Papers by Xianjun Yang
PcMSP: A Dataset for Scientific Action Graphs Extraction from Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedure Text (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | 305 open access scientific articles are used for synthesis action graphs . lack of annotated data has hindered progress in this field . |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedures PcMSP from 305 open access scientific articles for the construction of synthesis action graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains the synthesis sentences, entity mentions and intra-sentence relations extracted from the experimental paragraphs. |
Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hoang Phan, Xianjun Yang, Yuanshun Yao, Jingyu Zhang, Shengjie Bi, Xiaocheng Tang, Madian Khabsa, Lijuan Liu, Deren Lei
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning . however, the recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, where models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves general capabilities and improves reasoning . it can be applied to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or tuning . |
CBT-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Assisting Cognitive Behavior Therapy (2025.naacl-long)
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Mian Zhang, Xianjun Yang, Xinlu Zhang, Travis Labrum, Jamie C. Chiu, Shaun M. Eack, Fei Fang, William Yang Wang, Zhiyu Chen
| Challenge: | Existing research has explored mental health condition classifications, empathetic conversations, and chatbots designed for simple discourse structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for systematic evaluation of cognitive behavioral therapy assistance using Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes three levels of tasks covering key aspects of cognitive behavioral therapy that could be enhanced through AI assistance. |
MultiAgent Collaboration Attack: Investigating Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Model Collaborations via Debate (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results when working individually, and have reduced parameter size and inference times. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary and examine inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based model-driven analysis shows that the model-led model-mediated debates generate more compelling arguments and provide a defensive strategy. |
OASum: Large-Scale Open Domain Aspect-based Summarization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generic summarization methods generate only one summary for all different requests which is not optimal for diverse demands. |
| Approach: | They use crowd-sourced knowledge on Wikipedia to create a large-scale open-domain aspect-based summarization dataset with 1 million different aspects on 2 million Wikipedia pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse aspect-based summarizations on Wikipedia with zero/few-shot and fine-tuning on seven downstream datasets. |
TrustAgent: Towards Safe and Trustworthy LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are primarily used for simple text-related tasks, but LLM-based agents can undertake more complex tasks that require planning and interaction with the physical world and humans. |
| Approach: | They propose an Agent-Constitution-based agent framework with a particular focus on improving the LLM-based agents' safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can enhance an LLM agent’s safety across multiple domains by identifying and mitigating potential dangers during the planning process. |
Position Really Matters: Towards a Holistic Approach for Prompt Tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning is effective in extracting knowledge from foundation models, but its effectiveness is uncertain. |
| Approach: | They propose a parametric prompt tuning strategy that dynamically determines different factors of prompts based on specific tasks or instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across a wide range of tasks including NLP, vision recognition, and vision-language tasks. |
A Survey on Detection of LLMs-Generated Content (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xianjun Yang, Liangming Pan, Xuandong Zhao, Haifeng Chen, Linda Petzold, William Yang Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to an increase in synthetic content generation . the ability to detect LLMs-generated content has become of paramount importance . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a detailed overview of existing detection strategies and benchmarks, scrutinizing their differences and advocating for more adaptable and robust models to enhance detection accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model will be able to detect human-written content in real time. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |
Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Event argument extraction (EAE) has been well studied at the sentence level but under-explored at the document level. |
| Approach: | They propose a Few-Shot Document-Level Event Argument Extraction benchmark to capture event arguments that actually spread across sentences in documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is very challenging with low performance and limited learning process . argument extraction depends on context from multiple sentences and learning process limited to very few examples . |
Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chenyu Shi, Xiao Wang, Qiming Ge, Songyang Gao, Xianjun Yang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Xun Zhao, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted a tendency among large language models to refuse to answer benign queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic approach to reduce excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and a method to decode the next-token predictions by contrastive decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the refusal rate by 20% while having little impact on safety. |