Papers by Tao Shu
Crossing Variational Autoencoders for Answer Retrieval (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods learned semantic representations with dual encoders or dual variational auto-encoders failed to capture the aligned semantics between question and answer. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two variational auto-encoders to generate questions with aligned answers and generating answers with align questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art answer retrieval method on SQuAD. |
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become prevalent for aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization algorithm that introduces a modulating factor that down-weighs misranked preference pairs and employs focusing strategy that adapts over the course of training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that DynamicFocalPO surpasses both DPO and FocalPO on benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using Mistral-Base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B. |
The Retrieval Bottleneck: Scaling Laws for Reinforcement Learning in RAG (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become the dominant paradigm for building knowledge-intensive language systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sigmoidal scaling law that shows that retrieval quality determines the asymptotic performance ceiling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks while retaining the predictable scaling long available for pre-training but previously absent in RAG-RL. |
SINCon: Mitigate LLM-Generated Malicious Message Injection Attack for Rumor Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods define important nodes as important and target them for attacks if the model treats nodes’ predictive influence more uniformly . Existing approaches target high predictive influence nodes but are vulnerable to malicious message injection attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a defense mechanism that encourages the model to learn graph representations where nodes with varying importance have a more uniform influence on predictions. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the Twitter and Weibo datasets show that similarizing the predictive Influence of nodes with Contrastive Learning significantly enhances resistance against LLM-driven message injection attacks. |
EOP-LLM: Energy Oriented Pruning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Inference energy consumption has grown rapidly in large language models (LLMs) but existing methods focus on reducing FLOPs or latency rather than modeling or enforcing end-to-end inference energy constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an energy-oriented dynamic pruning framework that enables LLM inference under explicit per-sequence energy budgets. |
| Outcome: | EOP-LLM outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic pruning baselines while adhering to per-sequence energy constraints. |
Logic-Consistency Text Generation from Semantic Parses (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text generation from semantic parses is challenging due to the complexity of the inner logic and the lack of automatic evaluation metrics for logic consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for logic consistent text generation from semantic parses that employs iterative training procedures and quality control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances logic consistency and human evaluation on two benchmark datasets. |
PDALN: Progressive Domain Adaptation over a Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Cross-Domain Named Entity Recognition (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) are limited in labeled resources and domain shift. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive domain adaptation knowledge distillation approach to adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains by employing three components to achieve superior domain adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can adapt high-resource domains to low-resourced target domains even if they are diverse in terms and writing styles. |
MERIT: Multi-Agent Collaboration for Unsupervised Time Series Representation Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to time series representation learning are time-consuming and expert-dependent, which are difficult to generalize across different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language model agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and a framework to integrate three LLM agents to collaboratively generate positive views for time series data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates large language model (LLM) agent to guide unsupervised time series representation learning and compares it with state-of-the-art baselines on multiple time series datasets. |
Do Vision-Language Models Have Internal World Models? Towards an Atomic Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiyue Gao, Xinyu Pi, Kevin Liu, Junrong Chen, Ruolan Yang, Xinqi Huang, Xinyu Fang, Lu Sun, Gautham Kishore, Bo Ai, Stone Tao, Mengyang Liu, Jiaxi Yang, Chao-Jung Lai, Chuanyang Jin, Jiannan Xiang, Benhao Huang, Zeming Chen, David Danks, Hao Su, Tianmin Shu, Ziqiao Ma, Lianhui Qin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Recent studies have evaluated and shown limitations in specific capabilities such as visual understanding, but a systematic evaluation of VLMs’ fundamental WM abilities remains absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses perception and prediction to provide an atomic evaluation of VLMs as WMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses perception and prediction abilities on 15 latest VLMs and compares them to human-level models. |
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking leads to better results . a recent study suggests that test-time compute scaling is more effective than model scaling . |
| Approach: | They challenge the assumption that longer thinking yields better results . they show that models exhibit overthinking and marginal returns diminish at higher budgets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces computation significantly while maintaining comparable accuracy. |