Papers by Xiang Kong
An Empirical Exploration of Local Ordering Pre-training for Structured Prediction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-training contextualized encoders with language model objectives is effective for structured prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method for pre-training contextualized encoders with language model objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective on three typical structured prediction tasks in four languages. |
DPN-LE: Dual Personality Neuron Localization and Editing for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Lifan Zheng, Xue Yang, Jiawei Chen, Chenyan WU, Jingyuan Zhang, Fanheng Kong, Xinyi Zeng, Xiang Chen, Yu Tian
| Challenge: | Current methods for editing personality traits in large language models can change personalities but reduce performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel paradigm for personality editing that locates and edits LLM neurons and enables competitive personality control at inference time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-instruct show that the proposed approach can improve performance and improve performance. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
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Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
Direct Large Language Model Alignment Through Self-Rewarding Contrastive Prompt Distillation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate preference data without human annotations are difficult . et al., 2022b) is effective for aligning large language models with human expectations . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the response preference using output probabilities under contrastive prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could surpass the RLHF method without human-annotated preference data. |
PlatoLM: Teaching LLMs in Multi-Round Dialogue via a User Simulator (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to democratize ChatGPT have focused on leveraging real user and ChatGPP dialogues, but the most direct human needs are often ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to simulate human behavior better by using real human-like questions extracted from real human conversations as a learning goal and a user simulator called ‘Socratic’. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SoTA performance among LLaMA-based 7B models in MT-Bench. |
Good for Misconceived Reasons: An Empirical Revisiting on the Need for Visual Context in Multimodal Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies report improvements when equipping models with multimodal information, but it remains unclear whether such improvements actually come from the multimodal part. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend conventional text-only translation models with multimodal information by extending them with visual input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models replicate similar gains as recently developed multimodal-integrated systems achieved, but learn to ignore multimodal information. |
Generalized Data Augmentation for Low-Resource Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Low-resource language pairs with a lack of parallel data pose challenges for machine translation . data augmentation using monolingual data is an effective way to alleviate the problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework for data augmentation for low-resource machine translation using monolingual data and a related high-resourced language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality by 1.5 to 8 BLEU points under extreme low-resource settings compared to baselines. |
Lexical Knowledge Internalization for Neural Dialog Generation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialog models ignore the knowledge that resides in people's minds during a conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate lexical knowledge internally into the model's parameters instead of further conditioning them on external knowledge . they adopt contrastive learning approach and use a dictionary-based token-level lexicon retriever that requires only weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can relate J.K Rowling to Khalsa Aid with the knowledge retrieved from Wikipedia. |
A Two-Step Approach for Implicit Event Argument Detection (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2015) only consider local arguments in the same sentence of the event trigger. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the implicit event argument detection task into two sub-problems . they propose to use argument head-word detection and head-to-span expansion to reduce the number of candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than a strong sequence labeling baseline. |
Incorporating a Local Translation Mechanism into Non-autoregressive Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to capture local dependencies among output tokens are not efficient, causing errors of repeated translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a local autoregressive translation mechanism that predicts a short sequence of tokens for each target decoding position instead of one token. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves comparable or better performance with fewer decoding iterations, bringing a 2.5x speedup. |
Multilingual Neural Machine Translation with Deep Encoder and Multiple Shallow Decoders (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work in multilingual translation has improved translation quality surpassing bilingual baselines using deep transformer models with increased capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep encoder with multiple shallow decoders to reduce inference latency while maintaining translation quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 1.8x speedup on average compared to a standard transformer model with no drop in translation quality. |
Mutual Reinforcement of LLM Dialogue Synthesis and Summarization Capabilities for Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yen-Ju Lu, Ting-Yao Hu, Hema Swetha Koppula, Hadi Pouransari, Jen-Hao Rick Chang, Yin Xia, Xiang Kong, Qi Zhu, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Oncel Tuzel, Raviteja Vemulapalli
| Challenge: | Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within large language models to enhance few-shot dialogue summarization task. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings. |
Fully Non-autoregressive Neural Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive neural machine translation models are slow to learn the dependency between output tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose to use fully non-autoregressive neural machine translation (NAT) to predict tokens with single forward of neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on three translation benchmarks with comparable performance to autoregressive and iterative NAT systems. |
SCDE: Sentence Cloze Dataset with High Quality Distractors From Examinations (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that there is a significant performance gap between advanced models (72%) and humans (87%) Cloze datasets are convenient either to be generated automatically or by annotators. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to evaluate the performance of computational models through sentence prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fills up multiple blanks in a passage from a shared candidate set with distractors designed by English teachers. |