Papers by Xiangyang Li
TVShowGuess: Character Comprehension in Stories as Speaker Guessing (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Our proposed task, TVShowGuess, builds on the scripts of TV series and takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that takes the form of guessing the anonymous main characters based on the backgrounds of the scenes and the dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baselines, yet lag behind human performance. |
CtrlA: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Inherent Control (2025.findings-acl)
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Liu Huanshuo, Hao Zhang, Zhijiang Guo, Jing Wang, Kuicai Dong, Xiangyang Li, Yi Quan Lee, Cong Zhang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on detecting LLM’s confidence via statistical uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a representation perspective to solve adaptive RAG by enabling dynamic retrieval during generation and enabling retrieval only when the query exceeds LLM's internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing adaptive RAG methods on a diverse set of tasks. |
Instruction Fusion: Advancing Prompt Evolution through Hybridization (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks, namely HumanEval, HumanEva+, MBPP, mbap+ and MultiPL-E. |
TaCIE: Enhancing Instruction Comprehension in Large Language Models through Task-Centred Instruction Evolution (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) encounter performance limitations, impeding further enhancements in code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine two distinct prompts through a hybridization process to enhance the evolution of training prompts for code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs across five code generation benchmarks. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025.coling-main)
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Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | Lack of training data leads to the system cold-start problem in recommendation systems, making them struggle to provide effective recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based LLM recommendation framework which structures all items into an item tree to improve the efficiency of LLM’s item retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baseline model in the A/B test on Huawei industrial system. |
Multi-Attribute Controlled Text Generation with Contrastive-Generator and External-Discriminator (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on controlled text generation focus on single-attribute control, but in practical applications, they lack controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-attribute controlled text generation that can effectively generate texts with more attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves remarkable controllability while keeping the text fluent and diverse. |
Humanity’s Last Code Exam: Can Advanced LLMs Conquer Human’s Hardest Code Competition? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xiangyang Li, Xiaopeng Li, Kuicai Dong, null Zhangquanhu, Rongju Ruan, Xinyi Dai, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | o4-mini(high) and Gemini-2.5 Pro achieve pass@1 rates of only 15.9% and 11.4%, respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a harmonized online–offline sandbox that guarantees fully reproducible evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test reflects the advanced reasoning and code generation ability of large language models. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
Contrastive Learning enhanced Author-Style Headline Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current work only uses the article itself in the headline generation, but have not taken the writing style of headlines into account. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which takes historical headlines into account to integrate the stylistic features of the author into the model and integrate them into the decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can integrate the stylistic features of the author into the model and generate a headline that is appropriate for the article and consistent with the author’s style. |
CoIR: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Code Information Retrieval Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods and benchmarks for information retrieval are inadequately representing the diversity of code in various domains and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to assess code retrieval capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to invigorate research in the code retrieval domain . it shares the same data schema as other popular benchmarks like MTEB and BEIR . |
AIGuard: A Benchmark and Lightweight Detection for E-commerce AIGC Risks (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhua Zhang, Weicheng Li, Xuanrong Rao, Lixin Zou, Xiangyang Luo, Chubin Zhuang, Yongjie Hong, Zhen Qin, Hengyu Chang, Chenliang Li, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods lack real-world scenarios and corresponding risk datasets . current MLLMs lack knowledge and have limited capability to detect the risk of AIGC content. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for AIGC risk detection in real-world e-commerce . it includes 253,420 image-text pairs across four critical categories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 9.68% higher recall than leading multimodal models while using only 25% of training resources. |
GOBench: Stage-Wise Diagnostics and the Visual Paradox in Multimodal Graph Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, score outcomes only and cannot localize where failures occur along the modeling pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph Optimization benchmark that aligns multiple modalities with solver-derived oracles and a diagnostic protocol that evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results. |
| Outcome: | Graph Optimization benchmark (GOBench) evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results . vision reliably increases inference cost, while reliability impact is regime-dependent . current benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, fail to localize failures . |
Prefix-diffusion: A Lightweight Diffusion Model for Diverse Image Captioning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing image captioning models require large trainable parameters to bridge visual and textual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight image captioning network in combination with continuous diffusion that injects prefix image embeddings into denoising process of diffusion model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates diverse captions with relatively less parameters while maintaining fluency and relevance compared with other models. |
Low Resource Style Transfer via Domain Adaptive Meta Learning (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing unsupervised text style transfer methods suffer from performance degradation when fine-tuning the model in new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain adaptive meta-learning approach with an adversarial style training approach for better content preservation and style transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generalizes well on unseen low-resource domains against ten strong baselines. |
Complementary Evidence Identification in Open-Domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA that only measure the relevance between the question and each paragraph are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns vector representations of passages and models the sufficiency and diversity within the selected set, in addition to the relevance between the question and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the accuracy of complementary evidence selection in open-domain question answering domain. |
CodePRM: Execution Feedback-enhanced Process Reward Model for Code Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in code generation focus on optimizing the thought process, but lack effective process supervision, making it difficult to optimize the thoughts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages the code execution feedback to build a code PRM by collecting a large dataset of thought traces and then training it to take both the reasoning process and code execution as input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines and strong LLMs in the inference stage. |
BERT-ATTACK: Adversarial Attack Against BERT Using BERT (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to generate adversarial samples for discrete data are heuristic replacement strategies that are difficult to implement in continuous data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate adversarial samples using pre-trained masked language models using BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in success rate and perturb percentage while remaining fluent and semantically preserved. |
MC-indexing: Effective Long Document Retrieval via Multi-view Content-aware Indexing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document question answering do not consider content structures, resulting chunks exclude vital information or include irrelevant content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that segments document into content chunks and represents each content chunk in raw-text, keywords, and summary views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves recall of long document question answering datasets compared to state-of-the-art chunking schemes. |
D-NET: A Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Framework for Improving the Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)
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Hongyu Li, Xiyuan Zhang, Yibing Liu, Yiming Zhang, Quan Wang, Xiangyang Zhou, Jing Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | MRC requires machines to understand text and answer questions about the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple system Baidu submitted for MRQA 2019 Shared Task that focused on generalization of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is ranked at top 1 of all participants in terms of averaged F1 score. |
MBTI Personality Prediction for Fictional Characters Using Movie Scripts (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing NLP models cannot predict character's personality types based on text classifications . character comprehension is the cornerstone of understanding stories in psychology and education. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to predict movie character's MBTI or Big 5 personality types based on the narratives of the character. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in the task and is more accurate than random guesses. |
Improving Pre-trained Language Models with Knowledge Enhancement and Filtering Framework (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge enhancement techniques for pre-trained language models (PLMs) introduce noisy entity representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge enhancement filter that integrates external knowledge bases to enhance PLMs' ability to capture entity knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy while reducing the computational cost by 1.7-2.5x. |
Mitigating Language Confusion through Inference-time Intervention (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the problem of language confusion are incontext learning and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) however, they consume context window space and require extensive data collection. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-sensitive intervention that detects and assesses language confusion without additional complex mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects language confusion and assesses content quality without additional complex mechanisms. |
Efficient Sparse Attention needs Adaptive Token Release (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide array of text-centric tasks, however, their ‘large’ scale introduces significant computational and storage challenges, particularly in managing the key-value states of the transformer, which limits their wider applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose to release resources from caches and rebuild key-value states by a lightweight controller module to approximate an ideal top-K sparse attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a significant throughput improvement of 221.8% over full attention and a model with 7 billion tokens. |
Plug-and-Play Document Modules for Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-long)
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Chaojun Xiao, Zhengyan Zhang, Xu Han, Chi-Min Chan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiangyang Li, Zhonghua Li, Zhao Cao, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained models have been widely adopted for document-oriented NLP tasks, such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to decouple document encoding from downstream tasks by introducing a document plugin into the backbone of a PTM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode documents once and for all across different scenarios. |
Escaping the Sisyphus Dilemma: Experience Replay for Robust Text-to-Optimization Modeling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented strategies for large language models fail to capture dynamic reasoning required to resolve execution failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that implements Experience Replay to transform transient rectification steps into persistent knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model accuracy by 8.45% on complex tasks while reducing token consumption by 28.65% and interaction turns by 25.82%. |
LightMoE: Task-Aware Expert Availability Management for Memory-Efficient MoE-LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for balancing model accuracy with inference latency are limited due to memory constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for memory-efficient MoE inference that exploits the functional redundancy and temporal locality of expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy-efficiency trade-off by 4.3% over pruned models and 2.4% over dynamic swapping methods while maintaining inference latency comparable to pruned model. |