Papers by Xiangru Tang

23 papers
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability.
Approach: They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs.
Outcome: The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models.
PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts (2022.acl-demo)

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Challenge: PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . prompts are used to train and query language models in zero-shot learning settings .
Approach: PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . et al.: using prompts to train and query language models is emerging area in NLP . they propose a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, a user interface that iterates on prompt development .
Outcome: PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts . it has a templating language for defining data-linked prompts and a community-driven set of guidelines .
MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models face unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge.
Approach: They propose a multi-disciplinary collaboration framework that leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting.
Outcome: The proposed framework excels at mining and harnessing medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities.
FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: FinDVer is a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . financial documents are typically long, intricate and dense, and they include both quantita and numerical reasoning.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs . they assess 25 LLM systems under long-context and RAG settings .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in financial documents.
Self-Supervised Prompt Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing prompt optimization methods rely heavily on external references such as ground truth or by humans, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where such data is unavailable or costly to obtain.
Approach: They propose a cost-efficient framework that discovers effective prompts for both closed and open-ended tasks without external reference.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods with significantly lower costs and fewer samples.
OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Existing methods for table-to-text generation are limited and benchmarked on a limited number of datasets.
Approach: They propose to use open-source tools to reproduce existing large language models for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit compares existing large language models on 9 table-to-text generation datasets and maintains a leaderboard to provide insights for future work.
MIMIR: A Customizable Agent Tuning Platform for Enhanced Scientific Applications (2024.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents capable of planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks.
Approach: They propose a platform that leverages large language models to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuneing smaller, specialized models.
Outcome: MIMIR enables large models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2.
DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Data-to-text annotations can be costly when dealing with tables with nontrivial structures.
Approach: They propose a procedure for extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting table headers and table title.
Outcome: The proposed method exploits the semantic dependencies between table headers and title to extract semantic triples from tables.
FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering (2022.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing table-based question answering datasets lack advanced information-based questions that require reasoning and integration of information pieces retrieved from structured knowledge sources.
Approach: They propose a dataset with 10K Wikipedia-based table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells pairs that can be used to generate an answer.
Outcome: The proposed dataset has 10K Wikipedia-based table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells pairs.
RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing Table QA models are vulnerable to task-specific perturbations, such as replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly improves on existing Table QA models against human-annotated adversarial perturbations.
Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models.
Approach: They apply multitask prompted finetuning to pretrained multilingual models and generate variants called BLOOMZ and mT0.
Outcome: The proposed models can generalize to non-English languages that have never been seen before.
Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing table-to-text generation techniques that transform complex tabular data into comprehensible narratives are lacking in real-world applications.
Approach: They investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed models can generate table-to-text data in two real-world information seeking scenarios and perform better than existing models.
Investigating Crowdsourcing Protocols for Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Summaries (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing pre-trained summarization models produce text that is factually inconsistent with the input.
Approach: They present a scale-based scale for Likert rating and a scoring algorithm for Best-Worst Scaling to improve crowdsourcing reliability.
Outcome: The proposed model is more reliable than existing models on two news summarization datasets.
CONFIT: Toward Faithful Dialogue Summarization with Linguistically-Informed Contrastive Fine-tuning (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Factual inconsistencies in generated summaries severely limit the practical applications of abstractive dialogue summarization.
Approach: They propose a typology of factual errors to better understand hallucinations generated by current models and a contrastive fine-tuning strategy to improve the factual consistency and overall quality of summaries.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly reduces all kinds of factual errors on both SAMSum dialogue summarization and AMI meeting summarizing datasets.
Struc-Bench: Are Large Language Models Good at Generating Complex Structured Tabular Data? (2024.naacl-short)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced capabilities but produce complex structured data.
Approach: They propose a structure-aware fine-tuning method to bolster LLMs' performance by crafting format-specific instructions from the intended outputs.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms LLMs on all three formats and spans text tables, HTML, and LaTeX formats.
Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Model: A Survey from Detection to Remediation (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Data contamination is a problem in Large language models due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora.
Approach: They present a survey on the topic of data contamination in large language models.
Outcome: The results of the first survey on data contamination in large language models provide a comprehensive guide for NLP researchers seeking a systematic understanding of the issue.
Med-PRM: Medical Reasoning Models with Stepwise, Guideline-verified Process Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models have shown promise in clinical decision making, but current approaches struggle to localize and correct reasoning errors at specific steps of the reasoning process.
Approach: They propose a process reward modeling framework that leverages retrieval-augmented generation to verify each reasoning step against established medical knowledge bases.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on five medical QA benchmarks and two open-ended diagnostic tasks by 13.50% on MedQA.
PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific domains.
Approach: They propose a framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding.
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say .
Approach: They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects.
Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for large language models are inflated and inconsistent with actual performance.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between benchmarks and pretraining corpora and a protocol to investigate testset slot guessing.
Outcome: The proposed method exploits overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora and masks a wrong answer in a multiple choice question and prompts the model to fill in the gap.
QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights.
Approach: They propose a query-focused task where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored table summary.
Outcome: The proposed method improves existing baselines on table-to-text generation and large language models by concatenating generated facts to the model input.
Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to fidelity to contexts rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches without improving utilization of the given context.
Approach: They propose a native retrieval-augmented reasoning framework that integrates in-context evidence with the model’s own retrieval capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation methods, and external retrieval solutions on multiple real-world and counterfactual QA benchmarks.
Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Recent work on Wikipedia page generation focuses on generating the initial leading paragraph of a page, while recent pretrained language models improve upon both extractive and abstractive steps of previous models.
Approach: They propose a pretrained language model that can be combined to generate Wikipedia-style summaries with sections using 100 reference human-collected surveys.
Outcome: The proposed approach is compared with existing methods with 100 human-collected surveys.

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