Papers by Tianyu Gao
Automatic Label Sequence Generation for Prompting Sequence-to-sequence Models (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Prompting has shown to be sample efficient compared to fine-tuning with pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automatic prompting method that uses natural language prompts on sequence-to-sequence models and a beam search method to generate a large amount of label sequence candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms other no-manual-design methods on single label words and generates large amount of label sequence candidates. |
More Data, More Relations, More Context and More Openness: A Review and Outlook for Relation Extraction (2020.aacl-main)
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Xu Han, Tianyu Gao, Yankai Lin, Hao Peng, Yaoliang Yang, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting relational facts from text have been successful . but with explosion of Web text, human knowledge is increasing drastically . |
| Approach: | They propose to improve relation extraction methods to extract relational facts from text . they analyze existing methods and show promising directions towards more powerful RE . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can extract relational facts from text, but they are still lacking in the current field. |
Should You Mask 15% in Masked Language Modeling? (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Masked language models (MLMs) traditionally mask 15% of tokens due to the belief that more masking would leave insufficient context to learn good representations. |
| Approach: | They revisit the 15% masking rate of MLMs to examine the role of masking in linguistic training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed masking rate outperforms BERT-large size models on GLUE and SQUAD while maintaining 95% accuracy. |
KEPLER: A Unified Model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained Language Representation (2021.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing language representation models (PLMs) cannot capture factual knowledge from text. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model for Knowledge Embedding and Pre-trained LanguagERepresentation which integrates factual knowledge into PLMs and produces effective text-enhanced KE with the strong PLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing pre-trained language representation models and improves their performance on various NLP tasks. |
Meta-Information Guided Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing meta-learning models rely on implicit instance statistics and are unreliability and weak interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-information guided meta-learning framework that uses semantics to guide meta- learning . experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can establish connections between instance-based information and semantic-based data, enabling faster initialization and adaptation. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
The CRINGE Loss: Learning what language not to model (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Standard language model training uses gold human documents or human-human interaction data and treats all training data as positive examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedure to train with negative examples using the "CRINGE" loss technique and use it to train models with such data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure outperforms multiple strong baselines and is simple to train and implement. |
CoT-VTM: Visual-to-Music Generation with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual-to-music generation lack large-scale, high-quality visual-music paired datasets and lack of direct semantic correspondence between visuals and music. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that distills Chain-of-Thought reasoning to enable visual-to-music generation without paired data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves optimal performance on image-to-music and video-to music tasks. |
OpenNRE: An Open and Extensible Toolkit for Neural Relation Extraction (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | OpenNRE provides a framework to implement neural relation extraction (RE) . the toolkit provides various functional modules based on TensorFlow and PyTorch . |
| Approach: | OpenNRE is an open-source framework to implement neural relation extraction models. they also release an online system to meet real-time extraction without any training and deployment. |
| Outcome: | OpenNRE provides a framework to implement neural models for relation extraction (RE) the toolkit also includes an online system to meet real-time extraction without training and deployment . |
FewRel 2.0: Towards More Challenging Few-Shot Relation Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Few-shot domain adaptation and NOTA detection are two real-world challenges for few-shot relation classification models. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to investigate two aspects of few-shot relation classification models . they build upon the FewRel dataset by adding a new test set in a different domain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can evaluate few-shot domain adaptation and few- shot none-of-the-above detection on a new domain and NOTA relation choice. |
What In-Context Learning “Learns” In-Context: Disentangling Task Recognition and Task Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can perform in-context learning (ICL) with only a few demonstrations, but its mechanisms are not well-understood. |
| Approach: | They characterize two ways in which LLMs leverage demonstrations to solve tasks with a few demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves non-trivial performance with only TR, and TR does not improve with larger models or more demonstrations. |
How to Train Long-Context Language Models (Effectively) (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new study shows that language models can process extremely long contexts with minimal training. |
| Approach: | They use supervised fine-tuning and continued training to evaluate a language model's long-context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct on most long-context tasks . the model can process 512K tokens, one of the longest context windows of LMs . |
Manual Evaluation Matters: Reviewing Test Protocols of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
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Tianyu Gao, Xu Han, Yuzhuo Bai, Keyue Qiu, Zhiyu Xie, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Distantly supervised relation extraction (RE) has attracted much attention in the past few years . previous methods to evaluate models manually or directly on autolabeled data have produced inaccurate evaluations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to generate large-scale autolabeled data . they build manually-annotated test sets for two DS-RE datasets and evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 53% wrong labels at the entity pair level in the popular NYT10 dataset. |
Ditch the Gold Standard: Re-evaluating Conversational Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational question answering systems provide natural-language answers to users in information-seeking conversations. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first large-scale human evaluation of state-of-the-art conversational question answering systems . they propose a question rewriting mechanism based on predicted history which better correlates with human judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed question rewriting mechanism better correlates with human judgments. |
AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages. |
Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work relies on commercial search engines and human evaluation, making it difficult to reproduce and compare different modeling approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a new generation paradigm that requires large language models to provide citations to one or a few text passages for any statement they generate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves factual correctness and verifiability of large language models by providing citations to a set of questions and retrieval corpora and generating answers with citation. |
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn incessantly emerging novel relations are overfitting the few memorized examples of old relations, causing confusion among existing relations. |
| Approach: | They introduce episodic memory activation and reconsolidation (EMAR) to continual relation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in catastrophic forgetting old relations. |
Towards A Better Initial Policy Model For Scalable Long-CoT Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-CoT reasoning and reinforcement learning are demonstrating remarkable performance and scalability, however, there is a lack of systematic guidelines for obtaining a better initial policy model. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic guideline and a novel Re-RFT method to obtain more efficient reasoning patterns from different initial models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B model by 4.6%, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority. |
LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Literature search questions pose significant challenges for modern retrieval systems . a lack of domain expertise and reasoning through lengthy papers is a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval benchmark for literature search queries using inline citations from papers and questions about recently published papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval benchmarks outperform state-of-the-art retrieval models and reranking pipelines. |
Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Few-shot Learners (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that the GPT-3 model can perform few-shots on language understanding tasks with a natural-language prompt and a few task demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique for fine-tuning language models using a few examples . they propose LM-BFF, which uses prompt-based fine-uning and a pipeline for automating prompt generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms standard fine-tuning procedures on a range of NLP tasks. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications. |
Learning from Context or Names? An Empirical Study on Neural Relation Extraction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets may leak shallow heuristics via entity mentions, thus contributing to the high performance on RE benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entity-masked contrastive framework for relation extraction to gain a deeper understanding on textual context and type information while avoiding rote memorization of entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the effectiveness and robustness of neural models in different RE scenarios. |
SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning universal sentence embeddings are based on unsupervised approaches with only dropout as noise. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach that takes an input sentence and predicts itself in a contrastive objective with only standard dropout used as noise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs on par with previous supervised approaches and can produce superior sentence embeddings from unlabeled or labeled data. |
Long-Context Language Modeling with Parallel Context Encoding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context models degenerate with retrieved contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be applied to existing decoder-only LLMs for context expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to any existing decoder-only LLMs for context expansion. |
LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate draft tokens in a retrieval-based manner to reduce drafting overhead and improve inference speed. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests show that *LogitSpec* can achieve 2.61 speedup and 3.28 mean accepted tokens per decoding step. |