Papers by Tianlong Xu
Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic error detection in math word problems (MWPs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection by reducing conformity bias in MWPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. |
Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Tianlong Li, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise prompt tuning method that uses a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens to generate an instance-dependent prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieves state-of-the-art by tuning only 0.035% parameters on 14 datasets. |
Metacognitive Self-Correction for Multi-Agent System via Prototype-Guided Next-Execution Reconstruction (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xu Shen, Qi Zhang, Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Xinyu Zhao, Laura Yao, Vaishnav Tadiparthi, Hossein Nourkhiz Mahjoub, Ehsan Moradi Pari, Kwonjoon Lee, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) excel at collaborative problem solving but remain brittle to cascading errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a metacognitive framework that enables step-level error detection and self-correction in Large Language Model based multi-agent systems (MAS) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the Who When benchmark and delivers consistent gains on AgentErrorBench. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Zijie Liu, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Qingyu Chen, Kaidi Xu, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks. |
SConU: Selective Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks fail to identify outliers that violate the exchangeability assumption, leading to unbounded miscoverage rates and unactionable prediction sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that implements significance tests to determine whether a given sample deviates from the uncertainty distribution of the calibration set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach facilitates rigorous management of miscoverage rates across single-domain and interdisciplinary contexts, and enhances the efficiency of predictions. |
MedHallu: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Detecting Medical Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) generate plausible but factually incorrect outputs, posing serious risks to patient safety and clinical decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for medical hallucination detection using 10,000 question-answer pairs derived from PubMedQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F1 score as low as 0.625 for detecting 'hard' category hallucinations. |
Mitigating Position Bias in Transformers via Layer-Specific Positional Embedding Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding, Changze Lv, Yixin Wu, Tianlong Li, Zhibo Xu, Muling Wu, Tianyuan Shi, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the "lost-in-the-middle" problem suffer from high latency or suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific positional embedding scaling method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks. |
ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Recursively Thinking-Ahead agent that analyzes the opponents’ future moves/actions and assigns reward signals for these situations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent is based on two scenarios: Online Racing and Offline Probing. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |