Papers by Xiangyu Wu

Beyond Demographics: Enhancing Cultural Value Survey Simulation with Multi-Stage Personality-Driven Cognitive Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, raising ethical concerns, especially about perpetuating stereotypes.
Approach:	They propose a method that incorporates a neutral word semantics-based loss function to alleviate the deterioration of the LMS during debiasing.
Outcome:	The proposed method alleviates the deterioration of the Language Modeling Score (LMS) by incorporating a neutral word semantics-based loss function.

Copied to clipboard

Haijiang Liu, Qiyuan Li, Chao Gao, Yong Cao, Xiangyu Xu, Xun Wu, Daniel Hershcovich, Jinguang Gu

Capturing Event Argument Interaction via A Bi-Directional Entity-Level Recurrent Decoder (2021.acl-long)

Challenge:	Introducing MARK, a framework for cultural value survey simulation . based on type dynamics theory, it improves accuracy and interpretation of models .
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates psychological theory into cultural value survey simulations.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on the World Values Survey by 10% accuracy and reduces divergence between model predictions and human preferences.

Copied to clipboard

Xi Xiangyu, Wei Ye, Shikun Zhang, Quanxiu Wang, Huixing Jiang, Wei Wu

PsyScore: A Psychometrically-Aware Framework for Trait-Adaptive Essay Scoring and ZPD-Scaffolded Feedback (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing efforts to capture event argument interactions are limited by the argument role type information of contextual entities.
Approach:	They propose to capture event argument interactions as a Seq2Seq-like learning problem where a sentence with a specific event trigger is mapped to a sequence of event argument roles.
Outcome:	The proposed neural architecture generates argument roles by incorporating contextual entities’ argument role predictions, like a word-by-word text generation process, thereby distinguishing implicit argument distribution patterns within an event more accurately.

Copied to clipboard

Wei Xia, Jin Wu, Haoran Shi, Xiangyu Wang, Chanjin Zheng

Explainability & Interpretability in NLP

Challenge:	Existing approaches to Automated Essay Scoring (AES) treat scoring and feedback as separate components, resulting in fragmentation.
Approach:	They propose a psychometrically-aware framework that integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates diagnostic assessment with instructional scaffolding through a shared latent ability representation.

LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework .
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text .

Model Merging for Knowledge Editing (2025.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yingying Zhang, Yefeng Zheng, Tianshi Ming, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Xiangyu Zhao

LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing knowledge editing approaches struggle with sequential editing scenarios and harm the general capabilities of the model.
Approach:	They propose a framework that combines robust supervised fine-tuning and model merging for knowledge editing to combine supervised and supervised learning.
Outcome:	The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in sequential editing while preserving the original performance of the model.

Copied to clipboard

Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang

PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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.

Copied to clipboard

Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum

Don’t Stop Early: Scalable Enterprise Deep Research with Controlled Information Flow and Evidence-Aware Termination (2026.acl-industry)

Challenge:	Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window.
Approach:	They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window.
Outcome:	The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits.

Copied to clipboard

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jiaxin Zhang, Vaibhav Vats, Yu Li, Xiangyu Peng, Chien-Sheng Wu

Challenge:	Enterprise deep research systems fail to produce decision-ready reports due to uneven information coverage, context explosion, and premature stopping.
Approach:	They propose a scalable Enterprise Deep Research (EDR) architecture that decomposes requests into coverage-driven objectives via outline generation with reflection and localizes context with dependency-guided execution and explicit information sharing.
Outcome:	The proposed system achieves the strongest overall performance compared with competitive deep-research baselines on internal sales enablement tasks and the public DeepResearch Bench benchmark.

Mitigating Hallucinations of Large Language Models in Medical Information Extraction via Contrastive Decoding (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhihong Zhu, Zhenxi Lin, Qidong Liu, Xian Wu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Medical Information Extraction (MIE) tasks are a fundamental component of medical NLP.
Approach:	They propose an alternative adaptive constraint strategy to adjust the scale and scope of contrastive tokens.
Outcome:	The proposed approach selectively enhances the identification and classification capabilities while minimizing the influence of other inherent abilities in LLMs.

AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Yimin Deng, Yejing Wang, Zhenxi Lin, Zichuan Fu, Guoshuai Zhao, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xian Wu, Li Zhu, Xueming Qian

LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for temporal reasoning are limited and apply a fixed pipeline to all questions.
Approach:	They propose an adaptive temporal reasoning method that dynamically executes reasoning steps based on context and task requirements.
Outcome:	Experiments on two temporal QA benchmarks show the proposed method works.

Copied to clipboard

Longyun Wu, Dawei Zhu, Guangxiang Zhao, Zhuocheng Yu, Junfeng Ran, Xiangyu Wong, Lin Sun, Sujian Li

ThinkAnswer Loss: Balancing Semantic Similarity and Exact Matching for LLM Reasoning Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency.
Approach:	They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores.
Outcome:	The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection.

Copied to clipboard

Shan Yang, Kun Wu, Zeju Li, Linlin Zhang, Xiangyu Pei, Leike An, Yu Liu

Learning While Staying Curious: Entropy-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Adaptive Self-Distillation for Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for knowledge distillation use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and answer pairs, but they lack appropriate supervision signals.
Approach:	They propose a framework that decouples CoT and answer supervision . the framework applies semantic similarity constraints while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer .
Outcome:	The proposed framework decouples CoT and answer supervision while maintaining strict literal matching for the answer.

Copied to clipboard

Hao Wang, Hao Gu, Hongming Piao, Kaixiong Gong, Yuxiao Ye, Xiangyu Yue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Dapeng Wu

Tandem: Riding Together with Large and Small Language Models for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances establish "SFT-then-RL" as the defacto paradigm for enhancing large reasoning mod- els on automatically verifiable tasks.
Approach:	They propose an entropy-preserving SFT method to enhance exploration capabilities through intrinsic curiosity.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms the vanilla method on reasoning tasks by 2.5 points . it also outperformed the vanilla SFT by 2.9 points on out-of-distribution tasks .

Copied to clipboard

Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Guojing Li, Yejing Wang, Yijun Chen, Zhao Zihao, Luo Yixuan, Hanyu Yan, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao

Can LLMs Hear the Dogwhistle? (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have catalyzed the rise of reasoningintensive inference paradigms, where models perform explicit step-by-step reasoning before generating final answers.
Approach:	They propose a large-small LLM collaboration framework that synergizes large and small language models to achieve high-quality reasoning with significantly reduced computational cost.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms the mentor LLM while preserving the benefits of the thinking paradigm of LLMs.

Copied to clipboard

Yifan Liu, Yi Lin, Xinwei Guo, Ziwei Wang, Jiaxin Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Haiyan Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei

UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing safety benchmarks focus on explicitly harmful content, but ignore context-dependent expressions such as dogwhistles.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark for evaluating LLM safety under dogwhistle-driven prompts . their findings expose a blind spot in current safety evaluation practices .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark compared safety performance with toxic terms using dogwhistle-driven prompts.

Copied to clipboard

Xiangyu Zhao, Yuehan Zhang, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu

Training-free LLM Merging for Multi-task Learning (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	e-commerce tasks such as multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation are largely ignored due to the diversity of the multimodal fashion domain.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates image generation with retrieval and text generation tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models across fashion tasks.

Copied to clipboard

Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yejing Wang, Wanyu Wang, Shanshan Ye, Hongzhi Yin, Yi Chang, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao

A Multi-Expert Structural-Semantic Hybrid Framework for Unveiling Historical Patterns in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across diverse natural language processing tasks.
Approach:	They propose a training-free method for unifying different specialized LLMs into a single model using model-wise and layer-wise pruning and scaling.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing merging techniques and surpasses models fine-tuned on combined datasets in most scenarios.

Copied to clipboard

Yimin Deng, Yuxia Wu, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Li Zhu, Qidong Liu, Derong Xu, Zichuan Fu, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Xueming Qian

Knowledge Representation

Challenge:	Existing methods focus on graph structure learning or semantic reasoning, lacking the capability to capture the inherent differences between historical and non-historical events.
Approach:	They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning framework that integrates both structural and semantic information to guide the reasoning process for different events.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates structural and semantic information to predict future events . it can provide evidence for many downstream tasks, including situation analysis and political decision making .

Benchmarking Deep Search over Heterogeneous Enterprise Data (2025.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Xiangyu Peng, Shilpa Bhagavath, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing methods struggle to conduct deep searches and retrieve all necessary evidence.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark for evaluating deep search, a retrieval-augmented generation that requires source-aware, multi-hop reasoning over diverse, sparsed, but related sources.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks show that even the best-performing agentic RAG methods achieve an average performance score of 32.96 on the benchmark.

LPO: Towards Accurate GUI Agent Interaction via Location Preference Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Jiaqi Tang, Yu Xia, Yi-Feng Wu, Yuwei Hu, Chen Yuhui, Qing-Guo Chen, Xiaogang Xu, Xiangyu Wu, Hao LU, Yanqing Ma, Shiyin Lu, Qifeng Chen

Challenge:	Existing strategies for spatial localization are limited due to their limited capacity to perceive positional data.
Approach:	They propose a location-based approach that leverages locational data to optimize interaction preferences.
Outcome:	The proposed approach achieves SOTA results across offline benchmarks and real-world evaluations.

Turning Conversations into Workflows: A Framework to Extract and Evaluate Dialog Workflows for Service AI Agents (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Xiangyu Peng, Shilpa Bhagavath, Caiming Xiong, Shiva Kumar Pentyala, Chien-Sheng Wu

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing workflow extraction methods for service agents are time-consuming and outdated, causing inconsistent and inconsistent results.
Approach:	They propose a framework for extracting and evaluating dialog workflows from historical interactions.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves workflow extraction by 12.16% over baseline.

Unanswerability Evaluation for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Xiangyu Peng, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu

Select Before Use: On the Importance of Reference Model Selection in Preference Alignment (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation frameworks for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems focus on answerable queries, but ignore the importance of appropriately rejecting unanswerable requests.
Approach:	They propose a framework to evaluate whether retrieval-augmented generation systems handle unanswerable queries specific to a given knowledge base.
Outcome:	The proposed framework synthesizes diverse and challenging queries for any given knowledge base and evaluates them with unanswered ratio and acceptable ratio metrics.

Copied to clipboard

Muyang Li, Runze Wu, Xiangyu Zhao, Bo Han, Daoyi Dong, Tongliang Liu

Challenge:	Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is used as the initialization and reference model for subsequent preference alignment.
Approach:	They propose to use RewardRank to estimate initial implicit alignment between reference model and preference objective to ensure LLMs generate safe, helpful, and instruction-aligned content.
Outcome:	Empirical evidence shows that using the selected model as reference can gain up to 67.6% relative increase on length-controlled win rate compared to baselines.

EasyGen: Easing Multimodal Generation with BiDiffuser and LLMs (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Xiangyu Zhao, Bo Liu, Qijiong Liu, Guangyuan Shi, Xiao-Ming Wu

Multimodality

Challenge:	Existing multimodal models that depend on encoders like CLIP or ImageBind need ample amounts of training data to bridge modalities.
Approach:	They propose an efficient model that leverages bidirectional conditional diffusion model to foster more efficient modality interactions.
Outcome:	The proposed model is able to train a projection layer linking an LLM and an adapter to align the LLM’s text space with the bidirectional diffusion model.

MultiDx: A Multi-Source Knowledge Integration Framework towards Diagnostic Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Yimin Deng, Zhenxi Lin, Yejing Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Pengyue Jia, Zichuan Fu, Derong Xu, Yefeng Zheng, Xiangyu Zhao, Li Zhu, Xian Wu, Xueming Qian

T2R-BENCH: A Benchmark for Real World Table-to-Report Task (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing approaches focus on diagnostic reasoning based on internal model knowledge or static knowledge bases.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage diagnostic reasoning framework that integrates multi-perspective evidence to generate a diagnostic prediction.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates suspected diagnoses and reasoning traces from web search, SOAP-formatted case, and clinical case database.

Copied to clipboard

Jie Zhang, Changzai Pan, Sishi Xiong, Kaiwen Wei, Yu Zhao, Xiangyu Li, Jiaxin Peng, Xiaoyan Gu, Jian Yang, Wenhan Chang, Zhenhe Wu, Jiang Zhong, Shuangyong Song, Xuelong Li

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing table benchmarks lack the capacity to adequately assess the practical application of table reasoning in industrial applications.
Approach:	They propose a bilingual table-to-report task and a table-based benchmark to assess the quality of table reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed task is based on a bilingual benchmark with 457 industrial tables and evaluation criteria to measure the quality of report generation.

MirrorCAPTCHA: Wild CAPTCHA, Wild Distribution, Wild Web-based Platform Meet Multimodal LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Xiangyu Wu, Yuwei Hu, Tianyu Cui, Yueying Tian, Qing-Guo Chen, Zhao Xu, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yang Yang, Jianfeng Lu

Multimodality

Challenge:	Existing agent benchmarks fail to evaluate an agent's real-world capacity to handle CAPTCHA . Existing benchmarks ignore this practical challenge, failing to evaluate agents' ability to handle complex visual CAPTchas.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark annotated with Weighted Pass Rate and a new metric to measure agent's ability to handle CAPTCHA.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark outperforms current state-of-the-art closed-source models on mirrorCAPTCHA and achieves 9.4% higher average weighted pass rate and 2.13% higher average Completion degree.

Unlocking Exploration in RLVR: Uncertainty-aware Advantage Shaping for Deeper Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Can Xie, Ruotong Pan, Xiangyu Wu, Zhang Yunfei, Jiayi Fu, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou

OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown significant promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
Approach:	They propose a model-free method that refines credit assignment by leveraging the model's internal uncertainty signals.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms strong RLVR baselines on multiple model scales, including 1.5B and 7B.

Copied to clipboard

Zhanyu Liu, Shiyao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Rongzhou Zhang, Jiaxin Deng, Honghui Bao, Jinghao Zhang, Wuchao Li, PengFei Zheng, Xiangyu Wu, Yifei Hu, Qigen Hu, Xinchen Luo, Lejian Ren, Zhang Zixing, Qianqian Wang, Kuo Cai, Yunfan Wu, Hongtao Cheng, Zexuan Cheng, Lu Ren, Huanjie Wang, Yi Su, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou

Multi-perspective Improvement of Knowledge Graph Completion with Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Existing generative models lack the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning, a key advantage of LLMs.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation.
Outcome:	Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance.

Copied to clipboard

Derong Xu, Ziheng Zhang, Zhenxi Lin, Xian Wu, Zhihong Zhu, Tong Xu, Xiangyu Zhao, Yefeng Zheng, Enhong Chen