Papers by Tong Niu
MixQG: Neural Question Generation with Mixed Answer Types (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural question generation approaches focus on short factoid type of answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural question generator that trains a single generative model by combining multiple question types with different answer types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in both seen and unseen domains and can generate questions with different cognitive levels when conditioned on different answer types. |
Char2Subword: Extending the Subword Embedding Space Using Robust Character Compositionality (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Byte-pair encoding (BPE) is a ubiquitous algorithm in the tokenization process of language models but is only based on pre-training data statistics. |
| Approach: | They propose a character-based subword module that learns the subword embedding table in pre-trained language models like BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance on the social media linguistic code-switching evaluation (LinCE) benchmark. |
DIVKNOWQA: Assessing the Reasoning Ability of LLMs via Open-Domain Question Answering over Knowledge Base and Text (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrievalaugmented LLMs have been used to ground LLM in external knowledge . a gap exists in the current landscape regarding the effectiveness of grounding LLM on heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses symbolic language to generate symbolic queries . they use a dataset that is generated using predefined reasoning chains and human annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous approaches by a significant margin in QA tasks over text. |
OneAligner: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer with One Rich-Resource Language Pair for Low-Resource Sentence Retrieval (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new model for parallel sentence retrieval can be used to align parallel sentences in multilingual corpora . a faithful aligner can help narrow down the candidate pool without having to deal with an enormous search space . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can be trained on only one language pair and transfers to low-resource languages with negligible degradation in performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the previous model on the Tateoba dataset by 8.0 points in accuracy and using less than 0.6% of their parallel data. |
OpenGenAlign: A Preference Dataset and Benchmark for Trustworthy Reward Modeling in Open-Ended, Long-Context Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models perform suboptimal on held-out benchmarks, resulting in poor quality outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and a high-quality dataset to evaluate reward models . they define four key metrics to assess generation quality and develop a pipeline to evaluate outputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and dataset improves hallucination-free, comprehensive, reliable, and efficient open-ended long-context generation. |
RAGTruth: A Hallucination Corpus for Developing Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a main technique for alleviating hallucinations in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate RAG into large language models to analyze word-level hallucinations using a corpus of 18,000 naturally generated responses from diverse LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can fine tune a relatively small LLM and achieve a competitive hallucination detection performance when compared to the existing prompt-based approaches. |
Tackling Distractor Documents in Multi-Hop QA with Reinforcement and Curriculum Learning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-augmented generation systems has shown that retrievers exhibit imperfect recall and precision, limiting downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation model that generates answers from larger sets of retrieved contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates answers and cites relevant information from larger sets of retrieved contexts. |
Enhancing Dialogue State Tracking Models through LLM-backed User-Agents Simulation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the model can be used to generate dialogues in new domains quickly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to generate dialogue data to reduce dialogue collection and annotation costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than the baseline model trained on real data. |
Unsupervised Paraphrasing with Pretrained Language Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation has benefited from recent advances in the design of training objectives and model architectures, but previous studies focused on supervised methods that require a large amount of labeled data that is costly to collect. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning approach that enables pre-trained language models to generate high-quality paraphrases in an unsupervised setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs state-of-the-art on the Quora Question Pair and ParaNMT datasets and is robust to domain shift between the two datasets. |
Llama See, Llama Do: A Mechanistic Perspective on Contextual Entrainment and Distraction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | *contextual entrainment* occurs across a wide range of language models (LMs) and prompt settings. |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that there is a circuit of attention heads that corresponds to the phenomenon *contextual entrainment* . when they "turn off" these heads, the effect of contextual entraining is significantly attenuated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that LMs assign higher logits to tokens that have previously appeared in the context prompt, even for random tokens. |
Contextual Relevance and Adaptive Sampling for LLM-Based Document Reranking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | identifying relevant documents for Reasoning-intensive queries remains a challenge . large language models have shown strong performance in zero-shot document reranking . |
| Approach: | They propose a reranking algorithm that estimates contextual relevance by aggregating LLMs' relevance judgments across batches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves nDCG@10 over retrieval and reranking baselines by 15% and 6–21% respectively. |
Detecting Linguistic Characteristics of Alzheimer’s Dementia by Interpreting Neural Models (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Current diagnoses often involve lengthy medical evaluations. |
| Approach: | They apply neural models based on CNNs, LSTM-RNNs, and their combination to classify AD and control language samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves independent benchmark accuracy for the AD classification task. |
Retrieve-Plan-Generation: An Iterative Planning and Answering Framework for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factual errors due to limited internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that generates plan tokens to guide subsequent generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of large language models with external knowledge sources. |
VeraCT Scan: Retrieval-Augmented Fake News Detection with Justifiable Reasoning (2024.acl-demos)
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Cheng Niu, Yang Guan, Yuanhao Wu, Juno Zhu, Juntong Song, Randy Zhong, Kaihua Zhu, Siliang Xu, Shizhe Diao, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | generative artificial intelligence has exacerbated the challenge of distinguishing genuine news from fabricated stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented system that extracts the core facts from a given piece of news and conducts an internet-wide search to identify corroborating or conflicting reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has demonstrated state-of-the-art accuracy in the realm of fake news detection. |
FCGCL: Fine- and Coarse-Granularity Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform implicit knowledge transfer from machine translation to ST model are difficult because of the task complexity and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They recommend a method which conducts explicit knowledge transfer from MT to ST model by fine and coarse granularity contrastive learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the end-to-end speech translation model on all 8 languages. |
Automatic ICD Coding via Interactive Shared Representation Networks with Self-distillation Mechanism (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding ignore the long-tail of code frequency or noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an interactive shared representation network to model code co-occurrences while focusing on the clinical note's noteworthy part and extract valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism to solve the long-tail problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the long-tail of code frequency and noise in clinical notes and extracts valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism. |
RAM2C: A Liberal Arts Educational Chatbot based on Retrieval-augmented Multi-role Multi-expert Collaboration (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations indicate that RAM2C-empowered LLMs excel in Chinese reading teaching, offering more personalized, and ethically safe teaching response. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to retrieve large language models into educational dialogues and organize them into multi-experts groups with distinct roles to generate the data. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations show that RAM2C-empowered LLMs excel in Chinese reading teaching, offering more personalized, and ethically safe teaching response. |
Automatically Learning Data Augmentation Policies for Dialogue Tasks (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in automatic data augmentation have focused on computer vision tasks where it is easy to apply imperceptible perturbations without changing an image’s semantic meaning. |
| Approach: | They adapt AutoAugment to automatically discover effective perturbation policies for natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces data-level model bias by using a controller trained on the target task. |
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)
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Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zihan Niu, Chonggang Lu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications. |
Unlocking the Black Box of Latent Reasoning: An Interpretability-Guided Approach to Intervention (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) lack a coherent representation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of latent reasoning interventions that enable latent thinking and decode-time interventions that refine the latent process by imposing the identified geometric and semantic priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models unlock latent capabilities and improve reasoning accuracy without any parameter updates. |