Papers by Wenqing Tian
Exploring Logically Dependent Multi-task Learning with Causal Inference (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Hierarchical multi-task learning models can utilize task dependencies by stacking encoders and outperform democratic ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes the labels of all lower-level tasks and a Gumbel sampling model to deal with cascading errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms democratic models on six out of seven subtasks and achieves state-of-the-art on the two English and one Chinese datasets. |
To What Extent Do Natural Language Understanding Datasets Correlate to Logical Reasoning? A Method for Diagnosing Logical Reasoning. (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning and knowledge-related skills are considered as fundamental skills for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to diagnose correlations between an NLU dataset and a specific skill. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to diagnose correlations between dataset and logical reasoning skill on 8 MRC and 3 NLI datasets. |
Chain-of-Thought Tuning: Masked Language Models can also Think Step By Step in Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides large language models to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step reasoning framework based on prompt tuning to implement step-by-step thinking for MLMs on NLU tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on two NLU tasks. |
De-Confounded Variational Encoder-Decoder for Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Logical table-to-text generation is challenging where deep learning models capture surface-level spurious correlations rather than the causal relationships between the table x and the sentence y. |
| Approach: | They propose to use variational inference to estimate the confounders in the latent space and cooperate with the causal intervention based on Pearl’s do-calculus to alleviate the spurious correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two logical table-to-text datasets in terms of logical fidelity. |
Smart-Searcher: Incentivizing the Dynamic Knowledge Acquisition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wenqing Tian, Zhipeng Chen, Yuhuan Wu, Jiahao Zhao, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Lei Fang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful but prone to hallucinations due to static knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps by injecting external information, but current methods are costly, generalize poorly, or ignore the model’s internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train large language models to leverage both internal and external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and achieves efficient retrieval-augmented reasoning. |
A Semantically Consistent and Syntactically Variational Encoder-Decoder Framework for Paraphrase Generation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Paraphrase generation is a longstanding problem in natural language processing (NLP) Neural network-based methods have shown great progress on paraphrase generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates variational inference on a target-related latent variable to introduce the diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the metrics based on n-gram matching and semantic similarity, and it can generate multiple different paraphrases by assembling different syntactic variables. |
Diagnosing the First-Order Logical Reasoning Ability Through LogicNLI (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on diagnosing LMs' reasoning abilities in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic method for first-order logic reasoning with a proposed benchmark, LogicNLI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method disentangles the target FOL reasoning from commonsense inference and can be used to diagnose LMs from four perspectives: accuracy, robustness, generalization, and interpretability. |
MTR: A Dataset Fusing Inductive, Deductive, and Defeasible Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for logical reasoning focus on monotonic logic and a single form of reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to study the human-like reasoning in machine reading comprehension. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that state-of-the-art neural models perform noticeably worse than expected. |