |
| Outcome: | The proposed resource is the first knowledge base resource of major events. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
Fine-grained Coordinated Cross-lingual Text Stream Alignment for Endless Language Knowledge Acquisition (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | a novel information network decipherment paradigm is proposed for fine-grained coordinated cross-lingual text stream alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Burst Information Networks as media to represent text streams . they propose a simple yet effective information network decipherment algorithm with diverse clues . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on bilingual lexicon extraction from coordinated text streams and can harvest high-quality alignments from large amounts of streaming data for endless language knowledge mining. |
A Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System with Retrieval-based Selection and Exploration-Exploitation-Driven Enhancement (2026.acl-long)
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Shengji Tang, Jianjian Cao, Weihao Lin, Jiale Hong, Bo Zhang, Shuyue Hu, Lei Bai, Tao Chen, Wanli Ouyang, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Existing multi-LLM collaboration systems often encounter scalability challenges when integrating new LLMs and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Scalable Multi-LLM Collaboration System to coordinate multiple open-source LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms prevailing closed-source LLMs on eight mainstream benchmarks on multiple tasks. |
Evaluation Dataset for Lexical Translation Consistency in Chinese-to-English Document-level Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on document-level neural machine translation (NMT) assume that all repeated source words should be translated consistently. |
| Approach: | They construct a test set of 310 bilingual news articles to evaluate lexical translation consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test sets show that translation consistency is consistent across multiple languages. |
ImgTrojan: Jailbreaking Vision-Language Models with ONE Image (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the safety of large language models (LLMs) with human values have focused on the integration of multi-modal user input into these models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to bypass safety constraints of large language models by using poisoned images instead of original textual captions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack bypasses safety constraints of large language models (VLMs) by replacing the original textual captions with malicious jailbreak prompts. |
Metric Learning for Dynamic Text Classification (D19-61)
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| Challenge: | Traditional text classifiers are limited to predicting over a fixed set of labels, but real-world applications require dynamic classification. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace the traditional fixed-size output layer with a learned metric space . they propose to add or remove support points in the metric and fine-tune the resulting metric . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is robust to changes in the label space and improves performance in low data regime. |
Rationalizing Text Matching: Learning Sparse Alignments via Optimal Transport (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use only rationales to explain a prediction are limited by the complexity of deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They extend selective rationalization to text matching by using optimal transport to find a minimal cost alignment between inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves very sparse rationale selections with high fidelity while preserving prediction accuracy compared to strong attention baseline models. |
CoLT5: Faster Long-Range Transformers with Conditional Computation (2023.emnlp-main)
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Joshua Ainslie, Tao Lei, Michiel de Jong, Santiago Ontanon, Siddhartha Brahma, Yury Zemlyanskiy, David Uthus, Mandy Guo, James Lee-Thorp, Yi Tay, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Sumit Sanghai
| Challenge: | Many natural language processing tasks require long inputs, but processing long documents with a Transformer model is expensive due to quadratic attention complexity and applying feedforward and attention projection layers to every input token. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-input Transformer model that builds on the intuition that some tokens are more important than others and uses conditional computation to devote more computation to important tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves stronger performance than LongT5 with faster training and inference, achieving SOTA on the long-input SCROLLS benchmark. |
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)
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Yadong Xi, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lei Lin, Yanjiang Chen, Shuhan Yang, Xuhan Chen, Kailun Tao, Zhi Li, Gongzheng Li, Lin Jiang, Siyan Liu, Zeng Zhao, Minlie Huang, Changjie Fan, Zhipeng Hu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |