Papers by Tian Wen
AGD: Adversarial Game Defense Against Jailbreak Attacks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shilong Pan, Zhiliang Tian, Zhen Huang, Wanlong Yu, Zhihua Wen, Xinwang Liu, Kai Lu, Minlie Huang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing defenses, including post-training alignment and prompt engineering, struggle with adaptability to out-of-distribution (OOD) attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial game-based defense method that dynamically adjusts LLMs’ internal representations to achieve a balanced trade-off between helpfulness and harmlessness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs’ safety over all baselines. |
ZoFia: Zero-Shot Fake News Detection with Entity-Guided Retrieval and Multi-LLM Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are limited by knowledge cutoff and can generate factual hallucinations when handling time-sensitive news. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage zero-shot fake news detection framework that uses a hierarchical salience and saliency-calibrated minimum margin of relevance algorithm to extract core entities accurately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and even most few-shot methods on two public datasets. |
Formally Specifying the Intended Behavior of the Program: LLM-Driven Neuro-Symbolic Program Specification Synthesis (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Cheng Wen, Hu Junjie, YiKun Hu, Jie Su, Bin Yu, Dugang Liu, Zhiwu Xu, Weidi Sun, Shengchao Qin, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Formal verification typically requires developers to write detailed formal specifications . a formal verification system that generates candidate specifications is costly and error-prone . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven neuro-symbolic demonstration system that reframes specification writing as constrained structured synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces hallucinations and produces proof-ready annotations. |
Improving Preference Alignment of LLM with Inference-Free Self-Refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) develop in-context learning capability through pretraining and instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | Large language models (LLMs) develop in-context learning capability through pretraining and instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that incorporating IFSR into preference alignment yields performance improvement over 10%. |
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. |
Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wenqing Tian, Zhipeng Chen, Yuhuan Wu, Jiahao Zhao, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train large language models to leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. |
Martingale Foresight Sampling: A Principled Approach to Inference-Time LLM Decoding (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Standard autoregressive decoding in large language models is short-sighted, often failing to find globally optimal reasoning paths due to token-by-token generation process. |
| Approach: | They propose a principled framework that reformulates LLM decoding as a problem of identifying an optimal stochastic process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods in accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency. |
GRACE: Gradient-guided Controllable Retrieval for Augmenting Attribute-based Text Generation (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for controlling the generation of pre-trained language models infuse domain bias into the generation process, making it difficult to generate out-of-domain texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses retrieval to generate fluent sentences with high attribute relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate fluent sentences with high attribute relevance while keeping domain bias out of the model. |
RAPO: An Adaptive Ranking Paradigm for Bilingual Lexicon Induction (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhoujin Tian, Chaozhuo Li, Shuo Ren, Zhiqiang Zuo, Zengxuan Wen, Xinyue Hu, Xiao Han, Haizhen Huang, Denvy Deng, Qi Zhang, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on minimizing distances between words in aligned pairs, while suffering from low discriminative capability to distinguish the relative orders between positive and negative candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking-oriented induction model to learn personalized mapping function for each word. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn personalized mapping function for each word on public datasets including rich-resource and low-resourced languages. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating stories with complex plots rely on detailed prompts, which inadvertently limit the creative potential of the generated stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce to enhance stories’ complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables generating more diverse plotlines from human-written stories. |
CodeTransOcean: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Code Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing code translation datasets focus on a single pair of programming languages . early software systems are developed using programming languages such as Fortran and COBOL . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale comprehensive benchmark that supports the largest variety of programming languages for code translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports translations between multiple programming languages and a cross-framework dataset for deep learning code across different frameworks. |
From Informal to Formal – Incorporating and Evaluating LLMs on Natural Language Requirements to Verifiable Formal Proofs (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jialun Cao, Yaojie Lu, Meiziniu Li, Haoyang Ma, Haokun Li, Mengda He, Cheng Wen, Le Sun, Hongyu Zhang, Shengchao Qin, Shing-Chi Cheung, Cong Tian
| Challenge: | Recent studies in formal mathematical reasoning have shown an unstoppable growth trend. |
| Approach: | They constructed 18k high-quality instruction-response pairs across five mainstream formal specification languages and evaluated them against ten open-sourced LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compared instruction-response pairs across five formal specification languages and found that the LLMs were good at writing proof segments when given either the code, or the detailed description of proof steps. |
Bridging Kernel Drivers and Virtual Device Models with LLM-Powered Automation (2026.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Linux kernel device drivers are tightly coupled with hardware, making them difficult to execute and test without physical devices. |
| Approach: | They present a tool that generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |
Knowledge Injection Exists in MoE? Exploring Expert-Aware Contrast Decoding in MoE for Mitigating LLMs’ Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate hallucinations include prompt engineering and model optimization, but lack domain generalization and potential errors in fine-tuning data may exacerbate the hallucism. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-aware adaptive contrast decoding that uses expert differences in MoE’s higher layers to mitigate hallucinations on QA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on four datasets Large language models (LLMs) show strong performance but suffer from hallucinations, limiting their application. |