Papers by Wei Du

51 papers
Penetrating Linguistic Disguises: A Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework for Fine-Grained Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Flexible word boundaries and linguistic obfuscation, particularly slang, challenge precise span-level hate speech detection in Chinese.
Approach: They propose a Slang-aware Label-Aligned Framework that maps slang to explicit hate semantics and uses task-specific branches to mitigate feature interference.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces ambiguity by mapping obscure slang to explicit hate semantics.
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners (2024.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence.
Approach: They propose a task to induce natural language rules from natural language facts using natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language.
Outcome: The proposed task surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations.
Mirroring Users: Towards Building Preference-aligned User Simulator with User Feedback in Recommendation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models lack specific task alignment and large-scale simulations are challenging due to their ambiguity, noise and massive volume.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages user feedback in RSs with advanced LLM capabilities to generate high-quality simulation data.
Outcome: The proposed framework boosts the alignment with human preferences and in-domain reasoning capabilities of the fine-tuned LLMs.
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities .
Approach: They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities.
Outcome: The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities.
What Makes AI Research Replicable? Executable Knowledge Graphs as Scientific Knowledge Representations (2026.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to replicate AI research are limited by insufficient background knowledge and the limitations of retrieval-augmented generation methods.
Approach: They propose a pluggable, paper-centric knowledge base that integrates code snippets and technical insights extracted from scientific literature into a verifiable, executable representation.
Outcome: The proposed knowledge base shows significant performance gains on paperBench when integrated into three agent frameworks with two different LLMs.
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work.
SharedRequest: Privacy-Preserving Model-Agnostic Inference for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing privacy-preserving inference methods sacrifice utility or efficiency, authors say . current approaches suffer a trilemma between privacy, utility, and efficiency, they say .
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic framework for privacy-preserving LLM inference that reformulates privacy protection at the batch level rather than the individual-prompt level.
Outcome: The proposed model-agnostic framework achieves 20% higher utility than previous models . it reduces query cost by up to 5 compared to non-batched inference .
Adaptive and Representative Multi-Interest Modeling for Recommendation with Large Language Model (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for multi-interest analysis of users rely on heuristic assumptions . however, the granularity of raw generation of LLMs is agnostic, leading to overly fine or coarse interest grouping.
Approach: They propose an LLM-driven adaptive and representative multi-interest modeling framework that exploits the agnostic granularity of LLMs for multi-interest analysis.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on real-world datasets.
CSTree-SRI: Introspection-Driven Cognitive Semantic Tree for Multi-Turn Question Answering over Extra-Long Contexts (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in single-turn question answering (QA) on short-text.
Approach: They propose a framework that captures logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintains coherence of multi-turn Questions.
Outcome: The proposed framework is able to capture logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintain coherence of multi-turn Questions.
NOVER: Incentive Training for Language Models via Verifier-Free Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in reinforcement learning, such as DeepSeek R1-Zero, highlight the effectiveness of incentive training, but these methods rely on external verifiers, which limits their applicability to domains like mathematics and coding, where such verifier is readily available.
Approach: They propose a general reinforcement learning framework that requires only standard supervised fine-tuning data with no need for an external verifier.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the model of the same size distilled from large reasoning models such as DeepSeek R1 671B by 7.7%.
UOR: Universal Backdoor Attacks on Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to attack pre-trained language models rely on manual selection of triggers and backdoor representations.
Approach: They propose a backdoor attack method that turns manual selection into automatic optimization . they propose to use poisoned contrastive learning to learn more uniform backdoor representations .
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better attack performance on text classification tasks compared to manual methods.
Re-weighting Tokens: A Simple and Effective Active Learning Strategy for Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing active learning approaches focus on information-rich sequences, reducing the need for expert annotation.
Approach: They propose a re-weighting-based active learning strategy that assigns dynamic weights to individual tokens.
Outcome: The proposed strategy improves on multiple corpora and validates its effectiveness.
Investigating Multi-Hop Factual Shortcuts in Knowledge Editing of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work has demonstrated the power of large language models in recalling knowledge and reasoning.
Approach: They propose to erase shortcut neurons to mitigate the associated risks . 20% of the failures are attributed to shortcuts, they find .
Outcome: The proposed approach reduces failures in multi-hop knowledge editing caused by shortcuts by 20% .
An Efficient and Precise Training Data Construction Framework for Process-supervised Reward Model in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for constructing process supervision training data are costly or suffer from poor quality.
Approach: They propose a framework called EpicPRM which annotates each intermediate reasoning step based on its quantified contribution and uses an adaptive binary search algorithm to enhance annotation precision and efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves annotation precision and efficiency and can be used to train a high-quality training dataset with 50k annotated intermediate steps.
Backdoor NLP Models via AI-Generated Text (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing attacks disregard fluency and semantic fidelity of poisoned text, rendering it easily detectable.
Approach: They propose to use AI-generated poisoned text to attack NLP models by establishing covert associations between trigger patterns and target labels without affecting normal accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves effective attacks while maintaining fluency and semantic similarity across all scenarios.
Multi-Agent Collaboration via Cross-Team Orchestration (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted various domains, especially through organized LLM-driven autonomous agents.
Approach: They propose a framework that enables orchestrated teams to jointly propose various task-oriented solutions and interact with their insights in a self-independence while cross-team collaboration environment for superior solutions generation.
Outcome: Experiments show that the framework can generate better software quality compared to state-of-the-art frameworks.
A Comprehensive Evaluation of Quantization Strategies for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Quantization studies have focused on instruction-tuned LLMs, leaving their performance on other benchmarks unclear.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate quantized large language models using four dimensions . they propose to reduce the bits needed for model weights or activations with minimal performance loss .
Outcome: The proposed framework can retain comparable performance to non-quantized LLMs on most benchmarks.
Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) ignore the internal state of the target model.
Approach: They propose a framework to repair model-specific errors by using a model-based approach . they employ cross-validation to identify model- specific Hard Data and a memory tree to induce macro-level error patterns from micro-level failures.
Outcome: The proposed framework yields significant performance gains on Twitter and other platforms.
Forget the Token and Pixel: Rethinking Gradient Ascent for Concept Unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Gradient Ascent (GA) has emerged as a promising approach for concept unlearning in Multimodal Generative Models (MGMs).
Approach: They propose a novel approach that selectively applies GA to targeted Conceptual Knowledge while preserving Natural Knowledge through Gradient Descent (GD).
Outcome: The proposed approach removes Conceptual Knowledge and inadvertently diminishes Natural Knowledge, resulting in utility degradation.
Improving Empathetic Response Generation by Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations (2021.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to empathetic response generation ignore the emotion cause . existing dialogue systems lack emotion understanding and empathy .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates emotion cause information into empathetic response generation by predicting context emotion labels and sequence of emotion cause-oriented labels.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves empathetic response generation by incorporating emotion cause information into the model.
Leveraging Graph to Improve Abstractive Multi-Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Empirical results show that our model brings substantial improvements over several strong baselines.
Approach: They propose a neural abstractive multi-document summarization model which captures cross-document relations and can guide the summary generation process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the WikiSum and MultiNews datasets and can be easily combined with pre-trained language models.
RACE: Retrieval-augmented Commit Message Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to automatically generate commit messages are repetitive or redundant.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented neural commit message generation method which treats the retrieved similar commit as an exemplar and leverages it to generate an accurate commit message.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines on a large dataset with five programming languages and can boost existing Seq2Seq models in commit message generation.
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost .
Approach: They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation .
Outcome: GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50–68% to 79–93% while reducing test costs by 20–54%.
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing tree search methods neglect the underlying reasoning process, resulting in poor search quality.
Approach: They propose a framework that systematically explores and refines the reasoning process for code generation by using a tree search engine and a reflection mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the code generation domain.
Jailbreak LLMs through Internal Stance Manipulation (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to exploit LLMs' inherent safety mechanism, including GCG and AutoDAN, are ineffective for certain malicious requests.
Approach: They propose a method that generates jailbreak prompts to suppress a refusal stance and induce affirmative responses by modifying adversarial prompts.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the best baseline approach in Llama-2-7b-chat and achieves a 92.2% success rate across all models.
SynGhost: Invisible and Universal Task-agnostic Backdoor Attack via Syntactic Transfer (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing attacks are classified into end-to-end and pre-training types based on the attack phase . Existing backdoor attacks are based upon perplexity, fine-pruning, and maxEntropy.
Approach: They propose an entropy-based poisoning filter that mitigates backdoor attacks . they propose an invisible and universal task-agnostic backdoor attack via syntactic transfer .
Outcome: The proposed attack can transfer backdoors to various downstream tasks while preserving pre-trained language models' pre-training capabilities.
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data.
Approach: They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection.
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently.
Approach: They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules.
Outcome: The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored.
Enabling Agents to Communicate Entirely in Latent Space (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Natural language is the de facto communication medium for LLM-based agents, but it presents a fundamental constraint . natural language downsampling limits the depth and nuance of information that can be transmitted . et al.: inter-agent latent space communication is a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks .
Approach: They propose a paradigm that leverages the last hidden states of an LLM as a representation of its thought for direct communication.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm outperforms fine-tuned chain-of-thought prompting and single-agent baselines even across heterogeneous models.
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance.
Approach: They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
Balancing Visual Context Understanding in Dialogue for Image Retrieval (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods neglect the nuanced nature of conversational context, causing a disconnect between dialogue context and visual content.
Approach: They propose a framework to enhance the comprehension of dialogue history and improve cross-modal matching for image retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in dialogue-to-image retrieval tasks.
How Large Language Models Encode Context Knowledge? A Layer-Wise Probing Study (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies have focused on enhancing the factualness of large language models using context knowledge.
Approach: They propose to use ChatGPT to construct probing datasets that provide diverse and coherent evidence corresponding to various facts.
Outcome: The proposed model can encode knowledge across different layers, and it is compared with existing models.
DeepSieve: Information Sieving via LLM-as-a-Knowledge-Router (2026.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing RAG methods lack fine-grained control over query and source sides, resulting in noisy retrieval and shallow reasoning.
Approach: They propose an agentic RAG framework that integrates information sieving via LLM-as-a-knowledge-router.
Outcome: Experiments on multi-hop QA tasks across heterogeneous sources demonstrate improved reasoning depth, retrieval precision, and interpretability over conventional approaches.
DVAGen: Dynamic Vocabulary Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-demos)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing dynamic vocabulary approaches struggle to generalize to novel or out-of-vocabulary words, limiting their flexibility in handling diverse token combinations.
Approach: They propose an open-source framework for training, evaluation, and visualization of dynamic vocabulary-augmented language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework validates the effectiveness of dynamic vocabulary-augmented language models on modern LLMs and shows support for batch inference significantly improving inference throughput.
Soft-Prompting with Graph-of-Thought for Multi-modal Representation Learning (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to learn multi-modal tasks are based on chain-of-thought . however, human thought processes are non-linear and employ dynamic adjustment and updating mechanisms.
Approach: They propose a chain-of-thought technique that adjusts the length of the chain to improve the performance of generated prompts.
Outcome: The proposed model improves multi-modal representation learning in visual, visual, and audio-visual tasks and also has good domain generalization performance due to better reasoning.
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
A Hierarchical Interactive Network for Joint Span-based Aspect-Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for aspect-sentiment analysis ignore internal correlations between aspect extraction and sentiment classification.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical interactive network to model two-way interactions between two tasks appropriately using shallow-level and deep-level inputs.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms existing methods.
Sparse-to-Dense: A Free Lunch for Lossless Acceleration of Video Understanding in LLMs (2025.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have achieved exceptional performance on tasks like video question answering and captioning.
Approach: They propose a decoding strategy that leverages sparse top-K attention and dense full attention to accelerate Video-LLMs without loss.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves a 1.94 walltime speedup in video processing.
Enhancing Multimodal Named Entity Recognition through Adaptive Mixup Image Augmentation (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current named entity recognition methods struggle with text-image mismatch problem due to a lack of visual context.
Approach: They propose an adaptive mixup image augmentation method that generates augmented images based on matching score between text and image .
Outcome: The proposed method can be integrated into existing models and demonstrate consistent performance improvements.
DELAN: Dual-Level Alignment for Vision-and-Language Navigation by Cross-Modal Contrastive Learning (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies focus on cross-modal attention at the fusion stage, but modality features generated by disparate uni-encoders reside in their own spaces, leading to a decline in the quality of cross-modulation and decision-making.
Approach: They propose a framework to align navigation-related modalities before fusion by cross-modal contrastive learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates with the majority of existing models, resulting in improved navigation performance on various VLN benchmarks, including R2R, R4R, and CVDN.
Adaptive Reinforcement Tuning Language Models as Hard Data Generators for Sentence Representation (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods use contrastive learning (CL) to learn effective sentence representations, but require extensive human annotation.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning approach for fine-tuning small-parameter LLMs to generate high-quality hard contrastive data without human feedback.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on seven semantic text similarity tasks.
AFPQ: Asymmetric Floating Point Quantization for LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Low-bit weight quantization can save memory and accelerate inference.
Approach: They propose asymmetric FP quantization which sets separate scales for positive and negative values.
Outcome: The proposed method leads to large accuracy improvements and can be easily plugged into other quantization methods, including GPTQ and AWQ, for better performance.
EmbSpatial-Bench: Benchmarking Spatial Understanding for Embodied Tasks with Large Vision-Language Models (2024.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have revealed significant deficiencies of LVLMs in understanding visual contents, leaving the gap between current embodied intelligence and large vision-language models (LVLM) .
Approach: They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' spatial understanding of embodied environments to evaluate their ability to understand visual contents.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is derived from embodied scenes and covers 6 spatial relationships from an egocentric perspective.
Document-level Causal Relation Extraction with Knowledge-guided Binary Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research on Event-Event Causal Relation Extraction (ECRE) has highlighted the lack of document-level modeling and causal hallucinations.
Approach: They propose a Knowledge-guided binary Question Answering method with event structures for ECRE that utilizes cross-task knowledge in IE.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the MECI and MAVEN-ERE datasets.
The GaoYao Benchmark: A Comprehensive Framework for Evaluating Multilingual and Multicultural Abilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing multilingual evaluation benchmarks neglect cultural nuances and lack language coverage in subjective tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that categorizes evaluation tasks into three cultural layers and nine cognitive sub-layers.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses prior coverage by up to 111% on 20+ LLMs.
A Multi-answer Multi-task Framework for Real-world Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models of machine reading comprehension (MRC) are based on cloze style questions or crowdworkers given a short passage from well-edited sources.
Approach: They propose a multi-answer multi-task framework that uses multiple reference answers for multiple questions.
Outcome: The proposed model increases the ROUGE-L score on the DuReader dataset from 44.18, the previous state-of-the-art, to 51.09 .
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions.
SRAP-Agent: Simulating and Optimizing Scarce Resource Allocation Policy with LLM-based Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research on the allocation of public scarce resources has limitations due to data scarcity and data scariness.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates Large Language Models into economic simulations . they conduct extensive policy simulation experiments to verify the framework's effectiveness .
Outcome: The proposed framework bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world dynamics by integrating large language models into economic simulations.
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both NLP and CV . they are comparable to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, but are more interpretable in their predictions.
Approach: They develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity . they inject the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks.
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task.
Approach: They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks.
Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models that label slots and detect intent do not preserve hierarchical relationship between words, slots, and intents.
Approach: They propose a capsule-based neural network model which performs slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than existing models and existing models on real-world datasets.

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