Papers by Weiwei Sun
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| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating semantic annotations for different languages are attracting more and more interest. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend Universal Semantic Tagging to Mandarin Chinese and evaluate its performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme is only tested in four Indo–European languages . accuracies are 92.7% and 94.6% for Chinese and English respectively . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve multi-hop question are constrained by the retriever and the noise in the retrieved documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates parametric knowledge of large language models with external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning has enabled large language models to achieve remarkable performance, yet its success heavily depends on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a mutual alignment framework which enforces coherence between instructions and responses through mutual constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes well across model architectures and sizes, achieving state-of-the-art performance on LLaMA, Mistral, and Qwen models across diverse benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . they decompose a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference . it decomposes a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria . the framework is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompts . |
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| Challenge: | Prior work has explored the selection of examples for in-context learning, neglecting the internal relationships between examples and exist an inconsistency between training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential-aware method that leverages the LLM’s feedback on varying context, aiding in capturing inter-relationships and sequential information among examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 23 NLP tasks show that Se2 surpasses baselines and achieves 42% relative improvement over random selection. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier. |
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. |
| Outcome: | ADV-LLM significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100% ASR on various open-source LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging because of the one-to-many problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based dialogue evaluation approach that leverages the pre-created utterance as reference other than the gold response to relieve the one-to-many problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art evaluation methods on three datasets and two existing benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work utilizes generative LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. |
| Approach: | They investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR and use a test set to verify the model’s ability to rank unknown knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Document retrieval techniques are used to compute semantic similarity between a query and documents, but the scalar similarity fails to reflect enough information, hindering the interpretation of retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the global document-query similarity through contrastive learning and integrates well-designed fusion and decoding modules. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
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| Challenge: | This tutorial focuses on representing and processing sentence meaning in the form of labeled directed graphs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will briefly review relevant background in formal and linguistic semantics . it will also briefly define a unified abstract view on different flavors of semantic graphs - and associated terminology . |
| Outcome: | The tutorial will briefly review relevant background in formal and linguistic semantics . |
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| Challenge: | Generative retrieval heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers, thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm that can learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and industrial datasets and can handle new documents. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on domain adaptation in NLP focus on learning challenges at the syntax-semantics interface during second language acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose to use English Resource Grammar and TLE to parse ESL data using a reranking model to evaluate the quality of the annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can obtain a very promising quality in comparison to human annotations. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses, but their robustness is still far from optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage training framework that helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework improves diversity and aligns the model with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Despite the widespread use of English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESFL), developing syntactico-semantic representations for it is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar-based constructivist approach to address the challenges in ESFL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach bridges the gap between literal cues and intended meaning by using constructions as fundamental units. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
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| Challenge: | a learner language (interlanguage) is an idiolect developed by a learning of a second or foreign language. |
| Approach: | They propose to use semantic role labeling as a case task to parse interlanguages . they then evaluate three off-the-shelf SRL systems to gauge how successful they are . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an F-score of 72.06, a 2.02 point improvement over the baseline. |
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| Challenge: | Recent literature reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-detection method to detect which questions an LLM does not know by combining the two components to identify whether the model generates a non-factual response to the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect which questions an LLM does not know across factoid question-answering, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | a new type of graph-based meaning representation allows analysis for scope-related phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose variable-in-situ logico-semantic graphs to bridge gap between semantic graph and logical form parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based meaning representation achieves 92.39% accuracy in terms of elementary dependency match . the output of the proposed parser is highly coherent . |
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is one of the most popular parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation method that adds residual paths during training and merges them together during inference to achieve better results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.5x faster convergence speed and improves performance by 14.3% on NLG, NLU, and text-to-image tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing formal frameworks for graph manipulation are underexploited. |
| Approach: | They propose a DAG transducer to perform graph-to-program transformation using a declarative programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed transducer achieves a BLEU-4 score of 68.07 for natural language generation from type-logical semantic graphs. |
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| Challenge: | Knowledge selection is the key in knowledge-grounded dialogues (KGD), which aims to select an appropriate knowledge snippet to be used in the utterance based on dialogue history. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative approach for knowledge selection called GenKS that learns to select snippets by generating their identifiers with a sequence-to-sequence model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach captures intra-knowledge interaction inherently through attention mechanisms while generating their identifiers with a sequence-to-sequence model. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on empty category detection have shown positive effects on syntactic parsing . empty categories are used to indicate long-distance dependencies, discontinuous constituents, and certain dropped elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ECD to detect empty categories without syntactic analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the prior state-of-the-art by significant margins. |
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| 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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning pipelines suffer from degraded instruction following, excessive rollout costs, and strict context limits. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning of large language model (LLM) agents for long-horizon multi-turn tool use where context length quickly becomes a bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the success rate while maintaining the same or even lower working context length compared to baselines. |
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| Challenge: | a new approach to natural language processing uses arbitrary symbols to represent meaning . Soundex, MetaPhone, NYSIIS, logogram are used as inputs for NLP . |
| Approach: | They propose to use arbitrary symbols to represent linguistic meaning of a word . they propose to integrate codewords with text to provide more reliable inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on machine translation, language modeling, and part-of speech tagging. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue quality assessment are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset . open-domain dialogue assessment is complicated and costly, but it can be done by recruiting human evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is openly accessible at https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dialogue_quality_evaluation. |
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| Challenge: | Graph-structured semantic representations can encode rich semantic information of natural language sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a SHRG-based parser that relates synchronous production rules to syntacto-semantic composition processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the best existing model by 4.87 points . it relates synchronous production rules to syntacto-semantic composition process . |
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| Challenge: | Existing computational studies of child language acquisition focus on isolated mechanisms, such as spreading activation in retrieval, sentence planning, or production efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational framework for modeling child language production using graphs to formalize meaning and Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar to formalized the syntax–semantics interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on graphs to formalize meaning and Synchronous Hyperedge Replacement Grammar (SHRG) resulting interpretable grammars are evaluated by their ability to generate utterances . |
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| Challenge: | Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are limited on knowledge-intensive tasks due to the limited number of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism that fine-tunes Large Language Models with larger adapters . they store and update the parameters of larger adapter adapters on the CPU . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to those obtained with larger memory capacities over the limited bandwidth of PCI Express (PCIe). |
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency than competing approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose an answering model with a prompting model to address imperfections in open-domain question answering . Empirical studies show AmbigPrompt achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two commonly-used open benchmarks and achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results while using less memory and having a lower inference latency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for graph parsing are exponential or high-degree polynomial w.r.t. grammars, and there are few systems that can parse large but frequent MRs with a realistic, wide-coverage grammar in a reasonable time. |
| Approach: | They propose an exact graph parsing algorithm that exploits locality as terminal edge-adjacency in HRG rules and categorizes a subclass of HRG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can parse graphs with a (competence) grammar in a time-efficient manner. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for large language models lack the ability to calibrate their outputs towards human preference. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-stage, gradient-free approach to calibrate an LLM-based evaluator toward human preference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves correlation with expert evaluation on multiple text quality evaluation datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but need for task-specific prompt engineering can hinder their generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and versatile retriever that automatically retrieves prompts for a given zero-shot task input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is universally applicable across tasks and models . it mitigates hallucination problem in chatGPT, and it improves even the strongest LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies reveal query out-of-distribution issues degrading ANN performance . a distribution regularizer is introduced into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Approach: | They introduce a distribution regularizer into the encoder training objective to encourage alignment between query and base embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently improves retrieval performance across multiple datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction-tuned IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on instruction-tuned models than non-instruction-tunned models on MAIR. |