Papers by Wen Hou
From Selection to Refinement: Iterative Optimization for Instruction Data (2026.acl-long)
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Hang Hu, Ziyan Liu, Rujie Wen, Ruihui Hou, Xueyan Wu, Mu Zhang, Jianxing Yu, Tong Ruan, Jingping Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize instruction tuning datasets face two main challenges: unreasonable pruning of potentially valuable low-quality data and the persistence of noise or semantic drift during revision. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated iterative framework for instruction data optimization that prunes low-quality data and refines low quality data using feedback-driven iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on seven public benchmark datasets with high data efficiency. |
COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pretrained language models have shown promising results on commonsense reasoning benchmark datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense reasoning benchmark dataset with 4k sentence pairs . they propose 'gamified' model-in-the-loop setup to incentivize challenging samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the proposed model achieves 71% standard accuracy and 51% pairwise accuracy, well below human performance. |
Lost in Overlap: Exploring Logit-based Watermark Collision in LLMs (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing watermarking methods embed imperceptible identifiers into text to address copyright concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a new philosophy for watermark attacks that addresses watermark collision . they demonstrate that collision poses a threat to all logit-based watermark algorithms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves watermark collision performance on top of other methods. |
SpecCache: Speculative KV Cache Reuse for Efficient RAG Serving (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Qirui Chen, Jingxian Shuai, Yunpeng Hou, Huasen He, null Jianyang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves LLMs but faces high prefill latency during long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses deep-layer hidden-state norms to guide token selection . they propose to use deep-layered hidden-status norms as a proxy to guide the token selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed SpecCache outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks. |
Spec-o3: A Tool-Augmented Vision-Language Agent for Rare Celestial Object Candidate Vetting via Automated Spectral Inspection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Spec-o3 is a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented vision-language agent that performs astronomer-aligned spectral inspection via interleaved multimodal chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Spec-o3 outperforms traditional visual inspection methods on rare-object inspection tasks. |
On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing (2022.naacl-main)
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Yusheng Su, Xiaozhi Wang, Yujia Qin, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Kaiyue Wen, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but require much more training time than fine-timing. |
| Approach: | They empirically investigate the transferability of soft prompts across different downstream tasks and PLMs to determine what decides prompt transferability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by tuning a few soft prompts, but requires much more training time than fine-timing. |
Finding Skill Neurons in Pre-trained Transformer-based Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They find that after prompt tuning, some neurons encode task-specific skills . they also show that skill neurons are most likely generated in pre-training . |
| Outcome: | The neurons are highly predictive of task labels after prompt tuning for specific tasks. |
Rethinking Table Pruning in TableQA: From Sequential Revisions to Gold Trajectory-Supervised Parallel Search (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Guo, Shenghao Ye, Shuangwu Chen, Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Bai Qirui, Dong Jin, Yunpeng Hou, Huasen He, null Jianyang, Xiaobin Tan
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods rely on sequential revisions and unreliable critique signals . Existing methods fail to detect the loss of answer-critical data . |
| Approach: | They propose a table pruning framework which transforms table pruning to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the strongest baseline pruning framework by 3.2% on various tabular reasoning tasks. |
Token-Level Policy Optimization: Linking Group-Level Rewards to Token-Level Aggregation via sequence-level likelihood (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has significantly advanced the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework that leverages sequence-level likelihood to link group-level rewards with individual tokens via token- level aggregation and introduces a KL-Divergence mask constraint that targets tokens with positive advantages and decreasing entropy to mitigate abrupt policy updates. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TEPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks and reduces convergence time by 50% compared with GRPO/DAPO. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
Safety-Utility Conflicts Are Not Global: Surgical Alignment via Head-Level Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing mitigation strategies rely on global gradient geometry to resolve alignment conflicts . however, they overlook Modular Heterogeneity within Transformers, resulting in suboptimal trade-offs . Conflict-Aware Sparse Tuning (CAST) combines head-level diagnosis with sparse fine-tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates head-level diagnosis with sparse fine-tuning to address this limitation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates head-level diagnosis with sparse fine-tuning to reduce alignment conflicts in LLMs. |