Papers by Xia Xie
Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to prune Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are overparameterized and require fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning method that uses first-order pruning to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms first-order pruning and zero-order methods at sparsity levels. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
MolXPT: Wrapping Molecules with Text for Generative Pre-training (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Generative pre-trained Transformers (GPT) have great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified language model of text and molecules pre-trained on SMILES wrapped by text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines of molecular property prediction on MoleculeNet and performs comparably to the best model in text-molecule translation while using less than half of its parameters. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Embedding-Informed Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented large language models excel in various NLP tasks but are not always helpful when the knowledge required is absent in the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to determine whether the model is knowledgeable on a query via inspecting the (contextualized) pre-trained token embeddings of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed approach performs better than previous approaches on various benchmarks. |
Ask Again, Then Fail: Large Language Models’ Vacillations in Judgment (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models often waver in their judgments when faced with follow-up questions . this is a challenge for generating reliable responses and building user trust . |
| Approach: | They propose a Follow-up Questioning Mechanism and two metrics to quantify this inconsistency . they also develop a framework that teaches large language models to maintain original correct judgments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the general capabilities of large language models by allowing them to maintain original correct judgments. |
Model-Generated Pretraining Signals Improves Zero-Shot Generalization of Text-to-Text Transformers (2023.acl-long)
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Linyuan Gong, Chenyan Xiong, Xiaodong Liu, Payal Bajaj, Yiqing Xie, Alvin Cheung, Jianfeng Gao, Xia Song
| Challenge: | Recent work in NLP has shown that pretrained language models have made notable progress toward generalization to unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to pretrain T5 using an auxiliary model to construct more challenging token replacements for the main model to denoise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms similar-sized baseline models on prompted NLP benchmarks and rivals the state-of-the-art model with only **8%** of its parameters. |
League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xiaobing Sun, Tian Xia, Kai Chen, Xiaofeng Wang, Baosheng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
LoReFact: Bridging the Logic Gap in Fact-Checking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing fact-checking methods focus on verification of individual facts, overlooking logical dependencies . a recent study shows that text containing logical errors may still be misjudged as factual . |
| Approach: | They propose a content–logic coupled factuality evaluation paradigm that conceptualizes factual dimension along two complementary dimensions: content factualism and logic factuity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm bridges the gap between factual verification and content factuality . it incorporates the logical dimension and a logic-aware metric to expose and penalize logical fallacies. |
UniDrop: A Simple yet Effective Technique to Improve Transformer without Extra Cost (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the performance of natural language processing models are over-parameterized and overfitted. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to integrate dropout techniques into the training of Transformer models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve 1.5 BLEU improvement on IWSLT14 translation tasks and better accuracy for the classification even using strong pre-trained RoBERTa as backbone. |
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Dang Nguyen, Jian Chen, Yu Wang, Gang Wu, Namyong Park, Zhengmian Hu, Hanjia Lyu, Junda Wu, Ryan Aponte, Yu Xia, Xintong Li, Jing Shi, Hongjie Chen, Viet Dac Lai, Zhouhang Xie, Sungchul Kim, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Mehrab Tanjim, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Puneet Mathur, Seunghyun Yoon, Lina Yao, Branislav Kveton, Jihyung Kil, Thien Huu Nguyen, Trung Bui, Tianyi Zhou, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt
| Challenge: | Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities. |
Harnessing the Power of Large Language Model for Uncertainty Aware Graph Processing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for graph processing rely on assumptions about data relations that are inadequate when handling large and complex graph data. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model enhanced by an uncertainty-aware module to provide a confidence score on the generated graph data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms by a substantial margin on ten datasets. |
What are the Desired Characteristics of Calibration Sets? Identifying Correlates on Long Form Scientific Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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Griffin Adams, Bichlien Nguyen, Jake Smith, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Anna Ostropolets, Budhaditya Deb, Yuan-Jyue Chen, Tristan Naumann, Noémie Elhadad
| Challenge: | Summarization models are trained to maximize the likelihood of a single reference (MLE) but little is known about why one setup is more effective than another . |
| Approach: | They add a calibration step which exposes a model to its own ranked outputs to improve relevance or contrasts positive and negative sets to improve faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration step can unlock large gains in relevance or faithfulness. |