Papers by Xian Yang
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. |
Knowledge-Augmented Multimodal Clinical Rationale Generation for Disease Diagnosis with Small Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to balance predictive accuracy with human-understandable rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance LLMs by leveraging rationale distillation and domain knowledge injection for trustworthy multimodal rationale generation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world medical datasets show that ClinRaGen achieves state-of-the-art performance in disease diagnosis and rationale generation. |
PV2TEA: Patching Visual Modality to Textual-Established Information Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (20.97% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose to patch the visual modality to the textual-established attribute in- formation extractor. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show up to 11.74% absolute (29.9% relative) increase over unimodal baselines. |
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. |
DeltaNet: Conditional Medical Report Generation for COVID-19 Diagnosis (2022.coling-1)
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Xian Wu, Shuxin Yang, Zhaopeng Qiu, Shen Ge, Yangtian Yan, Xingwang Wu, Yefeng Zheng, S. Kevin Zhou, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | X-ray and CT are the gold standard for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment . however, due to the excessive number of patients, writing reports becomes a heavy burden for radiologists. |
| Approach: | They propose to use X-ray and CT to generate medical reports automatically . they evaluate DeltaNet on a COVID-19 dataset, where it outperforms state-of-the-art approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms state-of-the-art methods on a COVID-19 dataset. |
Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Alexander Bukharin, Shiyang Li, Zhengyang Wang, Jingfeng Yang, Bing Yin, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Tuo Zhao, Haoming Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to control diversity and quality of instruction tuning datasets and validate it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly improves worst and average case performance on large scale instruction tuning datasets. |
Improving Deep Embedded Clustering via Learning Cluster-level Representations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to learn meaningful representations at the instance level are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep embedded clustering model with cluster-level representation learning to jointly learn cluster and instance level representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces meaningful clusters on real-world short text datasets. |
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. |
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. |
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. |
ProMedTS: A Self-Supervised, Prompt-Guided Multimodal Approach for Integrating Medical Text and Time Series (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuai Niu, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Liang Bai, Zhihua Wang, V. W., Richard Yi Da Xu, Guo Li, Xian Yang
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at processing unstructured data, but integrating time series data with text remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised multimodal framework that uses prompt-guided learning to unify heterogeneous data types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on disease diagnosis tasks using real-world datasets. |
Self-Supervised Detection of Contextual Synonyms in a Multi-Class Setting: Phenotype Annotation Use Case (2021.emnlp-main)
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Jingqing Zhang, Luis Bolanos Trujillo, Tong Li, Ashwani Tanwar, Guilherme Freire, Xian Yang, Julia Ive, Vibhor Gupta, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Contextualised word embeddings are powerful tool to detect contextual synonyms, but most of the current SOTA methods are supervised and underexploit the potential of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised approach which detects contextual synonyms of concepts being trained on the data created by shallow matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the previous SOTA with gains of up to 4.5 and 4.0 absolute points after fine-tuning with as little as 20% of the labelled data. |
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. |
StoryLLaVA: Enhancing Visual Storytelling with Multi-Modal Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to maintain temporal, spatial, and narrative coherence across image sequences . existing models lack depth and engagement of human-authored stories . |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-driven narrative optimizer that integrates image descriptions, topic generation, and GPT-4-based refinements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in visual relevance, coherence, and fluency. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |