Papers by Wenhan Xiong
HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing question answering datasets focus on dealing with homogeneous information, but using homogenous information alone might lead to coverage problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale question-answering dataset that requires reasoning on heterogeneous information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve an EM score of 40% while the existing model is far behind human performance. |
Self-Supervised Learning for Contextualized Extractive Summarization (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for extractive summarization are usually trained from scratch with a cross-entropy loss . previous work builds an end-to-end system to learn to choose sentences without explicitly modeling document context . |
| Approach: | They propose three auxiliary pre-training tasks that learn to capture the document context in a self-supervised fashion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on a CNN/DM dataset. |
Simple yet Effective Bridge Reasoning for Open-Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on open-domain multi-hop question answering relies on off-the-shelf information retrieval techniques to retrieve answer passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a new subproblem for open-domain multi-hop question answering . they aim to recognize the anchor from a set of start passages with a reading comprehension model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the baseline method on the open-domain hotpotQA benchmark. |
LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large language models (LLMs) train on short text segments due to the computational overhead quadratic in the input lengths of their Transformer architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 2.7 decoding speed up and 7.5 memory saving over the original model. |
Do Multi-hop Readers Dream of Reasoning Chains? (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multihop reasoning are limited in their performance . multi-hop reasoning requires the ability to gather information from multiple passages . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides the full reasoning chain of multiple passages instead of just one final passage where the answer appears. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by providing the full reasoning chain of multiple passages instead of just one final passage where the answer appears. |
Coarse-to-Fine Contrastive Learning in Image-Text-Graph Space for Improved Vision-Language Compositionality (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted severe limitations of contrastive learning models in their ability to perform compositional reasoning over objects, attributes, and relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph decomposition framework and negative mining techniques to improve attribute binding and relation understanding of scene graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves attribute binding, relation understanding, generalization, and productivity on multiple benchmarks. |
One-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on knowledge graph completion require a large number of positive examples for each relation, but long-tail relations are more common in KGs and those newly added relations do not have many known triples for training. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-shot relational learning framework that utilizes the knowledge distilled by embedding models and learns a matching metric by considering both the learned embeddments and one-hop graph structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on existing embedding models and eliminates the need for retraining when dealing with newly added relations. |
Learning to Learn and Predict: A Meta-Learning Approach for Multi-Label Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-label classification ignore complexity and dependencies among labels . Experimental results show that our method can obtain more accurate multi-lab classification results. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning method to capture complex label dependencies . they use a Meta-learner to jointly learn the training policies and prediction policies for different labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can capture complex label dependencies on fine-grained entity typing and text classification tasks. |
Sub-network Discovery and Soft-masking for Continual Learning of Mixed Tasks (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Continual Learning (CL) have limited KT and catastrophic forgetting . a new method overcomes CF by isolating the knowledge of each task . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to overcome catastrophic forgetting and encourage knowledge transfer . they propose to discover a sub-network for each task and a soft-masking mechanism to preserve the previous knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in classification, generation, information extraction and their mixture. |
Sentence Embedding Alignment for Lifelong Relation Extraction (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to relation extraction require a fixed set of relations . Existing methods assume a closed set of relationships and perform once-and-for-all training on a set of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the stochastic gradient methods with a replay memory to alleviate the forgetting problem by anchoring the sentence embedding space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multiple benchmarks. |
Improving Question Answering over Incomplete KBs with Knowledge-Aware Reader (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use incomplete knowledge bases and text data to answer open-domain questions are insufficient to cover full evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which learns to aggregate answer evidence from incomplete knowledge bases and text snippets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the widely-used KBQA benchmark WebQSP across settings with different extents of incompleteness. |
Zero-shot Fact Verification by Claim Generation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact verification require large datasets, which can be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training a robust fact verification model by using automatically generated claims that can be supported, refuted, or unverifiable from evidence from Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the demand for human-annotated training data and improves a model's F1 from 50% to 77%, equivalent in performance to 2K+ manually-curated examples. |
Unsupervised Multi-hop Question Answering by Question Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing training data for multi-hop question answering (QA) is time-consuming and resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised framework that generates human-like multi-hop training data from homogeneous and heterogeneously data sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 61% and 83% of the supervised learning performance for the HybridQA and HotpotQA datasets. |
Bridging the Training-Inference Gap for Dense Phrase Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for building dense retrievers are often misaligned and do not reflect retrieval scenario at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to validate dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2 3 points and top-20 passage retrieval by 2 4 points for open-domain question answering. |
Progressively Pretrained Dense Corpus Index for Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering systems are insufficient to capture deep semantic matching that goes beyond lexical overlaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a sample-efficient method to pretrain the paragraph encoder using an existing pretraining model instead of heuristically created pseudo question-paragraph pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a strong dense retrieval baseline that uses 6 times more computation for training. |
Boosted Dense Retriever (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | DrBoost is a dense retrieval ensemble that is trained in stages to correct retrieval mistakes . it produces representations which are 4x more compact, while delivering comparable retrieval results. |
| Approach: | They propose a dense retrieval ensemble inspired by boosting that is trained in stages . they produce representations which are 4x more compact, while delivering comparable retrieval results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs surprisingly well under approximate search with coarse quantization, reducing latency and bandwidth needs by another 4x. |
SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences (2022.emnlp-main)
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Uri Shaham, Elad Segal, Maor Ivgi, Avia Efrat, Ori Yoran, Adi Haviv, Ankit Gupta, Wenhan Xiong, Mor Geva, Jonathan Berant, Omer Levy
| Challenge: | Standard NLP benchmarks focus on short texts, but long texts are produced in the context of longer discourses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new benchmark that places models in context of long texts that require reasoning over long texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task sets are based on a set of long-text datasets and host a live leaderboard to facilitate research on model architecture and pretraining methods. |
Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Text Models for Long Text Sequences (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing short-context models are limited in their domain coverage and can be used for long-sequence inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace full attention in transformers with pooling-augmented blockwise attention and pretrain the model with a masked-span prediction task with spans of varying lengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on long-sequence summarization tasks and achieves competitive performance on long document corpora. |
Detecting Machine-Generated Text: Techniques and Challenges (2024.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | This tutorial focuses on machine-generated text and deepfakes. |
| Approach: | This tutorial aims to provide a comprehensive overview of text detection techniques . it will focus on machine-generated text and deepfakes . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial focuses on machine-generated text and deepfakes. |
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations. |
Imposing Label-Relational Inductive Bias for Extremely Fine-Grained Entity Typing (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing entity typing systems exploit type hierarchy provided by KB schema to model label correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph layer that encodes global label co-occurrence statistics and word-level similarities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 15.3% relative F1 improvement on a large dataset with over 10,000 free-form types. |
Simple Local Attentions Remain Competitive for Long-Context Tasks (2022.naacl-main)
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Wenhan Xiong, Barlas Oguz, Anchit Gupta, Xilun Chen, Diana Liskovich, Omer Levy, Scott Yih, Yashar Mehdad
| Challenge: | Existing models for NLP tasks require long text sequences beyond the length limit of pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain large-size NLP models using the same long-doc corpus and fine tune them for real-world long-context tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can perform better under standard pretraining paradigms than longformer and Longformer. |
T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation. |
TWEETQA: A Social Media Focused Question Answering Dataset (P19-1)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jiawei Wu, Hong Wang, Vivek Kulkarni, Mo Yu, Shiyu Chang, Xiaoxiao Guo, William Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Social media is becoming an important realtime information source, especially during natural disasters and emergencies. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale dataset for question answering over social media data . they gather tweets used by journalists and ask human annotators to write questions upon them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that neural models that perform well on formal texts are limited in their performance . the proposed model is still lagging behind human performance with a large margin . |
Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | 3D human modeling is used for engaging interaction in gaming, film, and animation. however, the customization of characters is crucial for creativity and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D human generation using fashion descriptions to enhance 3D geometry transformation and fine-grained consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate a 3D human, guided by a fashion description, with high efficiency. |
Variational Knowledge Graph Reasoning (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs have large amount of missing links, which limits their application . a recent study has proposed to design an automated inference model to complete the missing links in large knowledge graph. |
| Approach: | They propose to use variation inference to solve missing links in knowledge graphs . they use a posterior approximator, prior (path finder) and likelihood (path reasoner) |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple datasets and is highly accurate. |
Open-Domain Question-Answering for COVID-19 and Other Emergent Domains (2021.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | a system for open-domain question-answering is developed for COVID-19 . small data size allows system to retrieve answers from large corpus of scientific papers . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-domain question-answering system that can retrieve answers from large corpus of COVID-19 papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed open-domain question-answering system can retrieve answers from large corpus of COVID-19 scientific papers. |