Papers by Tong Ruan
AIDA-SEAT: Towards Reliable AI Doctor Assistant via State-Evaluation-Action Tree Enhanced LLMs in Online Hospital (2026.acl-industry)
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Lianxin Sun, Xiaoying Ying, Guangya Yu, Weiyan Zhang, Chenhao Guan, Hao He, Mingxi Shang, Jianhua Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on large language models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) but these methods lack the explicit logical pathways essential for multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an AIDA-SEAT framework to provide reliable clinical decision-making support by transforming and modifying medical documents and doctors' state-evaluation-action trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.01% higher than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across five departments, including common RAG-based methods. |
From Selection to Refinement: Iterative Optimization for Instruction Data (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Hu, Ziyan Liu, Rujie Wen, Ruihui Hou, Xueyan Wu, Mu Zhang, Jianxing Yu, Tong Ruan, Jingping Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize instruction tuning datasets face two main challenges: unreasonable pruning of potentially valuable low-quality data and the persistence of noise or semantic drift during revision. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative framework for instruction data optimization that prunes low-quality data and refines low quality data using feedback-driven iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on seven public benchmark datasets with high data efficiency. |
MedOdyssey: A Medical Domain Benchmark for Long Context Evaluation Up to 200K Tokens (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks in the generic domain have evaluated long-context capabilities for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical long-context benchmark with seven length levels ranging from 4K to 200K tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks have seven length levels ranging from 4K to 200K tokens. |
RRNorm: A Novel Framework for Chinese Disease Diagnoses Normalization via LLM-Driven Terminology Component Recognition and Reconstruction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Clinical Terminology Normalization (CTN) aims at finding standard terms from a given termbase for mentions extracted from clinical texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages reasoning capability of large language models to recognize components of terms and automate decomposition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy achieves state-of-the-art on the experimental dataset. |
Balancing Knowledge Breadth and Task Depth for Effective Domain Adaptation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a lack of knowledge breadth and task depth can hinder curriculum learning in domains such as medicine and finance. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-dimensional curriculum learning framework that coordinates model training along two orthogonal axes: the knowledge dimension and the task dimension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy on medical evaluations by 2.49% and on financial evaluations 1.2% compared with the second-best method. |
EMRs2CSP : Mining Clinical Status Pathway from Electronic Medical Records (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current studies focus on extracting tests or treatments when constructing clinical pathways, neglecting the patient's symptoms and diagnosis. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel clinical pathway representation: the clinical status pathway and a pipeline framework for extracting clinical status from electronic medical records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves extraction accuracy by modeling diagnostic and treatment processes and demonstrates significant improvements on medical question-answering and decision-support tasks. |
PToco: Prefix-based Token-level Collaboration Enhances Reasoning for Multi-LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to collaboration between multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on highly capable models with strong self-reflection abilities or are limited to models sharing the same tokenizer. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that enables collaboration among less capable LLMs independent of tokenizer differences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism improves performance over individual models and generalizes well across different quantities and sizes of participating models. |
ClinicalMC: A Benchmark for Multi-Course Clinical Decision-Making with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess LLM performance in single-course settings and lack systematic evaluation in multi-course scenarios, where a patient’s condition evolves over time. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to assess their performance in multi-course clinical decision-making scenarios where a patient’s condition evolves over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model includes 1,275 Chinese and 5,804 English samples across four stages from admission to discharge. |
Experience is the Teacher: Reusing Atomic Thoughts from LLMs to Improve Medical Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
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Guangya Yu, Hui Luo, Qi Ye, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Mingxi Shang, Xuanwu Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent large reasoning models (LLMs) lack dynamic and diverse thinking capabilities . reusing atomic thoughts provides a practical pathway toward dynamic reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts atomic thoughts from teacher models and reuses them to guide reasoning and generate responses. |
DoTAT: A Domain-oriented Text Annotation Tool (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | DoTAT is a domain-oriented text annotation tool that can reduce the time for event annotation by 19.7% . the tool supports multi-person collaborative process with automatically merging and review . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-oriented text annotation tool called DoTAT . it provides multi-person collaborative process with automatic merging and review . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can reduce the time for event annotation by 19.7% compared with existing tools. |
CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation (2025.findings-acl)
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Guangya Yu, Yanhao Li, Zongying Jiang, Yuxiong Jin, Li Dai, Yupian Lin, Ruihui Hou, Weiyan Zhang, Yongqi Fan, Qi Ye, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Medical quality control indicators are essential to assess the qualifications of healthcare institutions for medical services. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese electronic medical records-based dataset for MQCIC and propose CF-IR method that disentangles clinical fact verification and inferential rule reasoning actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Chain-of-Thought methods on 20 representative LLMs, covering general and medical models. |
SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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Yuchun Fan, Yongyu Mu, YiLin Wang, Lei Huang, Junhao Ruan, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, Shujian Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Jingbo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant improvements in reasoning abilities, but these improvements are primarily focused on English, leading to inferior performance in non-English scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual reasoning alignment approach that fine-tunes the layers responsible for multilingual comprehension in one stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method fine-tunes 6 of the 9 layers responsible for multilingual comprehension, while reducing training time by 4.1-11.9 compared to the two-stage method. |
Exploiting Target Language Data for Neural Machine Translation Beyond Back Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) encounters challenges when translating in new domains and low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant of k-nearest neighbor machine translation that utilizes target language data by constructing a pseudo datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits strong domain adaptation capability in both high-resource and low-resourced machine translation. |
MedKInstruct: A Multimodal Knowledge Graph Based Framework for Multi-Hop and Hard-Negative Instruction Data Synthesis in MedVQA (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical visual question answering focus on image–caption pairs, limiting the model’s ability to learn relevant medical knowledge during training. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize instruction data from image–caption pairs and incorporate a multimodal medical knowledge graph to assist LVLMs in synthesizing knowledge-intensive instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on the public datasets Slake and VQA-RAD by 4.16% and 4.50%. |
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Qi Liu, Jingqing Ruan, Hao Li, Haodong Zhao, Desheng Wang, Jiansong Chen, Wan Guanglu, Xunliang Cai, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Bei Li, Jiahao Liu, Junhao Ruan, Kechen Jiao, Hongyin Tang, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | High-order numerical methods enhance performance in tasks like NLP but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative implicit Euler Transformer which simplifies high-order numerical methods by iterating implicit Eule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and reduces inference overhead by 55% while retaining 99.4% of the original task accuracy. |
Unexpected Phenomenon: LLMs’ Spurious Associations in Information Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Weiyan Zhang, Wanpeng Lu, Jiacheng Wang, Yating Wang, Lihan Chen, Haiyun Jiang, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Information extraction (IE) tasks require a limited number of example instructions to achieve effective performance. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies to find spurious associations in large language models (LLMs) they use forward label extension and backward label validation to leverage extended labels to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on Chinese and English datasets and 9.55%, 11.42%, and 21.27% in F1 scores on SciERC, ACE05, and DuEE datasets. |
MinosEval: Distinguishing Factoid and Non-Factoid for Tailored Open-Ended QA Evaluation with LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods overlook the distinction between factoid and non-factoidic questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that distinguishes open-ended questions and ranks candidate answers . they propose QA requires longer answer statements and nuanced reasoning processes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method better aligns with human annotations and offers more interpretable results. |
An LLM-based Framework for Biomedical Terminology Normalization in Social Media via Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results indicate that our approach exhibits competitive performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach to normalize non-standard terms using large language models . they use a search engine and a domain knowledge base to expand the short texts into accurate descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on the "Recall and Re-rank" framework . it can be used to identify the standard term in a specified termbase for non-standardized mentions . |
LCDS: A Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary Generation System Supporting Source Attribution and Expert Review (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating inaccurate discharge summary content or fabricating information without valid sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool for empowering LLMs with Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool identifies the writing logic of discharge summaries and integrates it with EMRs to generate silver discharge summararies. |
Can Multimodal Large Language Models Understand Spatial Relations? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spatial relation reasoning is a crucial task for multimodal large language models to understand the objective world. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-annotated spatial relation reasoning benchmark based on COCO2017 to improve MLLMs' spatial relation thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark achieves 48.14% accuracy, far below the human-level accuracy of 98.40%. |
Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Xiaoming Shi, Zeming Liu, Li Du, Yuxuan Wang, Hongru Wang, Yuhang Guo, Tong Ruan, Jie Xu, Xiaofan Zhang, Shaoting Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing medical dialogue systems have significant potential to simplify diagnostic procedure and reduce the cost of collecting information from patients. |
| Approach: | They analyze 325 papers from well-known computer science, natural language processing conferences and journals to find out the major challenges of medical dialog systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems have been surveyed in the medical community but have not been evaluated from a technical perspective. |
MedEureka: A Medical Domain Benchmark for Multi-Granularity and Multi-Data-Type Embedding-Based Retrieval (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Embedding-based retrieval (EBR) is a mainstream approach in information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose an enriched benchmark to evaluate retrieval capabilities of embedding models . they use four levels of granularity and six types of medical texts to prompt instruction-fine-tuned embeddable models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the retrieval capabilities of embedding models with multi-granularity and multi-data types. |
Dynamic Data Mixing Maximizes Instruction Tuning for Mixture-of-Experts (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models are constrained by their fixed model capacities when the number of tasks grows in instruction tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine all training tasks and apply fixed sampling weights without considering the importance of different tasks as the model training state changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on knowledge & reasoning tasks and open-ended queries with limited training budget. |
Enhancing Neural Machine Translation Through Target Language Data: A kNN-LM Approach for Domain Adaptation (2025.acl-long)
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Abudurexiti Reheman, Hongyu Liu, Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Yingfeng Luo, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) has made significant progress in recent years, yet often suffers from translating in new domains, which is called domain adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages semantically similar target language sentences in the kNN framework and generates a probability distribution over these sentences during decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates a probability distribution over similar target language sentences and then interpolates with the model’s distribution. |
MCLE-Mol: Empowering LLM with Molecular Comprehension and Low-Cost Continual Evolution for Interpretable Property Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhili Pu, Lantian Zhang, Hao Duan, Zhixing Zhang, Keyun Zhu, Yongqi Fan, Ruihui Hou, Tong Ruan, Yun Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) offer a new paradigm for molecular property prediction (MPP), yet a semantic gap between natural language and molecul representations limits their ability to capture structure–activity relationships (SAR). |
| Approach: | They propose an ML–LLM–Rule collaborative framework for MPP that injects ML-derived substructure attribution values into LLMs and calibrates them under specific chemical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple benchmark datasets and is highly interpretable. |
Text-to-ES Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Converting Natural Language to Elasticsearch Query (2025.acl-long)
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DonggeXue DonggeXue, Zhili Pu, Zhentao Xia, Hongli Sun, Ruihui Hou, Guangya Yu, Yupian Lin, Yongqi Fan, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Recent research on text-to-Query has explored using large language models to convert user query intent to executable code. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel semantic parsing task that leverages large language models to generate domain-specific language and post-processing code to support multi-index Elasticsearch queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1 on the large Elasticsearch Dataset (LED) and BirdES datasets. |
Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate: Three-stage Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation Using Large Language Models in Low-resource Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Biomedical data-to-text generation is a branch of Natural Language Generation, aiming at generating textual natural language descriptions that can fluently and precisely describe the structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM framework that can be used to generate textual natural language descriptions using in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides good interpretability and superior performance on the BioLeaflets dataset. |
LLaMA-MoE: Building Mixture-of-Experts from LLaMA with Continual Pre-Training (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has gained increasing popularity as a framework for scaling up large language models. |
| Approach: | They investigate how to build Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models from existing large language models . they use expert construction, Continual pre-training and data sampling strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with similar parameters on a wide range of tasks. |
Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System for Automated Feature Generation on Tabular Data (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. |
LogToP: Logic Tree-of-Program with Table Instruction-tuned LLMs for Controlled Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2026.findings-eacl)
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Yupian Lin, Guangya Yu, Cheng Yuan, Huan Du, Hui Luo, Yuang Bian, Jingping Liu, Zhidong He, Wen Du, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are difficult to achieve satisfactory results in table-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a specialized logical table-to-text generation model that can be used for table-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a Logic2Text dataset. |