Papers by Xiang Wan
On the Risk of Evidence Pollution for Malicious Social Text Detection in the Era of LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence-enhanced detectors are able to detect malicious social text, but they are prone to evidence pollution. |
| Approach: | They propose three defense strategies to mitigate evidence pollution by large language models by machine-generated text detection and a mixture of experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategies could mitigate evidence pollution, but they faced limitations for practical employment. |
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. |
Word Graph Guided Summarization for Radiology Findings (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on introducing salient word information to general text summarization framework to guide selection of key content in radiology findings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automatic impression generation using word graphs and a Word Graph guided Summarization model to capture critical words and their relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on two datasets, OPENI and MIMIC-CXR. |
Add-One-In: Incremental Sample Selection for Large Language Models via a Choice-Based Greedy Paradigm (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on individual quality and do not assess the value of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a choice-based sample selection framework that evaluates sample quality . they use LLMs to evaluate the value of each option during the selection process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the full dataset and recent studies on a larger medical dataset. |
VerilogLAVD: LLM-Aided Pattern Generation for Verilog CWE Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing static analysis tools focus on functional correctness and depend heavily on manual rules. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates executable Traversal Detection Patterns (TDPs) to help detect hardware vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the F1 score by 133% compared to LLM-based methods. |
Atoxia: Red-teaming Large Language Models with Target Toxic Answers (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are still vulnerable to generation safety vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that A**tacks LLMs with target "toxi" given a particular harmful answer, the method generates a user query and a misleading answer opening to examine the internal defects of a given LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects safety risks in open-source models and state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o. |
Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating impression generation have limited the relationship between extra knowledge and the original findings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automating impression generation that exploits extra knowledge and original findings . they propose combining key words and their relations to extract critical information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits extra knowledge and the original findings in an integrated way . the state-of-the-art results on two datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method . |
Unlocking LLMs’ Self-Improvement Capacity with Autonomous Learning for Domain Adaptation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use self-supervised and instruction fine-tuning can be trained using unlabeled corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unlabeled target corpora to adapt large language models to new domains . they propose to employ self-supervised pre-training and instruction fine-tuning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt to new domains using only a large amount of unlabeled target corpora. |
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. |
PrinciplismQA: A Philosophy-Grounded Approach to Assessing LLM-Human Clinical Medical Ethics Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack systematic approaches to integrate philosophical frameworks and expert validation for ethical reasoning assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a philosophy-grounded approach to assess medical ethics alignment . PrinciplismQA comprises 3,648 expert-validated questions spanning knowledge assessment and clinical reasoning . |
| Outcome: | PrinciplismQA provides a philosophy-grounded approach to assessing medical ethics alignment. |
Towards Injecting Medical Visual Knowledge into Multimodal LLMs at Scale (2024.emnlp-main)
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Junying Chen, Chi Gui, Ruyi Ouyang, Anningzhe Gao, Shunian Chen, Guiming Chen, Xidong Wang, Zhenyang Cai, Ke Ji, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) lack visual knowledge in medical applications due to data privacy concerns and high annotation costs. |
| Approach: | They refined medical image-text pairs from PubMed and employed MLLMs (GPT-4V) to denoise and reformat the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the MMMU Health & Medicine track and shows that it can be used in multimodal scenarios. |
Flipping Knowledge Distillation: Leveraging Small Models’ Expertise to Enhance LLMs in Text Matching (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in acquiring diverse knowledge, making them highly effective across a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flipped knowledge distillation paradigm where LLM learns from SLM . they propose to reinterpret LLMs as encoder-decoder models using LoRA . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has been deployed in an online application environment and validated on financial and healthcare benchmarks and real-world applications. |
Improving Radiology Summarization with Radiograph and Anatomy Prompts (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on automatic impression generation, but this task is time-consuming and in high demand. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an anatomy-enhanced multimodal model to generate automatic impressions by combining radiology images with textual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark datasets and compares with existing models. |
Cross-modal Memory Networks for Radiology Report Generation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Medical imaging reports are essential in clinical practice, and generating the reports is beneficial to reduce the burden of radiologists. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a shared memory to enhance the encoder-decoder framework for radiology report generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more accurate reports on two widely used datasets. |
One Cannot Stand for Everyone! Leveraging Multiple User Simulators to train Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have found that Task-oriented Dialogue systems can be more suitable for human users. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to optimize ToD systems by leveraging Multiple User SimulaTors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on multiWOZ with human evaluations and automatic evaluations. |
HuatuoGPT, Towards Taming Language Model to Be a Doctor (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongbo Zhang, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Fei Yu, Zhihong Chen, Guiming Chen, Jianquan Li, Xiangbo Wu, Zhang Zhiyi, Qingying Xiao, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the distilled language model outperforms its teacher model (ChatGPT) in most cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model (LLM) that leverages both distilled data from **ChatGPT** and real-world data from**doctors** in the supervised fine-tuning stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the teacher model in most cases by using additional real-world data and RLMF to align the language model with the merits of both sources. |
On the Difference of BERT-style and CLIP-style Text Encoders (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Masked language modeling is one of the most popular pretraining recipes in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They analyze BERT-style and CLIP-style text encoders from three experiments . they show that CLIP style encoder is equipped with synesthesia for the cross-modal association . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform BERT-style models on vision-centric text understanding tasks, but have synesthesia for the cross-modal association, similar to the senses of humans. |
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. |
Self-Instructed Derived Prompt Generation Meets In-Context Learning: Unlocking New Potential of Black-Box LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt refinement methods suffer from semantic inconsistencies and fail to maintain users’ real intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-instructed in-context learning framework that generates reliable derived prompts while keeping semantic consistency with original prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates better derived prompts and significantly enhances LLMs’ ability to deliver more effective responses. |
A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) focus on reducing discrepancy between tokens and tokens, but transfer of valuable label information is often not considered or ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that borrows entity information from the source domain to enhance NER in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the state-of-the-art model on several datasets. |
Toward Expanding the Scope of Radiology Report Summarization to Multiple Anatomies and Modalities (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies are limited to a single modality and a chest X-ray, making it difficult to replicate results or compare approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to generate an impression section of a radiology report . they propose to use three new modalities and seven new anatomies to evaluate their models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC CXR datasets and evaluates their clinical efficacy via RadGraph, a factual correctness metric. |
Learn from Relation Information: Towards Prototype Representation Rectification for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Few-shot Relation Extraction focus on implicitly introducing relation information to constrain the prototype representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-less method to promote few-shot relation extraction . they use a prototype rectification module to rectify original prototypes by relation information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on fewRel 1.0 and 2.0 datasets. |
Affection Driven Neural Networks for Sentiment Analysis (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep neural network models lack mechanisms to highlight important sentiment terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to incorporate affective knowledge into deep neural network models by mapping affective influence vectors to an affective impact value and integrating them into long-term memory models to highlight affective terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three large datasets by 1.0% to 1.5% on the benchmark datasets. |
WIND: Weighting Instances Differentially for Model-Agnostic Domain Adaptation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instance weighting cannot learn the weights which make the model generalize well in target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a modelagnostic instance weighting algorithm which can learn the instance weights instead of manually designed weighting metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn the instance weights instead of manually designed weighting metrics. |
A Simple yet Effective Relation Information Guided Approach for Few-Shot Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to introduce relation information into the model are limited by labeling and data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose a direct addition approach to introduce relation information into a model by concatenating two views of relations and adding them to the original prototype. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on the benchmark dataset FewRel 1.0 and shows comparable results to the state-of-the-art. |
Huatuo-26M, a Large-scale Chinese Medical QA Dataset (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xidong Wang, Jianquan Li, Shunian Chen, Yuxuan Zhu, Xiangbo Wu, Zhiyi Zhang, Xiaolong Xu, Junying Chen, Jie Fu, Xiang Wan, Anningzhe Gao, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are a powerful tool for medical research, but the data is a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the largest ever medical Question Answering dataset with 26 Million QA pairs as a fine-tuning data for training large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset demonstrates that it can be used to train large language models and improves zero-shot performance on other datasets. |
How Do Social Bots Participate in Misinformation Spread? A Comprehensive Dataset and Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Social media platforms provide an ideal environment to spread misinformation, where social bots can accelerate the spread. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale dataset that includes annotations for misinformation and social bots on the Sina Weibo platform. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 65,749 social bots and 345,886 genuine accounts, annotated using a weakly supervised annotator. |
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. |
MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria (2025.naacl-long)
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Wentao Ge, Shunian Chen, Hardy Chen, Nuo Chen, Junying Chen, Zhihong Chen, Wenya Xie, Shuo Yan, ChenghaoZhu ChenghaoZhu, Ziyue Lin, Dingjie Song, Xidong Wang, Anningzhe Gao, Zhang Zhiyi, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for multimodal large language models are limited in evaluating objective queries without considering real-world user experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm shows that it can be used to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria. |
LLM Inductive Reasoning Through Multi-Agent Enhanced Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing inductive reasoning of large language models often lack explicit optimization guidance and effective error correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play test-time framework that integrates multi-agent coordination with Monte Carlo Tree Search to improve inductive reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four benchmarks and shows consistent improvements on QWQ-32B and Deepseek-V3 . |
When Cantonese NLP Meets Pre-training: Progress and Challenges (2022.aacl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Cantonese is an influential Chinese variant with a large population of speakers worldwide. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review Cantonese's progress in linguistics and NLP . it will introduce transformer-based pre-training methods for a wide range of downstream tasks . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will present the main challenges for Cantonese NLP in relation to Cantonesian language idiosyncrasies of colloquialism and multilingualism. |
Generating Radiology Reports via Memory-driven Transformer (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Medical imaging reports are time-consuming and can be error-prone for inexperienced radiologists. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate radiology reports with memory-driven Transformer using relational memory and memory-based conditional layer normalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR . it generates long reports with medical terms and meaningful image-text attention mappings . |
CMB: A Comprehensive Medical Benchmark in Chinese (2024.naacl-long)
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Xidong Wang, Guiming Chen, Song Dingjie, Zhang Zhiyi, Zhihong Chen, Qingying Xiao, Junying Chen, Feng Jiang, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a great breakthrough in medicine, says a new study . existing studies on LLMs leverage subjective evaluation, but evaluation in medicine is professional . |
| Approach: | They propose a localized medical benchmark in Chinese rooted in native Chinese . they propose to use traditional Chinese medicine to evaluate large-scale LLMs . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark is developed to evaluate large-scale LLMs in china . the proposed model is rooted in the native Chinese linguistic and cultural framework . |
Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture task-specific robust features while eliminating non-robust ones . they show that models can achieve significant improvement in robust accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all defense methods on SST-2, AGNEWS and IMDB datasets while achieving no performance drop. |
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. |
APLOT: Robust Reward Modeling via Adaptive Preference Learning with Optimal Transport (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that RLHF improves performance of Large Language Models . BT-based RMs struggle to distinguish between similar preference responses . |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance BT-based reward models by using an adaptive margin mechanism . they use semantic similarity and reward-predicted reward differences to adjust focus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in both in-distribution and OOD settings. |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Hero-Gang Neural Model For Named Entity Recognition (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental and important task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Hero-Gang Neural structure to leverage both global and local information to promote NER by using a Transformer-based encoder and a Gang module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract local features and position information from the Hero and Gang modules, and it performs on multiple datasets. |
Field Embedding: A Unified Grain-Based Framework for Word Representation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current methods focus on learning word embeddings while linguistic information is discarded after the learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework field embedding to jointly learn word and grain embedds by incorporating morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates morphological, phonetic, and syntactical linguistic fields to learn word embeddings and grain embedds. |
CoD, Towards an Interpretable Medical Agent using Chain of Diagnosis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) are proving to be effective in medical automatic diagnosis, but their interpretability remains unaddressed. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a "Chain-of-Diagnosis" approach to enhance the interpretability of medical automatic diagnosis by outputting the disease confidence distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other LLMs on automatic diagnostic tasks across three real-world benchmarks and provides interpretability while ensuring controllability in diagnostic rigor. |
Sina Mandarin Alphabetical Words:A Web-driven Code-mixing Lexical Resource (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Mandarin Alphabetical Words (MAWs) are a key component of Modern Chinese . they are characterized by unique code-mixing idiosyncrasies influenced by language exchanges . |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a large collection of Mandarin Alphabetic Words from Sina Weibo . they propose to use a web-based technique to identify and validate MAWs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method identifies 16,207 Mandarin Alphabetic Words (MAWs) using a web-based technique . the results show that the proposed method is useful for linguistic research and inquiries . |
Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Multimodal Feature Integration (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GEC models improve over strong baselines and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the Falko-MERLIN test set. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates both speech and text features to enhance GEC by generating audio from text using advanced text-to-speech models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on CoNLL14, BEA19 English, and Falko-MERLIN German datasets. |
Route Sparse Autoencoder to Interpret Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable and monosemantic features in large language models . prior work focused on feature extraction from a single layer, failing to capture activations that span multiple layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a routing mechanism with a shared SAE to efficiently extract features from multiple layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts features from multiple layers while incurring minimal parameter overhead while achieving high interpretability and flexibility. |
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. |