Papers by Wei Ai
MergeME: Model Merging Techniques for Homogeneous and Heterogeneous MoEs (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuhang Zhou, Giannis Karamanolakis, Victor Soto, Anna Rumshisky, Mayank Kulkarni, Furong Huang, Wei Ai, Jianhua Lu
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods for merging expert models with different architectures do not address parameter interference and require extensive fine-tuning to restore performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for merging experts with different architectures into a unified Mixture-of-Experts model with a goal of enhancing performance in each domain while retaining effectiveness on general tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple domains show that the proposed methods reduce fine-tuning costs and improve performance over state-of-the-art methods. |
InquireMobile: Teaching VLM-based Mobile Agent to Request Human Assistance via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Qihang Ai, Pi Bu, Yue Cao, Yingyao Wang, Jihao Gu, Jingxuan Xing, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Zhicheng Zheng, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled mobile agents to perceive and interact with real-world mobile environments based on human instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model that actively seeks human confirmation at critical decision points and a model inspired by reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an improvement of 46.8% in inquiry success rate and the best overall success rate among existing baselines on InquireBench. |
Explore Spurious Correlations at the Concept Level in Language Models for Text Classification (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in numerous NLP tasks, employing both fine-tuning and in-context learning (ICL) methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess concept bias in models during fine-tuning and in-context learning using ChatGPT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms token removal approaches and is validated through extensive testing. |
Large Language Models and Causal Inference in Collaboration: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Paiheng Xu, Junda Wu, Jiaxin Yuan, Yifan Yang, Yuhang Zhou, Fuxiao Liu, Tianrui Guan, Haoliang Wang, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential to enhance Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in areas such as predictive accuracy, fairness, robustness, and explainability. |
| Approach: | They evaluate or improve generative Large Language Models from a causal perspective in areas such as reasoning capacity, fairness and safety issues, explainability, and handling multimodality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to perform causal relationship discovery and causal effect estimation tasks. |
DISCO Balances the Scales: Adaptive Domain- and Difficulty-Aware Reinforcement Learning on Imbalanced Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuhang Zhou, Jing Zhu, Shengyi Qian, Zhuokai Zhao, Xiyao Wang, Xiaoyu Liu, Ming Li, Paiheng Xu, Wei Ai, Furong Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly aligned with human preferences through Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | a new study proposes a domain-informed self-consistency policy optimization extension to GRPO that addresses inter-group imbalance. |
| Outcome: | a new extension of GRPO addresses inter-group imbalance with two key innovations . the proposed method outperforms existing GR PO variants by 5% on Qwen3 models . |
VietMix: A Naturally-Occurring Parallel Corpus and Augmentation Framework for Vietnamese-English Code-Mixed Machine Translation (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine translation (MT) systems degrade when faced with code-mixed text. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that can augment Vietnamese-English code-mixed text with iterative fine-tuning and targeted filtering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong back-translation baselines and improves zero-shot models by up to +11.9 points. |
Skill Discovery for Software Scripting Automation via Offline Simulations with LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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Paiheng Xu, Gang Wu, Xiang Chen, Tong Yu, Chang Xiao, Franck Dernoncourt, Tianyi Zhou, Wei Ai, Viswanathan Swaminathan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate code from natural language queries, but runtime code generation is limited due to unverified code, security risks, longer response times, and higher computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline simulation framework to curate a software-specific skillset by exploiting large language models and publicly available scripting guides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves automation success rates, reduces response time, and saves runtime token costs compared to traditional runtime code generation. |
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)
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Haitao Li, Junjie Chen, Jingli Yang, Qingyao Ai, Wei Jia, Youfeng Liu, Kai Lin, Yueyue Wu, Guozhi Yuan, Yiran Hu, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing general-domain benchmarks do not capture complexity of real-world judicial cognition and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM Agents in the legal domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 17 corpora from real-world legal scenarios and provides 37 tools for interacting with external knowledge. |
Dynamic Graph Neural ODE Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based multimodal emotion recognition methods fail to capture dynamic changes in emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Network (DGODE) which combines dynamic changes of emotions to capture temporal dependencies of speakers’ emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the temporal dependencies caused by dynamic changes in emotions and can improve on two publicly available multimodal emotion recognition datasets. |
Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution for large language models, but their deployment remains computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget and enables the transfer of knowledge from expensive teacher LLMs to smaller student models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models. |
TeCES: Collaborative Geometric Knowledge Representation Framework under Evolving Fact Snapshots (2026.acl-long)
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Jiujiang Guo, Zhengliang Guo, Kai Wang, Meiyang Wang, Dehua Peng, Shaozu Yuan, Chengyin Hu, Shuan Ai, Yiwei Wei
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs represent static facts but lack collaborative modeling of both . e.g., existing knowledge graph models lack a framework for integrating snapshots into knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for high-fidelity modeling of evolving snapshots using concept of snapshots. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on six benchmarks. |
Teaching-Assistant-in-the-Loop: Improving Knowledge Distillation from Imperfect Teacher Models in Low-Budget Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across a wide spectrum of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages three signal types to improve efficiency within resource-constrained, imperfect teacher scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on four complex reasoning tasks by 20.79% compared to fine-tuning without any signals across datasets. |
The Promises and Pitfalls of Using Language Models to Measure Instruction Quality in Education (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess instruction quality require trained raters to observe classrooms based on established criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Natural Language Processing techniques to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to assess multiple high-inference instructional practices in two educational settings: in-person K-12 classrooms and simulated performance tasks for pre-service teachers. |
Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training (2026.acl-long)
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Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jingxuan Xing, Yue Cao, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ziming Wang, Yingxiu Zhao, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |