Papers by Wang Ling

43 papers
UniVocal: Unified Speech-Singing Code-Switching Synthesis (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing systems cannot automatically determine when to switch between modes based on text content.
Approach: They propose a unified framework that implicitly infers vocal modes from text context to pioneer SCS Synthesis.
Outcome: The proposed framework infers vocal modes solely from text context to pioneer SCS Synthesis.
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) can handle extensive context and multi-turn reasoning.
Approach: They propose a taxonomy dividing psychotherapy into stages of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment to examine LLM advancements and challenges.
Outcome: The proposed taxonomy reveals imbalances in current research, such as a focus on common disorders, linguistic biases, fragmented methods, and limited theoretical integration.
FLIQA-AD: a Fusion Model with Large Language Model for Better Diagnose and MMSE Prediction of Alzheimer’s Disease (2025.naacl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing classification and regression models that only extract finer-grained information from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may not be effective for Alzheimer's disease (AD).
Approach: They propose to use a 3D Adapter in a Vision Transformer to extract the patient's EHR information and questions related to the disease as text prompts.
Outcome: The proposed model can discriminate and predict the corresponding MMSE score based on the extracted brain structural information and textual content .
TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Best-of-N (BoN) sampling generates multiple responses and selects the best one, achieving improved performance but with a high computational cost.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates a speculative tree-search strategy into Best-of-N (BoN) Sampling.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms Best-of-N (BoN) sampling but has high computational cost . tree-search strategy reduces computational overhead while maintaining high output quality .
Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Prompting (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to detect mental manipulations are limited due to complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations.
Approach: They propose an approach to detect mental manipulations using large language models using intent-aware prompting by capturing the intents of participants.
Outcome: The proposed approach significantly reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases.
DynamicFocalPO: Adaptive Focusing Strategy for Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become prevalent for aligning large language models with human preferences.
Approach: They propose a preference optimization algorithm that introduces a modulating factor that down-weighs misranked preference pairs and employs focusing strategy that adapts over the course of training.
Outcome: Experiments show that DynamicFocalPO surpasses both DPO and FocalPO on benchmarks including Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using Mistral-Base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B.
CodeFlowBench: A Multi-turn, Iterative Benchmark for Complex Code Generation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Modern software development demands code that is maintainable, testable, and scalable by organizing the implementation into modular components with iterative reuse of existing codes.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to perform codeflow by reusing existing functions over multiple turns.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that LLMs perform significantly worse in multi-turn codeflow scenarios and that their performance inversely correlates with dependency complexity.
BANER: Boundary-Aware LLMs for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that aims to detect the entity spans of text and classify them into pre-defined set of entity types.
Approach: They propose a boundary-aware contrastive learning strategy to enhance the LLM’s ability to perceive entity boundaries for generalized entity spans.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms prior methods and validates its effectiveness across a range of LLM architectures.
Beyond Surface-Level Pattern Trap: LLM Agents for Faster and Smarter Cross-Architecture Code Migration (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: cross-architecture code migration is a resource-intensive and errorprone task.
Approach: a framework for cross-architecture code migration is proposed to decouple implementation details through functional mining and code refactoring.
Outcome: a new framework improves performance and correctness over state-of-the-art frameworks on OpenCV migration tasks.
From Insight to Action: A Novel Framework for Interpretability-Guided Data Selection in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent research in mechanistic interpretability has revealed that Large Language models contain disentangled, human-understandable components.
Approach: They propose a framework that first identifies causal task features through frequency recall and interventional filtering, then selects “Feature-Resonant Data” that maximally activates task features for fine-tuning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing models on mathematical reasoning, summarization, and translation tasks while using only 50% of the data.
Spiral of Silence in Large Language Model Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models .
Approach: They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals .
Outcome: The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance .
Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for learning continual tasks do not cache history data, which makes the problem more challenging.
Approach: They propose a method that allocates a small portion of private parameters and learns them with a shared pre-trained model.
Outcome: The proposed method is comparable to existing methods and comparable to those using historical data.
Exploring the Impact of Negative Samples of Contrastive Learning: A Case Study of Sentence Embedding (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Unsupervised contrastive learning is emerging as a powerful technique for extracting knowledge from unlabeled data.
Approach: They propose a momentum contrastive learning model with negative sample queue for sentence embedding with a simulated model with EMA update mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves a Spearman’s correlation of 77.27% on the semantic text similarity task and a maximum traceable distance metric.
Latent Suicide Risk Detection on Microblog via Suicide-Oriented Word Embeddings and Layered Attention (D19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to detect suicidal ideation on social media are limited to a small group of people.
Approach: They propose to use tree holes to embed words into microblogs to strengthen the sensibility of suicide-related lexicons and to use a two-layered attention mechanism to grasp intermittently changing points from individual's open blog streams.
Outcome: The proposed approach can achieve over 91% accuracy with the use of suicide-oriented word embeddings and attention on a large-scale well-labelled suicide data set.
Joint Intent Detection and Entity Linking on Spatial Domain Queries (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Spatial domain queries have unique properties making them more challenging for language understanding than common conversational queries.
Approach: They propose a language understanding framework for spatial domain queries that jointly learns the intent detection and entity linking tasks on a voice assistant service.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods with a significant margin.
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for achieving this alignment involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) Existing approaches involve using RLHF to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels . however, RLRF is susceptible to instability during fine- tuning and presents challenges in implementation.
Approach: They propose to use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune large language models with human preferences to achieve precise control of model behavior.
Outcome: Experiments show that RAHF can be used to capture and manipulate representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values rather than being confined to a single concept or function.
Infinity-Parser: Layout-Aware Reinforcement Learning with High-quality Document Parsing Dataset (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing supervised fine-tuning methods struggle to generalize across document types, leading to poor performance.
Approach: They propose layoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models on a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities.
Temporal Consistency for LLM Reasoning Process Error Identification (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Empirical evaluations show consistent performance improvements over baseline methods . 7B/8B distilled models outperform all 70B/72B models and GPT-4o on ProcessBench .
Approach: They propose a temporal consistency method that leverages consistency in a sequence of self-reflection actions to improve verification accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmarks . it leverages consistency in a sequence of self-reflection actions to improve accuracy .
How Do Large Language Models Capture the Ever-changing World Knowledge? A Review of Recent Advances (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving tasks, but they can quickly be outdated after deployment.
Approach: They provide a review of recent advances in aligning deployed large language models with the ever-changing world knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed models can be used to perform various tasks directly through in-context learning or for further fine-tuning for domain-specific uses.
R2IF: Aligning Reasoning with Decisions via Composite Rewards for Interpretable LLM Function Calling (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing RL-based approaches to function calling are misaligned between reasoning processes and tool-call decisions.
Approach: They propose a reasoning-aware RL framework for interpretable function calling . they integrate a composite reward integrating format/correctness constraints, CER, and SMV .
Outcome: Experiments on BFCL/ACEBench show R2IF outperforms baselines by 34.62% with positive Average CoT Effectiveness.
X-ACE: Explainable and Multi-factor Audio Captioning Evaluation (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for automated audio captioning only provide an overall score . current evaluation checklists are inadequate to characterize the nuanced differences .
Approach: They propose an explainable and multi-factor audio captioning evaluation paradigm . they define sound event, source, attribute and relation as four factors tailored for the audio description .
Outcome: The proposed evaluation paradigm improves the quality of audio captions . it can detect mismatches and align with human perception, the authors show .
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples.
Approach: They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus .
Outcome: Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks.
Better Document-Level Machine Translation with Bayes’ Rule (2020.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing document translation models are based on autoregressive language models, but they are not able to be learned from monolingual documents.
Approach: They propose to use Bayes' rule to create document translation models that can be learned from only parallel sentences and monolingual documents.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing document translation approaches and is based on a novel left-to-right beam-search algorithm.
Lost in Pronunciation: Detecting Chinese Offensive Language Disguised by Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (2025.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Phonetic Cloaking Replacement (PCR) is a problem in content moderation in China.
Approach: They organize PCR into a four-way surface-form taxonomy and compile PCR-ToxiCN, a dataset of 500 phonetically cloaked offensive posts gathered from the RedNote platform.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves only an F1-score and zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting pushes performance even lower.
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks.
Identifying the Achilles’ Heel: An Iterative Method for Uncovering Factual Errors in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current methods for evaluating LLMs’ veracity are limited by the need for extensive human labor, test data contamination, or limited scope, hindering efficient and effective exposure of errors.
Approach: They propose a framework that extracts fact triplets to generate diverse question types using rule-based natural language processing techniques.
Outcome: The proposed framework can trigger factual errors in up to 55% of questions in large LLMs while maintaining coverage of questions.
LEANCODE: Understanding Models Better for Code Simplification of Pre-trained Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models often require significant computational resources, often constraining input word or code token lengths.
Approach: They propose to use the encoder-decoder attention scores to represent the importance of a code token across multiple contexts to reduce training and prediction time.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the SOTAs DietCode and SlimCode in code search and summarization tasks.
Learning to Ask: When LLM Agents Meet Unclear Instruction (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Despite their impressive capabilities, LLMs struggle with complex computations and delivering accurate, timely information.
Approach: They propose a framework that prompts LLM agents to ask questions when they encounter obstacles due to unclear instructions and an automated evaluation tool called ToolEvaluator.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks for tool learning in the Noisy ToolBench.
VAEGPT-Sim: Improving Sentence Representation with Limited Corpus Using Gradually-Denoising VAE (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Text embedding requires a highly efficient method for training domain-specific models on limited corpora.
Approach: They propose a model that combines a denoising variational autoencoder with a target-specific discriminator to generate synonymous sentences that closely resemble human language.
Outcome: The proposed model surpasses ConSERT by 2.8 points in small-dataset training on STS benchmarks.
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress.
Approach: They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study.
GenesisFunc: Multi-Agent Data Generation for Accurate and Generalizable Function-Calling (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) extend their capabilities through function-calling (FC) however, obtaining and annotating real function-called data is challenging, and synthetic data from existing pipelines suffers from unreliable APIs, limited tool scalability, insufficient diversity, and weak quality control.
Approach: They propose a pipeline for generating FC training data using reliable tools and a multi-agent framework that supports a dialogue generation system that produces conversations spanning diverse scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline outperforms open-source models in in-domain FC performance and out-of-domain generalization while reaching FC capabilities comparable to some of the latest API-based models.
IF-CRITIC: Towards a Fine-Grained LLM Critic for Instruction-Following Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation models for instruction-following have many shortcomings, such as substantial costs and unreliable assessments.
Approach: They propose an LLM critic for fine-grained instruction-following evaluation using a checklist generator and a constraint-level preference optimization method.
Outcome: The proposed model beats strong LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in evaluations under lower computational overhead compared to baselines.
IF-RewardBench: Benchmarking Judge Models for Instruction-Following Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for instruction-following lack data coverage and oversimplified pairwise evaluation paradigms that misalign with model optimization scenarios.
Approach: They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction-following that covers diverse instruction and constraint types and a preference graph for each instruction.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on IF-RewardBench show that the proposed benchmark achieves a stronger positive correlation with downstream task performance compared to existing benchmarks.
Text Classification by Contrastive Learning and Cross-lingual Data Augmentation for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for AD detection are too expensive and time-consuming to cover all potential patients.
Approach: They propose a contrastive learning method to obtain effective text representations based on monolingual embeddings of BERT and a cross-lingual data augmentation method by building autoencoders to learn the text representation shared by both languages.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms other methods on a Mandarin AD corpus and achieves 81.6% detection accuracy.
Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Question Answering via Prompt-Assisted Self-learning (2024.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing SFDA methods focus on the adaptation phase, overlooking the impact of source domain training on model generalizability.
Approach: They propose a source-free domain adaptation approach for Question Answering where a model trained on a domain is adapted to unlabeled target domains without additional source data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods in managing domain gaps and demonstrating greater stability across target domains.
JurisBench: A Deep Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models in Professional Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated tasks or exam-style questions, failing to capture the procedural interdependencies and adjudicative rigor inherent in professional practice.
Approach: They propose a vertical, depth-oriented, domain-specific benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chinese civil litigation.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that large language models exhibit an "illusion of competence" the results highlight a critical gap between fluent linguistic output and judicial reliability .
Enhanced Visual Instruction Tuning with Synthesized Image-Dialogue Data (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: OpenAI's GPT-4 has demonstrated remarkable multimodal capabilities, but specific mechanics of GPT4 remain unknown.
Approach: They propose a data collection methodology that synchronously synthesizes images and dialogues for visual instruction tuning.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on ten commonly assessed models and provides greater flexibility compared to existing methods.
EmoAgent: Assessing and Safeguarding Human-AI Interaction for Mental Health Safety (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions, especially for vulnerable human users with psychological disorders.
Approach: EmoAgent is a multi-agent AI framework designed to evaluate and mitigate mental health hazards in human-AI interactions.
Outcome: EmoAgent evaluates and mitigates mental health hazards in human-AI interactions.
Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editing (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters.
Approach: They propose a new approach to fine-tuning neural models that scales and biases the representation produced at each layer.
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 25,700 compared to full parameter fine-tuning and by . 32 compared with LoRA.
Dissecting Logical Reasoning in LLMs: A Fine-Grained Evaluation and Supervision Study (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks that rely on final-answer accuracy fail to capture the quality of the reasoning process.
Approach: They propose a fine-grained evaluation framework that assesses logical reasoning across three dimensions: overall accuracy, stepwise soundness, and representation-level probing.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses logical reasoning across three dimensions: overall accuracy, stepwise soundness, and representation-level probing.
PENS: A Dataset and Generic Framework for Personalized News Headline Generation (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using a dataset of Microsoft News, we propose a generic framework to personalize a text generator and establish personalized headlines.
Approach: They propose a generic framework to personalize a news headline generator and establish personalized headlines by leveraging user behavioral data.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on user preference data and user preference injections to personalize a text generator and establish personalized headlines.
When More Thinking Hurts: Overthinking in LLM Test-Time Compute Scaling (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research implicitly assumes that longer thinking leads to better results . a recent study suggests that test-time compute scaling is more effective than model scaling .
Approach: They challenge the assumption that longer thinking yields better results . they show that models exhibit overthinking and marginal returns diminish at higher budgets .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces computation significantly while maintaining comparable accuracy.
Promoting Data and Model Privacy in Federated Learning through Quantized LoRA (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing federated learning frameworks require substantial data and computational resources to develop large language models.
Approach: They propose a method that distributes a quantized version of the model’s parameters during training and combine it with a popular fine-tuning method to significantly reduce communication costs.
Outcome: The proposed method enables accurate estimations for parameter updates while preventing clients from accessing a model whose performance is comparable to the centrally hosted one.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations