Papers by Wenhao Sun
Failures are Treasures: Constructing a Pedagogical Bridge for Agentic Strategy Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods focus on imitating successful trajectories, whereas small language models are fragile and often collapsing after encountering errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pedagogical Bridge for Reflective Insight and Distillation of Guiding Errors that combines reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action to enable agents to diagnose and correct critical errors while abstracting transferable strategies from contrastive student–teacher trajectories. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model significantly elevates performance in large language models (SLMs) . |
CUTE: A Multilingual Dataset for Enhancing Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Low-Resource Languages (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual models such as XLM-R support only approximately 100-200 languages, leaving nearly 7,000 low-resource languages untapped. |
| Approach: | They construct and open-source a dataset of four-language corpora obtained through machine translation into Chinese, Uyghur and Tibetan. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes two resource-rich languages and two low-resource languages. |
Automatic Poetry Generation with Mutual Reinforcement Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for automatic poetry generation are based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) MLE-based models tend to remember common patterns of the poetry corpus, which results in loss-evaluation mismatch. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the criteria and use them as explicit rewards to guide gradient update by reinforcement learning to motivate the model to pursue higher scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model and improves on Chinese poetry. |
Empowering Language Models with Knowledge Graph Reasoning for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Language Models lack the power to store all required knowledge, resulting in a lack of ability to infer out-of-context knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Interaction Layer that can be flexibly plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be plugged into existing Transformer-based LMs to interact with a differentiable Knowledge Graph Reasoning module collaboratively. |
Document Segmentation Matters for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhitong Wang, Cheng Gao, Chaojun Xiao, Yufei Huang, Shuzheng Si, Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Wenhao Li, Tangjian Duan, Chuancheng Lv, Guoshan Lu, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing rule-based chunking methods lead to suboptimal splits, where overly large chunks introduce irrelevant information and small chunks lack semantic coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages document summaries as pseudo-instructions to guide chunking by computing semantic similarity between sentences and the summary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple open-domain question-answering benchmarks show that PIC significantly improves retrieval accuracy (Hits@k) and end-to-end QA performance (Exact Match) without any additional training. |
Evade the Trap of Mediocrity: Promoting Diversity and Novelty in Text Generation via Concentrating Attention (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that powerful Transformer architectures produce dull high-frequency phrases, severely hurting the diversity and novelty of generated text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to control the sharpness of the attention distribution by python code and use it to learn a Bayesian approximation of posterior attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves diversity and novelty while maintaining comparable quality on conditional and unconditional generation tasks. |
Locally Differentially Private In-Context Learning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pretrained language models (LLMs) have shown surprising In-Context Learning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a locally differentially private framework of in-context learning for LLMs that can be augmented with a private database for some specific task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict labels without additional parameter modifications without input-label pairs . |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
AutoPKG: An Automated Framework for Dynamic E-commerce Product-Attribute Knowledge Graph Construction (2026.findings-acl)
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Pollawat Hongwimol, Haoning Shang, Chutong Wang, Zhichao Wan, Yi Gao, Yuanming Li, Lin Gui, Wenhao Sun, Cheng Yu
| Challenge: | Product attribute extraction in e-commerce is bottlenecked by ontologies that are inconsistent, incomplete, and costly to maintain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent Large Language Model framework that constructs a Product-attribute Knowledge Graph from multimodal product content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 0.953 WKE for product types, 0.724 WKEs for attribute keys, and 0.531 edge-level accuracy for value assertions after canonicalization on a large real-world marketplace catalog dataset from Lazada (Alibaba). |
MEIC-DT: Memory-Efficient Incremental Clustering for Long-Text Coreference Resolution with Dual-Threshold Constraints (2026.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Shuzheng Si, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Zhitong Wang, Cheng Huang, Yingli Shen, Yufeng Han, Wenhao Li, Cunliang Kong, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing supervised neural methods are underexplored for coreference resolution, especially in incremental clustering. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-threshold incremental clustering approach based on a lightweight Transformer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on common benchmarks show that MEIC-DT achieves highly competitive coreference performance under stringent memory constraints. |
GLTW: Joint Improved Graph Transformer and LLM via Three-Word Language for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-acl)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Cheng Gao, Shuzheng Si, Zhu Liu, Yingli Shen, Zhitong Wang, Cunliang Kong, Wenhao Li, Yufei Huang, Ye Tian, Xuantang Xiong, Lei Han, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs lack the ability to integrate structural information into LLMs and output predictions deterministically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which encodes structural information of KGs and merges it with LLMs to enhance KGC performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of KG Completion datasets on KGs by integrating structural information with LLMs. |
ImCoref-CeS: An Improved Lightweight Pipeline for Coreference Resolution with LLM-based Checker-Splitter Refinement (2026.acl-long)
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Kangyang Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shuzheng Si, Cheng Gao, Zhitong Wang, Yingli Shen, Wenhao Li, Zhu Liu, Yufeng Han, Jiayi Wu, Cunliang Kong, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing supervised neural methods for coreference resolution are underexplored . current methods rely on small language models, but their potential is underexploited . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an enhanced supervised model with LLM-based reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in coreference resolution. |
From Scaffolding to Assimilation: Progressive Structural Internalization for Format-Constrained Creative Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms rely on unreliable prompting or rigid constrained decoding strategies to achieve aesthetic unity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to embed external constraints into the model’s intrinsic intuition and use it to generate open-ended creative texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines in both strict constraint adherence and literary aesthetics. |
Recurrence Boosts Diversity! Revisiting Recurrent Latent Variable in Transformer-Based Variational AutoEncoder for Diverse Text Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has been widely adopted in text generation due to its ability to learn flexible representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based recurrent VAE structure that imposes recurrence on segment-wise latent variables with arbitrarily separated text segments and constructs the posterior distribution with residual parameterization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed structure can deduce a non-zero lower bound of the KL term and enhance the entanglement of each segment and preceding latent variables, providing a theoretical guarantee of generation diversity. |
Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer through Reversible Transliteration: A Huffman-Based Approach for Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models demonstrate cross-lingual transfer capabilities, but these capabilities often fail to extend to low-resource languages, especially those utilizing non-Latin scripts. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine character transliteration with Huffman coding to create a complete transliterations framework that can be extended to other low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces storage requirements and improves accuracy and accuracy across multiple downstream tasks while maintaining performance on high-resource languages. |
Stylistic Chinese Poetry Generation via Unsupervised Style Disentanglement (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Automatic Chinese poetry generation is one of the first attempts towards computer writing. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which requires no supervised style labeling to generate stylistic poems . they incorporate mutual information, a concept in information theory, into modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates stylistic poems without losing fluency and coherency . it is based on mutual information, a concept in information theory . |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
Fuse It More Deeply! A Variational Transformer with Layer-Wise Latent Variable Inference for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Auto-Encoders are often used for text generation tasks due to the sequential nature of the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational Transformer framework that learns a series of layer-wise latent variables with each inferred from those of lower layers and tightly coupled with the hidden states by low-rank tensor product. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn latent variables from lower layers and incorporate more information. |
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Zhu, Xiyu Wei, Guangxiang Zhao, Wenhao Wu, Haosheng Zou, Junfeng Ran, null XWang, Lin Sun, Xiangzheng Zhang, Sujian Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length. |