Papers by Weijie Xu
Cognitive-Uncertainty Guided Knowledge Distillation for Accurate Classification of Student Misconceptions (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying student misconceptions overlook students' reasoning processes, authors report . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework that mines high-value samples from existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms sota LLM and standard fine-tuned 72B models on cross-topic tests. |
Neural Topic Modeling with Large Language Models in the Loop (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in topic discovery, but their direct application to topic modeling suffers from issues such as incomplete topic coverage, misalignment of topics, and inefficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-in-the-loop framework that integrates Large Language Models with Neural Topic Models (NTMs) global topics and document representations are learned through the NTM, while an LLM refines these topics using an Optimal Transport (OT)-based alignment objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves topic interpretability while preserving the efficiency of existing NTMs. |
Mitigating Selection Bias with Node Pruning and Auxiliary Options (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit systematic preferences for answer choices when answering multiple-choice questions. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to identify and remove internal sources of selection bias . they propose Choice Kullback-Leibler Divergence (CKLD) to capture distributional imbalances in model predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve answer accuracy while reducing selection bias. |
Legal Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs: Procedural Alignment through Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing legal mathematical reasoning models lack structured numerical reasoning . existing models perform poorly on LexNum, while LexPam improves both mathematical accuracy and legal coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a legal mathematical reasoning benchmark LexNum and LexPam to address this problem . LexPam is a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for efficient legal reasoning training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves mathematical accuracy and legal coherence . it also improves legal cohesion and generalizes effectively across tasks and domains. |
ACR: Adaptive Context Refactoring via Context Refactoring Operators for Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiawei Shen, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Qingyu Niu, Guoqing Ma, Jingjiang Liu, Yidan Liang, Yilin Wang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-turn dialogues lack contextual consistency and dependencies, and models struggle to maintain factual faithfulness as interaction turns increase. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive context refactoring framework that monitors and reshapes the interaction history to mitigate contextual inertia and state drift. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines while reducing token consumption. |
ReTRE: Benchmarking LLM Transfer Robustness with Structure-Preserving Variants (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Learning transfer theory emphasizes that applying acquired knowledge to novel manifestations is a key signal of deep understanding |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that probes transfer robustness along two rewrite levels: Near Transfer and Far Transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark demonstrates that large language models are robust when faced with novel manifestations of the same problem. |
MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized product search methods assume that users’ query fully captures their real motivation, but in practice, user's queries do not always articulate the requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search method that embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs and utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in retrieval and ranking tasks. |
DeTiME: Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-decoder based LLM (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural Topic Models and Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily use contextual embeddings from LLMs, which are not optimal for clustering or topic generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Encoder-Decoders to generate highly clusterable embeddings that could generate topics that exhibit enhanced clusterability and enhanced semantic coherence compared to existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is efficient to train and exhibits high adaptability, demonstrating its potential for a wide array of applications. |
The Linearity of the Effect of Surprisal on Reading Times across Languages (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a large amount of insight into human language processing can be gleaned by studying word-by-word processing difficulty. |
| Approach: | They extend the study by examining eyetracking corpora of seven languages . they find evidence for superlinearity in some languages, but highly sensitive to language models . |
| Outcome: | The study extends existing studies on english to Danish, Dutch, English, German, Japanese, Mandarin, and Russian. |
Synthesizing Conversations from Unlabeled Documents using Automatic Response Segmentation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Several datasets have been developed for building conversational question answering systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust dialog synthesising method that learns segmentation instead of using sentence boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior quality when compared to WikiDialog . it also improves performance across OR-QuAC benchmarks . |
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weijie Shi, Jipeng Zhang, Yaguang Wu, Jingzhi Fang, Shibo Zhang, Yao Zhao, Hao Chen, Ruiyuan Zhang, Yue Cui, Jia Zhu, Sirui Han, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency. |
Beyond Guilt: Legal Judgment Prediction with Trichotomous Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current legal large language models lack trichotomous reasoning capabilities due to the absence of an appropriate benchmark dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for Legal Judgment Prediction with Innocent Verdicts that incorporates trichotomous dogmatics into zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset extends three widely-used legal datasets through LLM-based augmentation and manual verification. |
Wasserstein Distance Regularized Sequence Representation for Text Matching in Asymmetrical Domains (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Asymmetrical text matching is a fundamental problem in information retrieval and natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that regularizes features vectors projected from different domains . WD-Match can be used to improve different text matching methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and benchmarks on four datasets. |
vONTSS: vMF based semi-supervised neural topic modeling with optimal transport (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent Neural Topic Models (NTMs) have limited applications in the real world due to the challenge of incorporating human knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised neural topic modeling method, vONTSS, which uses von Mises-Fisher variational autoencoders and optimal transport. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing semi-supervised topic modeling methods on multiple aspects. |
Logic Rules as Explanations for Legal Case Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to learn explainable legal case retrieval models fail to provide faithful and interpretable explanations for legal cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses logic rules to explain legal case retrieval results . they extend benchmarks of LeCaRD and ELAM with manually annotated logic rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to provide faithful explanations for legal case retrieval. |
Token-wise Influential Training Data Retrieval for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been widely used in various industries due to their unprecedented scale and impressive capabilities derived from the massive training dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can estimate the influence of training data by caching and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can estimate the influence of training data within minutes, achieving over a speedup of 6,326x. |
CitaLaw: Enhancing LLM with Citations in Legal Domain (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have focused on enabling large language models (LLMs) to generate citationsupported outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a citation-based framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to produce legally sound responses with appropriate citations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables LLMs to retrieve supporting citations from the reference corpus and align these citation with the corresponding sentences in their responses. |
LLMs and Copyright Risks: Benchmarks and Mitigation Approaches (2025.naacl-tutorial)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing, but their widespread use has raised significant copyright concerns. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI and examine specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
| Outcome: | The course will provide an overview of relevant copyright principles and their application to AI, followed by an examination of specific copyright issues in LLM development and deployment. |
RSDA: Restoring Stale Data Affinity via Dynamic Renovation Strategy for Mitigating Data Scarcity (2026.acl-long)
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Yidan Liang, Jia Zhu, Weijie Shi, Hanghui Guo, Yue Cui, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Jingjiang Liu, Qingyu Niu, Yilin Wang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | High-quality data is the cornerstone of advancing large language models, but the supply of premium data is nearing depletion, while vast stale corpora remain underutilized. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to restore stale data affinity by quantifying the latent value of samples and employing a dynamic renovation strategy selection mechanism to determine the optimal component-level strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance improvements using less than 10% of the data volume, underscoring that the latent potential of stale corpora remains largely untapped. |
PIP: Perturbation-based Iterative Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are growing in size and complexity, causing significant challenges for their practical deployment in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a double-view structured pruning method that combines information from two different views to iteratively prune those that struggle to distinguish between them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the parameter count by approximately 20% while retaining over 85% of the original model’s accuracy across varied benchmarks. |
Optimal Partial Transport Based Sentence Selection for Long-form Document Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document matching are limited by the partial nature of the sentence-level matching signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching approach that equips existing document matching models with an Optimal Partial Transport component, namely OPT-Match, which selects the key sentences that play a major role in matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on four publicly available datasets and the key sentences selected by it are consistent with human-provided rationales. |
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation (2025.naacl-long)
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Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-party data valuation approach that assesses the value of individual data samples and proposes a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, showing significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase. |
KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjiang Liu, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Xiaokang Jin, Yilin Wang, Qingyu Niu, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Yidan Liang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods compress content for gist browsing, but they break prerequisite logic in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. |
LegalReasoner: Step-wised Verification-Correction for Legal Judgment Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Weijie Shi, Han Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Mengze Li, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing legal judgment prediction methods struggle with logical errors when conducting complex legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances LJP reliability through step-wise verification and correction of the reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves concordance with court decisions from 72.37 to 80.27 on LLAMA-3.1-70B. |
NeuReduce: Reducing Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic Expressions by Recurrent Neural Network (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) expressions are difficult to simplify because of interleaving bitwise and arithmical operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn and reduce MBA expressions using a string to string method . they propose to use a dataset to train the method to reduce MBA rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all other tools in terms of accuracy, solving time, and performance overhead. |
DioR: Adaptive Cognitive Detection and Contextual Retrieval Optimization for Dynamic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models face limitations in key aspects such as retrieval triggers and contextual scrutiny of retrieval content. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic RAG method that uses cognitive detection and contextual retrieval optimization to determine when retrieval is needed and what to retrieve for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method. |
Memory efficiency and resource-rational encoding in sentence processing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that language models need to be constrained in their use of working memory for context, the analogue to human working memory (WM). |
| Approach: | They propose to inject noise into hidden representations of Transformer-based LMs to capture constraint on memory encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves alignment with human reading times and makes them more compressed and categorical. |
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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Weijie Shi, Hao Chen, Jiaming Li, Yao Zhao, Yazhong Zhang, Qijin Chen, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jia Zhu, Jiajie Xu, Xiaofang Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks. |
Benchmarking Multi-National Value Alignment for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Chengyi Ju, Weijie Shi, Chengzhong Liu, Jiaming Ji, Jipeng Zhang, Ruiyuan Zhang, Jiajie Xu, Yaodong Yang, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models focus on ethical reviews, failing to capture the diversity of national values. |
| Approach: | They propose a national value extraction pipeline to efficiently construct value assessment datasets and a model-based model with instruction tagging to process raw data sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the alignment of LLMs with the values of five major nations: China, the United States, the UK, France, and Germany. |
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning when faced with factual queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS significantly improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance. |
Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of ‘value’ labels, but this lacks exploration of needs in user consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a consultation value assessment framework that evaluates historical consultations from three novel perspectives: (1) Scenario Scope Value, (2) Posterior Action Value, and (3) Time Decay Value. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and commercial datasets on both retrieval and ranking tasks. |
GraphMR: Graph Neural Network for Mathematical Reasoning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown the effectiveness of sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seque) on mathematics solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence neural network which can learn hierarchical information of graphs inputs to solve mathematical problems and speculate answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural network outperforms other neural networks in hidden information learning and mathematics resolving. |
The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Using long-term memory, large language models can embed social hierarchies into their emotional reasoning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 15 large language models on validated emotional intelligence tests to examine how user memory affects emotional intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The results show that the models with advantaged profiles receive more accurate emotional interpretations. |