Papers by Xiang Tian
Relation Extraction with Type-aware Map Memories of Word Dependencies (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on the dependency connections between words with limited attention paid to exploiting dependency types. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach for relation extraction with type-aware map memories . they map all associated words along with dependencies among them to memory slots . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on two English benchmark datasets. |
SafeSteer: A Decoding-level Defense Mechanism for Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense methods rely on fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-level defense mechanism that employs a lightweight discriminator to iteratively steer the decoding process toward safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety performance by up to 33.40% without fine-tuning on multiple MLLMs. |
Tracing and Dissecting How LLMs Recall Factual Knowledge for Real World Questions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have shown promising ability to perform commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-dimensional analysis framework that incorporates token back-tracing and token decoding to uncover how LLMs conduct factual knowledge recall. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that LLMs lack relevant knowledge but struggle to select the most accurate information based on context during the retrieval and rerank phase. |
PairCoder: Pair Programming-Inspired Two-Agent Collaboration for Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi agent frameworks for large language models are brittle on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that brings pair programming to autonomous LLM collaboration. |
| Outcome: | Using PairCoder, large language models achieve better results on code generation tasks and reduce token usage by 40% to 70% on eight representative backbones. |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
Named Entity Recognition for Social Media Texts with Semantic Augmentation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition suffer from data sparsity problems when conducted on short and informal texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-based approach to named entity recognition for social media texts . they obtain augmented semantic information from a large-scale corpus and encode it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing approaches on three social media datasets. |
Hierarchical Text Classification with Reinforced Label Assignment (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing hierarchical text classification methods make local decisions regarding labels or ignore hierarchy information during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a Label Assignment Policy via deep reinforcement learning to determine where to place an object and when to stop the assignment process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on five datasets and four base models and achieves an average improvement of 33.4% over flat classifiers. |
Token Alignment via Character Matching for Subword Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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Ben Athiwaratkun, Shiqi Wang, Mingyue Shang, Yuchen Tian, Zijian Wang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Robert Kwiatkowski, Ramesh Nallapati, Parminder Bhatia, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Generative models struggle with prompts corresponding to partial tokens due to tokenization, where partial token is out-of-distribution during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to alleviate tokenization artifact on text completion by backtracking to the last complete tokens and aligning subsequent generations to match with the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it improves on partial token scenarios with only a minor time increase. |
Interactive Key-Value Memory-augmented Attention for Image Paragraph Captioning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to image paragraph captioning ignore the past alignment information, resulting in repetitive captioning and incomplete captioning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Interactive key-value Memory-augmented Attention model for image paragraph captioning to keep track of attention history along with update-chain of decoder state. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on a benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
FAER: Benchmarking VLMs for Failure-Aware Embodied Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual-language models (VLMs) are the core component of embodied agents in perceiving the environment and making decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a failure-aware benchmark to evaluate the performance of visual language models (VLMs) in long-horizon tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the performance of 16 widely utilized VLMs and 4 LLMs for FAER tasks. |
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. |
In-Image Neural Machine Translation with Segmented Pixel Sequence-to-Sequence Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to convert images containing texts from one language to another. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end model instead of the traditional cascade methods which use optical character recognition followed by neural machine translation and text rendering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms both cascade methods and current model in translation quality and robustness across various dimensions. |
Improving Named Entity Recognition with Attentive Ensemble of Syntactic Information (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that named entity recognition (NER) is effective in encoding and aggregating syntactic information, but they lack the appropriate knowledge to model such properties. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage syntactic information by leveraging attentive ensembles to model NER . they propose key-value memory networks, syntax attention and gate mechanism for encoding, weighting and aggregating syntaktic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous studies on six English and Chinese benchmark datasets. |
DiffER: Diffusion Entity-Relation Modeling for Reversal Curse in Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models exhibit unidirectional behavior when processing bidirectional relationships . authors propose a solution to alleviate the reversal curse in Diffusion LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that addresses the "reversal curse" of bidirectional behavior in large language models . they propose 'entity-aware training' and balanced data construction to alleviate asymmetry and missing relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates the "reversal curse" in Diffusion LLMs . the proposed model employs whole-entity masking to mitigate entity fragmentation . |
R3-NL2GQL: A Model Coordination and Knowledge Graph Alignment Approach for NL2GQL (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yuhang Zhou, Yu He, Siyu Tian, Yuchen Ni, Zhangyue Yin, Xiang Liu, Chuanjun Ji, Sen Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Adapting existing approaches for converting natural language to SQL encounters hurdles due to distinct nature of GQL compared to SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates both small and large Foundation Models for ranking, rewriting, and refining tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach integrates both small and large Foundation Models for ranking, rewriting, and refining tasks while capitalizing on the superior generalization and query generation prowess of larger models for the final transformation of natural language queries into GQL formats. |
Dependency-driven Relation Extraction with Attentive Graph Convolutional Networks (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suffer from noise in dependency trees, which can cause confusions in relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-driven approach for relation extraction with attentive graph convolutional networks . they apply an attention mechanism upon graph convolutional networks to different word dependencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous studies on two English datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-speech Tagging via Two-way Attentions of Auto-analyzed Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging are important fundamental tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging . they incorporate context features and syntactic knowledge for each input character . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn and benefit from existing tools, but its quality may be poor. |