Papers by Xian Liu
Contrastive Attention for Automatic Chest X-ray Report Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that learning-based models fail to accurately capture and describe abnormal regions due to data bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that compares the current input image with normal images to capture abnormal regions by contrasting the input image and normal images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be easily incorporated into existing models to boost their performance under most metrics. |
Reasoning as Gradient: Scaling MLE Agents Beyond Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifei Zhang, Xu Yang, Xiao Yang, Bowen Xian, Qizheng Li, Shikai Fang, Jingyuan Li, Jian Wang, Minrui Xu, Yuge Zhang, Weiqing Liu, Jiang Bian
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents for machine learning engineering rely on tree search to rank candidates. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent that operationalizes gradient-based optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves a state-of-the-art 35.1% any-medal rate on MLE-Bench with a limited budget on a single GPU. |
ALERT: An LLM-powered Benchmark for Automatic Evaluation of Recommendation Explanations (2025.naacl-long)
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Yichuan Li, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Mao Li, Tianyi Liu, Pei Chen, Yifan Gao, Kyumin Lee, Kaize Ding, Zhengyang Wang, Zhihan Zhang, Jingbo Shang, Xian Li, Trishul Chilimbi
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for recommendation explanation evaluation lack item diversity and user preferences data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic recommendation explanation evaluation benchmark based on Amazon e-commerce categories with implicit preferences . they propose two novel automatic evaluators that enable scalable and human-preference aligned evaluation of explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic evaluation benchmark outperforms existing methods in a variety of domains. |
Competence-based Multimodal Curriculum Learning for Medical Report Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Medical report generation is more challenging for data-driven neural models due to data bias and limited medical data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Competence-based Multimodal Curriculum Learning framework to alleviate the data bias by efficiently utilizing the limited medical data for medical report generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be incorporated into existing models to improve their performance on the IU-Xray and MIMIC-CXR datasets. |
Can LLMs Replace Clinical Doctors? Exploring Bias in Disease Diagnosis by Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the bias of disease prediction in large language models . the model biases are prevalent across gender, age range and disease judgment behaviors . |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based approach to alleviate the bias in disease prediction with LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates the observed bias in disease prediction with LLMs. |
AssistedDS: Benchmarking How External Domain Knowledge Assists LLMs in Automated Data Science (2025.findings-emnlp)
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An Luo, Xun Xian, Jin Du, Fangqiao Tian, Ganghua Wang, Ming Zhong, Shengchun Zhao, Xuan Bi, Zirui Liu, Jiawei Zhou, Jayanth Srinivasa, Ashish Kundu, Charles Fleming, Mingyi Hong, Jie Ding
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows, yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate how large language models handle external domain knowledge in tabular prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evaluates whether it can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. |
Toward Structured Knowledge Reasoning: Contrastive Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Experience (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiawei Gu, Ziting Xian, Yuanzhen Xie, Ye Liu, Enjie Liu, Ruichao Zhong, Mochi Gao, Yunzhi Tan, Bo Hu, Zang Li
| Challenge: | Large language models struggle to infer implicit relationships embedded in tabular formats . authors introduce a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning (ICL). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that builds experience memory representations and enhances generalization through contrastive In-Context Learning to simulate human-like knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Text-to-SQL and TableQA show CoRE significantly improves performance . it achieves gains of 3.44% and 4.24%, with up to 17.2% on challenging tasks . |
AutoHallusion: Automatic Generation of Hallucination Benchmarks for Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xiyang Wu, Tianrui Guan, Dianqi Li, Shuaiyi Huang, Xiaoyu Liu, Xijun Wang, Ruiqi Xian, Abhinav Shrivastava, Furong Huang, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Tianyi Zhou, Dinesh Manocha
| Challenge: | Large vision-language models are prone to hallucinations, where contextual cues in an image can trigger the language module to produce overconfident and incorrect reasoning about abnormal or hypothetical objects. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the generation of hallucination-related questions using images . they propose to use three image manipulation strategies to induce hallucinosity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human bias in crafting such examples and improves accuracy. |
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources. |
Improving Zero-Shot Translation by Disentangling Positional Information (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multilingual neural machine translation has shown the capability of directly translating between language pairs unseen in training, i.e. zero-shot translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to remove residual connections in an encoder layer to reduce the difficulty of generalizing to new translation directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pivot-based translation in terms of quality and ease of integration of new languages. |
Multistage Fusion with Forget Gate for Multimodal Summarization in Open-Domain Videos (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal summarization for open-domain videos lack fine-grained interactions between multisource inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multistage fusion network with a forget gate module to integrate multimodal information into a fluent textual summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple encoder-decoder architectures and low noise transcripts. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Information Extraction via Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Zhenxi Lin, Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks are a fundamental component of medical NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adaptive constraint strategy to adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach selectively enhances the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs. |
Multilingual Denoising Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.tacl-1)
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Yinhan Liu, Jiatao Gu, Naman Goyal, Xian Li, Sergey Edunov, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Mike Lewis, Luke Zettlemoyer
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to pre-train models focus on only English corpora, but this is not common in machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence denoising auto-encoder pre-trained on monolingual corpora . they show that it produces significant performance gains across MT tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve significant performance gains across a wide variety of MT tasks. |
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Yiran Yang, Li Jin, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiao Li, Linhao Zhang, Jintao Liu, Guo Zhi
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
T2I-ReasonBench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Informed Text-to-Image Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have demonstrated exceptional capability in synthesizing high-quality images from textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to explore the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark examines the knowledge-driven reasoning capabilities of T2I models. |
LLM-ForcedAligner: A Non-Autoregressive and Accurate LLM-Based Forced Aligner for Multilingual and Long-Form Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for forcing alignment are language-specific and prone to temporal shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a slot-filling paradigm that uses time indices to predict slot positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces accumulated temporal shifts by 69% compared with prior methods. |
Assist Non-native Viewers: Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for How2 Videos (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal summarization methods are limited to monolingual videos . a proposed task aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos . they propose fusion network that integrates multimodal and cross-linguistic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms existing methods on a reorganized How2 dataset on the reorganized How2 data set. |
DGLF: A Dual Graph-based Learning Framework for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhihong Zhu, Kefan Shen, Zhaorun Chen, Yunyan Zhang, Yuyan Chen, Xiaoqi Jiao, Zhongwei Wan, Shaorong Xie, Wei Liu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection neglect high-order relationships and underestimate high-frequency messages. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Graph-based Learning Framework to capture inter-modal inconsistencies . they propose combining a hypergraph and a vanilla graph to achieve enhanced propagation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
KELE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structured Socratic Teaching with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Socratic teaching places high demands on teachers’ expertise and real-time feedback capabilities, making it difficult to scale in large educational settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for structured Socratic teaching with LLMs that integrates a structured SocRule and a consultant-teacher collaborative teaching mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in natural language generation and dialogue comprehension in the classroom. |
Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li, Hansi Zeng, Xin Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Xian Li, Jianshu Chen, Dakuo Wang, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns and provides tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
Does Large Language Model Contain Task-Specific Neurons? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST) this method identifies task- specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can locate task-specific neurons across eight public tasks. |
Towards A Unified View of Sparse Feed-Forward Network in Pretraining Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) have proven effective in scaling up the model size for pretraining large language models. |
| Approach: | They compare S-FFN architectures for language modeling and compare their performance and efficiency . they found a simpler selection method that selects blocks through their mean aggregated hidden states . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model size and selection method achieve lower perplexity in language model pretraining compared to existing MoE architectures. |
Beyond Uniform SVD: Dual-Level Optimization across Columns and Modules for LLM Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for low-rank decomposition overlook decomposing errors and suboptimal approximation. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank decomposition framework that integrates low-level optimization at column and module levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and baselines in SVD and pruning. |
A Multi-Expert Structural-Semantic Hybrid Framework for Unveiling Historical Patterns in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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Yimin Deng, Yuxia Wu, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Li Zhu, Qidong Liu, Derong Xu, Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xueming Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph structure learning or semantic reasoning, lacking the capability to capture the inherent differences between historical and non-historical events. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning framework that integrates both structural and semantic information to guide the reasoning process for different events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates structural and semantic information to predict future events . it can provide evidence for many downstream tasks, including situation analysis and political decision making . |
Lifting the Curse of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pretrained language models require a tremendous amount of inference compute to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose to compress pretrained language models to small ones with a teacher-student paradigm to fill the capacity gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance at small FLOPs compared with competitive baselines. |
MultiCapCLIP: Auto-Encoding Prompts for Zero-Shot Multilingual Visual Captioning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised visual captioning require large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach that generates captions for different scenarios without labeling . they use concept prompts to retrieve concepts and auto-encode them to learn writing styles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates captions for different scenarios and languages without labeled vision-caption pairs. |
RankCSE: Unsupervised Sentence Representations Learning via Learning to Rank (2023.acl-long)
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Jiduan Liu, Jiahao Liu, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Wei Wu, Yunsen Xian, Dongyan Zhao, Kai Chen, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Unsupervised sentence representation learning is one of the fundamental problems in natural language processing . contrastive learning methods fail to capture fine-grained ranking information among the sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for unsupervised sentence representation learning that integrates ranking consistency and ranking distillation with contrastive learning into a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better over state-of-the-art models on STS and TR tasks. |
Beyond Modality Collapse: Taming Guided Modality Entropy for Omni-modal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoOmni is a data paradigm for omni-modal large language models that can be used for emotion reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data paradigm that interleaves guided tokens into reasoning traces to enforce structured evidence extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm over-relys on a dominant modality while neglecting complementary cues. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction framework which captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning. |
PreQuant: A Task-agnostic Quantization Approach for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhuocheng Gong, Jiahao Liu, Qifan Wang, Yang Yang, Jingang Wang, Wei Wu, Yunsen Xian, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Quantization is a viable solution for pre-trained language models, but most existing methods are task-specific and require customized training and quantization with a large number of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a "quantize before fine-tuning" framework that allows for quantization with a large number of trainable parameters on each individual task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is compatible with quantization-aware training and post-training quantization and corrects quantization errors. |
End-to-end Spoken Conversational Question Answering: Task, Dataset and Model (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational question answering significantly degrade on datasets . a new task aims to enable systems to model complex dialogues flow given the speech documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a new Spoken Conversational Question Answering task to model human conversations . they propose DDNet, which ingests cross-modal information to achieve fine-grained representations of speech and language modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance in spoken conversational question answering. |
O2NA: An Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive Approach for Controllable Video Captioning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video captioning consider a sequence of frames and biases towards focused objects. |
| Approach: | They propose an Object-Oriented Non-Autoregressive approach to video captioning . it performs three steps: 1) identify the focused objects and predict their locations . 2) generate related attribute words and relation words of these focused objects to form a draft caption . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive results with the state-of-the-art methods but with higher diversity and faster inference speed. |
Beyond Surface Features: Advancing Medical Vision-Language Alignment via Dynamic Evidence-Guided Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zixuan Huang, Zhihong Zhu, Xiaolong Liu, Yanchao Hao, Manman Zhang, Zheng Wei, Bowen Xing, Xian Wu, Ye Li, Fen Miao, Yefeng Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based methods for medical large vision-Language Models face limitations in medical settings . existing methods are limited by overfitting to superficial cues and pseudo convergence of the preference signal. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence-aware and adaptive preference learning for Med-LVLMs. |
On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Language Models with Early-Stage Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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Huaisheng Zhu, MingYu Liu, Junze Liu, Zhen Ge, Tian Wang, Jiri Gesi, Dakuo Wang, Weiqi Zhang, Houyu Zhang, Yufan Guo, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Sujay Sanghavi
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated that masked diffusion models (MDMs) can surpass autoregressive models (ARMs) in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate early token predictions without demonstration data by distilling an unnormalized target distribution into the original model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math, planning, and RLHF tasks show that COPSD improves both effectiveness and efficiency, and further enhances performance when combined with supervised fine-tuning. |