Papers by Wei Pang
MoNMT: Modularly Leveraging Monolingual and Bilingual Knowledge for Neural Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-domain translation tasks only use monolingual data, whereas bilingual data is indispensable for improving the models. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular strategy that facilitates the cooperation of monolingual and bilingual knowledge in translation tasks by avoiding catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superior generalization and robustness over the conventional approach. |
MERMAID: Multi-perspective Self-reflective Agents with Generative Augmentation for Emotion Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models struggle to handle ambiguous emotional expressions and implicit affective cues, which are crucial for affective understanding but largely overlooked. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that integrates a self-reflection module, an emotion-guided visual augmentation module, and a cross-modal verification module to enhance emotion recognition. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that MERMAID outperforms existing methods and achieves absolute accuracy gains of 8.70%–27.90% across diverse benchmarks. |
SharedRequest: Privacy-Preserving Model-Agnostic Inference for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| 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 . |
MLaKE: Multilingual Knowledge Editing Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on knowledge editing focus on monolingual scenarios, neglecting the complexities presented by multilingual contexts and multi-hop reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the adaptability of multilingual knowledge editing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the adaptability of multilingual knowledge editing methods across five languages. |
Self-Distillation Bridges Distribution Gap in Language Model Fine-Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-tuning of large language models for specific tasks can be challenging . distribution shift during fine-timing can lead to performance degradation in general task capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that bridges the distribution gap between task datasets and LLMs by guiding fine-tuning with a distilled dataset generated by the model itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves comparable or superior performance on downstream tasks compared to the vanilla approach. |
HierPrompt: Zero-Shot Hierarchical Text Classification with LLM-Enhanced Prototypes (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Hierarchical Text Classification are based on prototypes, but do not perform well due to ambiguity and impreciseness of category names. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages hierarchy-aware prompts to instruct LLM to produce more representative and informative prototypes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on three benchmark datasets. |
DREAM: Improving Video-Text Retrieval Through Relevance-Based Augmentation Using Large Foundation Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in video-text retrieval models have limited training data annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Video-Text Retrieval Paradigm with Relevance-based Augmentation which enhances video and text data using large foundation models to learn more generalized features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves video-text retrieval performance over existing methods. |
ToolCoder: A Systematic Code-Empowered Tool Learning Framework for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hanxing Ding, Shuchang Tao, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool learning rely on hand-crafted prompts and natural language reasoning, making multi-step planning difficult and lacking precise error diagnosis and reflection mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates tool learning as a code generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance in task completion accuracy and execution reliability compared to existing approaches. |
Breaking the Evaluation Paradox: Evaluating High-Entropy Search with Computationally Irreducible Constraints (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for evaluation of exhaustive search capabilities is needed . high-entropy enumeration tasks make such ground truth impossible for humans to create . VERITAS is a framework built on the principle of computationally irreducible constraints . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses non-optimizable constraints to create verifiable searches . VERITAS can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation framework for large language models is based on non-optimizable constraints . the framework can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control . |
Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Weixuan Ou, Run Liu, Shengyuan Pang, Guancheng Wan, Ranjie Duan, Wei Dong, Kai-Wei Chang, XiaoFeng Wang, Ying Nian Wu, Xinfeng Li
| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment techniques prioritize mitigating harmful responses at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning free framework to improve safety and reduce false refusals by dynamic, inference-time intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework raises compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. |
MacLaSa: Multi-Aspect Controllable Text Generation via Efficient Sampling from Compact Latent Space (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-aspect controllable text generation require expensive iteration / searching within the discrete text space during the decoding stage, resulting in a degradation of text quality due to the domain discrepancies between different aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that estimates compact latent space for multiple aspects and performs efficient Sampling with a fast sampler to eliminate domain discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on attribute relevance and textual quality while maintaining a high inference speed. |
OFFSIDE: Benchmarking Unlearning Misinformation in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MU are limited by a lack of image diversity and coarse-grained unlearning targets. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate misinformation unlearning in MLLMs . OFFSIDE supports advanced unlearning targets such as fine-grained unlearning and visual rumor removal. |
| Outcome: | OFFSIDE supports advanced unlearning targets, such as fine-grained unlearning and visual rumor removal. |
Phased Instruction Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance pre-trained language models' ability to follow instructions are limited due to the simultaneous handling of varying instruction complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a phased instruction fine-tuning method that posits that the transition of a pre-trained language model from simple next-word prediction to sophisticated instruction following is a gradual learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the one-off instruction fine-tuning method in win rate and validates the hypothesis of progressive alignment. |
The Evolution of Thought: Tracking LLM Overthinking via Reasoning Dynamics Analysis (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Wei, Liang Pang, Jiahao Liu, Wenjie Shi, Jingcheng Deng, Shicheng Xu, Zenghao Duan, Jingang Wang, Fei Sun, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Explicit reasoning trajectories increase performance but often trigger overthinking . despite its importance, this study examines how each step of reasoning affects the final outcome . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reasoning Completion Point Detector that detects the RCP by monitoring rank dynamics of termination tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage by up to 44% while preserving accuracy. |
Following the Autoregressive Nature of LLM Embeddings via Compression and Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jingcheng Deng, Zhongtao Jiang, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Liwei Chen, Kun Xu, Yang Song, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches when using the same amount of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new contrastive learning method built on embedding conditional probability distributions that integrates two tasks: information compression and conditional distribution alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms traditional contrastive learning approaches and achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art models when using the same amount of data. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
Privacy-Preserving Reasoning with Knowledge-Distilled Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG systems require uploading local documents to the cloud, resulting in inference latency and poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalizable knowledge-distilled parametric RAG model aligned with standard RAG in document structure and parameter activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in accuracy and generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data. |
Monotonic Infinite Lookback Attention for Simultaneous Machine Translation (P19-1)
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Naveen Arivazhagan, Colin Cherry, Wolfgang Macherey, Chung-Cheng Chiu, Semih Yavuz, Ruoming Pang, Wei Li, Colin Raffel
| Challenge: | Simultaneous machine translation begins to translate each source sentence before the source speaker has finished speaking, with applications to live and streaming scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a simultaneous translation system that learns an adaptive schedule with a neural machine translation model that attends over all source tokens read thus far. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can achieve latency-quality trade-offs favorable to a proposed wait-k strategy for many latency values. |
Multimodal Misinformation Detection by Learning from Synthetic Data with Multimodal LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Obtaining large-scale, high-quality real-world fact-checking datasets is costly . generalizability of detectors trained on synthetic data to real-life scenarios remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to use synthetic data to learn from real-world data to detect multimodal misinformation . they propose to combine model-agnostic data selection methods with real-life data distributions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a small MLLM on real-world fact-checking datasets, surpassing GPT-4V. |