Papers by Wen Cui
Athena 2.0: Contextualized Dialogue Management for an Alexa Prize SocialBot (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Juraj Juraska, Kevin Bowden, Lena Reed, Vrindavan Harrison, Wen Cui, Omkar Patil, Rishi Rajasekaran, Angela Ramirez, Cecilia Li, Eduardo Zamora, Phillip Lee, Jeshwanth Bheemanpally, Rohan Pandey, Adwait Ratnaparkhi, Marilyn Walker
| Challenge: | Athena 2.0 is a socialbot that has been a finalist in the last two Alexa Prize Grand Challenges. |
| Approach: | They describe Athena 2.0's dialogue management strategy and its performance in the Alexa Prize 20/21 competition. |
| Outcome: | The system is a finalist in the Alexa Prize 20/21 competition and will be shown on a live demo and recorded video recordings. |
MISC: A Mixed Strategy-Aware Model integrating COMET for Emotional Support Conversation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for emotional support conversation are too coarse-grained to capture user’s instant mental state and focus on expressing empathy in the response rather than gradually reducing user’ s distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which firstly infers the user’s fine-grained emotional status and then responds skillfully using a mixture of strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers the user’s fine-grained emotional status and responds skillfully using mixed-up strategy modeling. |
Heterogeneous Adaptive Policy Optimization: Tailoring Optimization to Every Token’s Nature (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that use entropy as a discrete filter or post-hoc regulator are limited in their ability to optimize for reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-aware algorithm that continuously adapts optimization dynamics based on token-level entropy throughout the entire training process. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning, code, and logic tasks across multiple models demonstrate HAPO’s consistent superiority over DAPO. |
Bayesian Active Learning with Gaussian Processes Guided by LLM Relevance Scoring for Dense Passage Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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Junyoung Kim, Anton Korikov, Jiazhou Liang, Justin Cui, Yifan Simon Liu, Qianfeng Wen, Mark Zhao, Scott Sanner
| Challenge: | Existing approaches passively rely on first-stage dense retrievers, which leads to two limitations: failing to retrieve relevant passages in semantically distinct clusters and failing to propagate relevance signals to the broader corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that propagates sparse LLM relevance signals across the embedding space to guide global exploration. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing approaches under the same budget on all four datasets. |
InferPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Inference attacks are important for assessing model's robustness, but their implementation and parameters are challenging for non-experts. |
| Approach: | They propose an autonomous agent capable of conducting inference attacks without human intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a 100.0% task completion rate and near-expert attack performance with an average token cost of only 0.627 per run. |
OpenEL: An Annotated Corpus for Entity Linking and Discourse in Open Domain Dialogue (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER), named entity linking and discourse modeling are crucial aspects of natural language understanding for open domain dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present an annotated multi-domain corpus for linking entities in open-domain dialogue . they use dialogue context and anaphora resolution to assess the effectiveness of the task . |
| Outcome: | The OpenEL corpus is an annotated multi-domain corpus for linking entities in open-domain dialogue . the system Flair + BLINK has the best performance with a 0.65 F1 score . |
Active Listening: Personalized Question Generation in Open-Domain Social Conversation with User Model Based Prompting (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work shows that users of conversational systems want a more personalized experience . Question Generation tasks focus on factual questions from textual excerpts . |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that conversational systems want a more personalized experience . they use large language models capable of casual conversation to generate PQs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces the most natural and engaging responses against competing models. |
Implicit Discourse Relation Identification for Open-domain Dialogues (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Discourse relation identification is a challenging problem in open-domain dialogue systems . previous work relies on formal text but this data is not suitable for informal dialogue . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically extract the implicit discourse relation argument pairs from dialogic turns and a pipeline to identify them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline extracts argument pairs from dialogic turns and improves it by performing feature ablation and incorporating dialogue features. |
MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers (2026.acl-long)
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Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency often enforce rigid structural constraints such as local attention windows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments sparse-attention mechanisms with dynamically integrated in-context information through an efficient retrieval system. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that MATCH significantly improves the performance of sparse-attention models on synthetic and real-world natural-language tasks. |
Every Document Owns Its Structure: Inductive Text Classification via Graph Neural Networks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based methods for text classification cannot capture contextual word relationships within each document nor can they produce inductive learning of new words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Graph Neural Networks to learn the local word representations and then aggregate the word nodes as the document embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets. |
Multimodal Item Scoring for Natural Language Recommendation via Gaussian Process Regression with LLM Relevance Judgments (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Simon Liu, Qianfeng Wen, Jiazhou Liang, Mark Zhao, Justin Cui, Anton Korikov, Armin Toroghi, Junyoung Kim, Scott Sanner
| Challenge: | Existing NLRec approaches use Dense Retrieval to compute item relevance scores . DR views the request as the sole relevance label, leading to a weak proxy for query relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Gaussian Process Regression to model item relevance . they propose to combine LLM with a Gauss-based kernel to model multimodal relevance judging . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms simpler unimodal kernels and baseline methods by up to 65% on four NLRec datasets and two LLM backbones. |