Papers by Xiao-Ming Wu
MSEarth: A Multimodal Benchmark for Earth Science Phenomenon Discovery with MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
LANID: LLM-assisted New Intent Discovery (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Data annotation is expensive in Task-Oriented Dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models' zero-shot capability to enhance the performance of a smaller text encoder on the NID task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses all strong baselines in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. |
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Hao Wang, Jian Li, Xu Chu, Zhaolu Kang, Yiran Liu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs) aims to enable sequential knowledge acquisition without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns replay schedules with a model-centric notion of time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three benchmarks show that FOREVER consistently mitigates catastrophic forgetting. |
A Closer Look at Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Intent Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) intent detection are not adequate . despite its importance, few- shot OOD intent detection is a challenging problem . |
| Approach: | They propose a latent representation generation and self-supervision approach to solve few-shot OOD intent detection problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is highly effective and could improve state-of-the-art methods for few-shot OOD intent detection. |
Out-of-Scope Intent Detection with Self-Supervision and Discriminative Training (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for out-of-scope intent detection rely on strong assumptions on data distribution and confidence threshold selection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train an out-of-scope intent classifier in a fully end-to-end manner by simulating the test scenario in training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four benchmark dialogue datasets and improves over state-of-the-art methods. |
Continual Dialogue State Tracking via Reason-of-Select Distillation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on dialogue systems has focused on domain-specific offline systems lacking adaptation abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reason-of-Select distillation method that enhances smaller models with a novel "meta-reasoning" capability. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the performance and generalization capabilities of existing models. |
Unknown Intent Detection Using Gaussian Mixture Model with an Application to Zero-shot Intent Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unknown intent detection are limited by prior knowledge of class labels. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Gaussian mixture model to model utterance embeddings with a distribution and inject dynamic class semantic information into Gausssian means. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on three real task-oriented dialogue datasets in two languages. |
Recurrent Knowledge Identification and Fusion for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yujie Feng, Xujia Wang, Zexin Lu, Shenghong Fu, Guangyuan Shi, Yongxin Xu, Yasha Wang, Philip S. Yu, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Continual learning (CL) is crucial for large language models without costly retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for recurrent knowledge identification and fusion that enables dynamic estimation of parameter importance distributions to enhance knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enhances knowledge transfer. |
UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
VI-OOD: A Unified Framework of Representation Learning for Textual Out-of-distribution Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is a crucial part of deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational inference framework which maximizes the likelihood of the joint distribution p(x, y) instead of p[y|x). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maximizes the likelihood of the joint distribution p(x, y) instead of p[y|x). |
New Intent Discovery with Pre-training and Contrastive Learning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying intents from unlabeled utterances are label-intensive, inefficient, and inaccurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task strategy to leverage unlabeled data and external labeled data for representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three intent recognition benchmarks. |
Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models for Few-shot Intent Detection: Supervised Pre-training and Isotropization (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that fine-tuning pre-trained language models with a small set of labeled utterances in a supervised manner is helpful, but it yields an anisotropic feature space, which may suppress the expressive power of the semantic representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to regularize supervised pre-training towards isotropy by contrastive learning and correlation matrix regularizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve supervised pre-training by regularizing the feature space towards isotropy. |
Towards LLM-driven Dialogue State Tracking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT3 and ChatGPT has sparked considerable interest in assessing their efficacy across diverse applications. |
| Approach: | They present a framework for a domain-slot instruction tuning method that allows LDST to achieve performance on par with ChatGPT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better in zero-shot and few-shot settings than previous SOTA methods. |
Revisit Few-shot Intent Classification with PLMs: Direct Fine-tuning vs. Continual Pre-training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent progress in intent detection relies on deep models and datasets with well-crafted annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a continual pre-training approach to train deep learning models . they propose augmentation method and sequential self-distillation to boost performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms methods that employ continual pre-training on labeled datasets on few-shot intent detection tasks. |
EasyGen: Easing Multimodal Generation with BiDiffuser and LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| 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. |
TaSL: Continual Dialog State Tracking via Task Skill Localization and Consolidation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for Continual Dialogue State Tracking (DST) struggle with catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for task skill localization and consolidation that enables effective knowledge transfer without relying on memory replay. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 7.6% increase in Avg. JGA and 11% rise in BWT metrics over existing state-of-the-art methods. |
Boosting Deep CTR Prediction with a Plug-and-Play Pre-trainer for News Recommendation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Personalized news recommendation is a ubiquitous channel in various online applications, such as Google News and MSN News. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play pre-trainer to learn both user and news encoders through multi-task pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models and improves inference and updating time. |
Reconstructing Capsule Networks for Zero-shot Intent Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for intent classification are limited due to fast-emerging intents . a recent study shows that existing methods are not effective in recognizing unseen intents. |
| Approach: | They propose to reconstruct capsule networks for zero-shot intent classification by using latent information from labeled utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two task-oriented dialogue datasets in different languages. |
GeoEdit: Geometric Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Li-Ming Zhan, Zexin Lu, Yongxin Xu, Xu Chu, Yasha Wang, Jiannong Cao, Philip S. Yu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing training-based model editing methods struggle to incorporate new knowledge while preserving unrelated general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses geometric relationships to differentiate between neurons associated with new knowledge updates and those related to general knowledge perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework avoids updating neurons with directions approximately orthogonal to existing knowledge, thus preserving the model’s generalization ability. |
How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection? (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring AI safety . large language models (LLMs) are becoming more prevalent due to their scale, pre-training objectives, and paradigms used for inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to investigate out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in machine learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other OOD detectors in zero-grad and fine-tuning scenarios. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
Zero-shot Cross-domain Dialogue State Tracking via Context-aware Auto-prompting and Instruction-following Contrastive Decoding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Previous studies have implemented slot-based input improvements, such as schema-driven descriptions and question-answering formats, but still suffer from negative transfer for seen slots and inefficient transfer for unseen slots due to the significant source-target domain gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates dynamic, context-aware slot queries to improve model transferability by penalizing deviations from the provided instructions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two datasets show that the proposed model performs better than existing models on the restaurant domain. |
Effectiveness of Pre-training for Few-shot Intent Classification (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms further pre-train language models such as BERT on vast amount of unlabeled corpus, but we find it highly effective and efficient to simply fine-tune BERT with roughly 1,000 labeled utterances from public datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune BERT with a small set of labeled utterances from public datasets to achieve a pre-trained model based on a set of 1,000 labeles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on domains with very different semantics on novel domains. |