Papers by Tian Ding
ERNIE-Doc: A Retrospective Long-Document Modeling Transformer (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level language pretraining are not suitable for long documents due to their quadratically increasing memory and time consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level language pretraining model based on Recurrence Transformers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on language understanding tasks. |
A Static Evaluation of Code Completion by Large Language Models (2023.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Hantian Ding, Varun Kumar, Yuchen Tian, Zijian Wang, Rob Kwiatkowski, Xiaopeng Li, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Baishakhi Ray, Parminder Bhatia, Sudipta Sengupta
| Challenge: | Large language models trained on code have shown great potential to increase productivity of software developers. |
| Approach: | They propose a static evaluation framework to quantify static errors in Python code completions by leveraging Abstract Syntax Trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is more efficient and applicable to code in the wild. |
AgentInit: Initializing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems via Diversity and Expertise Orchestration for Effective and Efficient Collaboration (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing MAS initialization methods do not fully account for the collaborative needs of the generated agents in subsequent stages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Natural Language to Format mechanism to optimize the structure of agent teams and incorporate a natural language to format mechanism to ensure consistency and standardization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art initialization methods and pre-defined strategies across various frameworks and tasks while reducing token consumption. |
Context-aware Watermark with Semantic Balanced Green-red Lists for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research suggests that watermarking methods cause degradation of text quality due to semantic disparities between the watermarked text and the unwatermarked text. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware watermark method that generates a watermark key considering contexts to split a green/red list for watermark injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces performance drop due to adding bias on green lists . it also allows green lists to cover almost all semantics . |
AssistedDS: Benchmarking How External Domain Knowledge Assists LLMs in Automated Data Science (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
An Luo, Xun Xian, Jin Du, Fangqiao Tian, Ganghua Wang, Ming Zhong, Shengchun Zhao, Xuan Bi, Zirui Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Jayanth Srinivasa, Ashish Kundu, Charles Fleming, Mingyi Hong, Jie Ding
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows, yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large language models handle external domain knowledge in tabular prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluates whether it can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation due to limited parallel data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a dynamic graph to organize auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation accuracy in low-resource languages (LRLs) using auxiliary language pairs and synthetic pseudo-parallel data. |
CogGen: A Cognitively Inspired Recursive Framework for Deep Research Report Generation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deep research report generation rely on rigid predefined linear workflows, which cause error accumulation and limit in-depth multimodal fusion and report quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a Cognitively inspired recursive framework for deep research report Generation that simulates cognitive writing and abstract visual representation (AVR) they also propose CLEF, a cognitive load evaluation framework, and a benchmark from our world in data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art among open-source systems, surpassing Gemini Deep Research. |
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Kunbo Ding, Weijie Liu, Yuejian Fang, Weiquan Mao, Zhe Zhao, Tao Zhu, Haoyan Liu, Rong Tian, Yiren Chen
| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries . however, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages . |
| Approach: | They propose Embedding-Push, Attention-Pull, and Robust targets to transfer English embeddings to virtual multilingual embedders without semantic loss. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on cross-lingual tasks and can achieve a better multilingual alignment. |
TamEdit: Trajectory-Aware Meta-Learning for Specificity-Preserving Continual Knowledge Editing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual knowledge editing focus on single edits or preventing knowledge forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning method that preserves specificity for continual knowledge editing by capturing relationships between different single edits within the trajectory. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TamEdit outperforms baselines in continual editing while preserving general capabilities. |
Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models with human preferences post pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Supervised Fine-Tuning and Preference Optimization (PO) with two sub-processes defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) |
| Outcome: | The proposed process performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. |
Unlocking Black-Box Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Zeroth-Order Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Prompt optimization is an important technique for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order approach which enables efficient prompt tuning solely via inference APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing black-box prompt tuning methods in terms of performance and convergence speed. |
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
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%. |
Self-Evolution Learning for Mixup: Enhance Data Augmentation on Few-Shot Text Classification Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Haoqi Zheng, Qihuang Zhong, Liang Ding, Zhiliang Tian, Xin Niu, Changjian Wang, Dongsheng Li, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Text classification tasks often encounter few-shot scenarios with limited labeled data, and addressing data scarcity is crucial. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolution learning (SE) based mixup approach for data augmentation in text classification which generates more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can generate more adaptive and model-friendly pseudo samples for the model training. |
Self-adaptive Context and Modal-interaction Modeling For Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict emotion label for a given utterance lack modeling of diverse dependency ranges and inconsistent treatment of contribution for various modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal emotion recognition in conversation task that uses context and multiple modalities to predict emotion label for a given utterance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three multimodal datasets. |
RiT: Rubrics-in-Thinking Reinforcement Learning for Improved Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models benefit from generating intermediate reasoning steps alongside final answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to introduce thinking-rubric supervision into intermediate reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms outcome-only RL baselines on reasoning-intensive and open-ended tasks. |
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chengyu Du, Xintao Wang, Aili Chen, Weiyuan Li, Rui Xu, Junteng Liu, Zishan Huang, Rong Tian, Zijun Sun, Yuhao Li, Liheng Feng, Deming Ding, Pengyu Zhao, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Ding, Yuhan Chen, Jiayang Lyu, Jiyao Yuan, Qi Zhu, Shuangshuang Tian, Dantong Zhu, Futing Wang, Heyuan Deng, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Tao Lin
| Challenge: | evolving generic Large Language Models into specialized Large Reasoning Models requires effective post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a plasticity-ceiling framework to harness expert trajectories . they establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework overcomes stability and premature convergence deficits in synchronized approaches. |