Papers by Wei Cai
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large language models generate harmful content, but the potential for generating harmful content is an escalating concern. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune LLMs with preference learning to emphasize the preference for timely course-correction by using an automated pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves course-correction skills without affecting general performance and resists jailbreak attacks. |
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| Challenge: | Representative models like LLaVA and MiniGPT-4 have great capabilities in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified model to represent various multi-modal tasks using a single representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in a variety of tasks while maintaining generality and scalability. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
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| Challenge: | MCTS methods retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding comparative signals present in the many explored paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms supervision extraction into a synthesis procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or exceeds baselines on 60K CRPS-synthesized examples on out-of-domain benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | generative models for end-to-end sequence generation have been shown promising for this task . however, how to precisely extract a skeleton and how to effectively train a retrieval-guided response generator is still challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where skeleton extraction is made by an interpretable matching model and a retrieval-guided response generator is followed by a separate generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in a variety of experiments. |
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection models assume the same training and testing distributions and can not cope with the continuously changing social network environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual Prompt-Tuning RD framework which avoids catastrophic forgetting of upstream tasks during sequential task learning and enables bidirectional knowledge transfer between domain tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework avoids catastrophic forgetting (CF) of upstream tasks during sequential task learning and enables bidirectional knowledge transfer between domain tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
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| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models are reshaping internet services, and serving them is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient distributed LLM serving system that splits prefill and decode requests into smaller chunks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces TTFT, TPOT, and latency compared to the state-of-the-art system. |
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics fail to align well with human judgments when evaluating QG questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional evaluation benchmark for QG and automatic metrics that evaluates questions and automated metrics across 7 dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates QG models and automatic metrics across 7 dimensions . it shows that most QG model performs unsatisfactorily in terms of answerability and answer consistency . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate solutions themselves and iteratively train on filtered, high-quality rationales, but performance reaches a ceiling after a few iterations. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to improve the efficiency of sampling heavy-tailed data by using Socratic-style guidance signals to help LLMs reasoning with complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective on difficult queries and on held-out tasks, while requiring human supervision. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong model editing apply parameter perturbations to static and dense layers for all instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that identifies the most knowledge-relevant layers for each editing instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the performance of the competitive RLEdit by 8.48% with perturbing only half of the layers per edit. |
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| Challenge: | Low-code LLM is a visual programming interface that allows users to incorporate their ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-LLM interaction framework that incorporates low-code visual programming interactions to achieve more controllable and stable responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables users to incorporate ideas into the process without writing trivial prompts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks such as story ending generation generate text-based story endings, but visual storytelling generates photo-streams-based stories. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Image-guided Story Ending Generation (IgSEG) given a multi-sentence story plot and an ending-related image, they propose MGCL to solve these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on automatic and human evaluation. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead. |
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| Challenge: | Computer-aided design (CAD) is crucial in prototyping 3D objects through geometric instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a CAD review task to automatically detect and correct potential errors . they propose CAD program repairer framework to provide helpful feedback on error correction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing MLLMs in detecting errors and providing feedback on error correction. |
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| Challenge: | Neural text generation is notorious for repetitive loops and tedious outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that penalizes future generation of repetitive content . they construct an anti-LM based on previously generated text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms established baselines in terms of generation quality, decoding speed, and universality. |
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| Challenge: | Existing calibration methods rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness . Existing methods fail under systematic errors, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical calibration framework that measures confidence at two levels . they propose sensitivity analysis to measure local curvature of deductive process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework de-saturates overconfident errors and improves selective generation performance on OOD benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to fragile, linear reasoning and weak visual grounding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates reasoning as a hierarchical search with self-verification and replaces linear Chain-of-Thought with a tree-search policy capable of backtracking to correct logical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on hallucination and safety benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects . they use a pipeline that provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. |
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| Challenge: | Pathology imaging is used for identifying the causes and effects of diseases or injuries. |
| Approach: | They propose a pathological visual question answering framework to analyze pathology images and answer medical questions related to these images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs self-supervised pretraining and finetuning end-to-end to learn powerful visual and textual representations jointly and automatically identifies and excludes noisy self-controlled examples from pretraining. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to name entity recognition and relation extraction are knowledge-based and may not be highly relevant. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal named entity recognition framework that leverages image information to improve the performance of NER and relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve state-of-the-art on four multi-modal named entity recognition datasets and one multi-module relation extraction dataset. |
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| Challenge: | SWE-Swiss-32B demonstrates strong generalization to other common LLM benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase training recipe that decomposes issue resolution into three core skills: Localization, Repair, and Unit Test Generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 60.2% score on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark and is in the top-tier performance bracket of much larger models. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually incorrect information, also known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for verifiable text generation with evolving memory and self-reflection that incorporates long-term memory to retain documents and recent documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting protein-protein interactions oversimplify the problem of PPI prediction in a semi-supervised manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal large language model that integrates proteins and PPI networks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LLaPA can predict protein-protein interactions (mPPI) types and affinities based on sequence data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions lack generalizability to unseen domains, underscoring the urgent need for generalization capabilities in the field of ECI. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Decomposed reasoning framework for Event Causality Identification that incorporates specialized agents such as Causal Explorer and Mediator Detector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the state-of-the-art performance of LLMs for event causality identification (ECI) tasks compared with baselines based on LLM and supervised training. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in interactive applications, and human evaluation remains the gold standard for assessing their performance in multi-turn conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to simulate users for automatic assistant evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human evaluations on two interactive tasks and achieves Spearman’s of 0.7 on both tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal sentiment analysis methods are limited to textual data and cannot handle multimodal scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a transfer learning framework that allows cross-lingual and cross-modal alignments and a language family disentanglement module that enhances the sharing of language universals within families. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods and can handle low-resource languages. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on single task, simple evaluation metrics, and readily available ground truth (GT) DataSciBench is built on curated, natural, and challenging prompts with complex evaluation criteria and uncertain GT. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models in data science that integrates LLM-based self-consistency and human verification to ensure accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models in all metrics and offers rigorous insights into LLM strengths and weaknesses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods focus only on relations between objects in an image and neglect the importance of syntactic dependency relations between words. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual channel graph convolutional network to capture relations between objects in an image and syntactic dependency relations between words in a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Existing generative dialogue models generate responses from input queries . however, the results are limited and the models are unsatisfactory . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which exploits retrieval results via a skeleton-to-response paradigm . they extract a query skelet and use it to generate a new skele and response . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the informativeness of the generated responses. |
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| Challenge: | Alympics provides a framework for simulating human-like strategic interactions with Large Language Model (LLM) agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework utilizing Large Language Models (LLM) agents for empirical game theory research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study human-like strategic interactions with large language model (LLM) agents in a game on the multi-round auction of scarce survival resources. |
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| Challenge: | Effidit is a digital writing assistant that provides three modules to help users write faster and more efficiently. |
| Approach: | They present Effidit, a digital writing assistant that provides three modules to help users write higher-quality text more efficiently. |
| Outcome: | Effidit expands the capabilities of a typical writing assistant by providing three modules . Effit can help users create their own text faster and more efficiently . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on text comprehension, but MLLMs lack the ability to integrate visual data over financial visuals. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 21 state-of-the-art multimodal large language models in a zero-shot setting . they use an annotated question–answer pair from eight common financial image modalities . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing models but trailed financial experts by 14 percentage points. |
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| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work merely predicts the total prison term, but in reality a defendant is often charged with multiple crimes. |
| Approach: | They propose a charge-based prison term prediction task that better fits real needs and makes it more accurate and interpretable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance for charge-specific feature selection and aggregation. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for short TST are difficult to implement and can cause content degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to vary the style polarity of text while preserving semantic content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over baselines and is highly efficient. |
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| Challenge: | Special attention is paid to the cross-modal misalignment in text-image datasets which may mislead the learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal back-translation method which uses diffusion-based generative models for pseudo-paralleled pairs and a divergence estimator to construct a high-resource corpora as a bridge for low-ressource learners. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 14 state-of-the-art methods in both entity and relation extraction tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pretraining data mixing for large language models neglect significant inter-domain overlaps and commonalities, failing to control the global diversity of the constructed training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-wise data mixture approach that performs global cross-domain sampling by systematically evaluating the quality and diversity of each sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds existing domain-based methods in multiple downstream tasks and perplexity assessments. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches on zero-shot event detection train models on datasets annotated with known event types and prompt them with unseen event definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to train models to better follow event definitions by using an automatic generated Diverse Event Definition dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three open benchmarks on zero-shot event detection. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on smaller, task-specific models enhanced by distilling knowledge from LLMs, but the diversity and quality of negative knowledge remains understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-guided contrastive rationale distillation framework that aims to enhance reasoning capabilities through contrastive knowledge learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently outperforms existing distillation techniques yielding higher-quality rationales. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained models do not provide all knowledge needed for fine-tuning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to achieve graceful forgetting in generative language models by pre-training a model on large-scale correlating datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the learning plasticity of the target task by selectively discarding irrelevant knowledge. |