Papers by Xiaobin Wang
Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness (2025.acl-long)
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Shuofei Qiao, Zhisong Qiu, Baochang Ren, Xiaobin Wang, Xiangyuan Ru, Ningyu Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans to a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on their self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms baseline models on various tasks with minimal external knowledge. |
Few-shot Classification with Hypersphere Modeling of Prototypes (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fewshot learning use embeddings in space, but they lack expressivity and are difficult to perform statistically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere’s center and the radius. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much more expressive than embeddings and performs better than statistical modeling. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize pre-trained language models are expensive and slow to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for instance-level lottery prompts and generalize them to unseen data . they validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines. |
Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot named entity recognition (NER) focus on coarse-grained entities with few examples, while most unseen entities are fine-grounded. |
| Approach: | They present a human-annotated few-shot named entity recognition dataset . they construct benchmark tasks to assess the generalization capability of models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER data set. |
Domain-Specific NER via Retrieving Correlated Samples (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Successful Named Entity Recognition models fail on texts from some special domains, for example, Chinese addresses and e-commerce titles. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance NER models with correlated samples to help the text understanding . they draw correlated texts by the sparse BM25 retriever from large-scale in-domain unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NER models can be enhanced with correlated samples . the proposed model can be used to reason out the correct answer on hard cases . |
Memp: Exploring Agent Procedural Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Yuan Liang, Xiaobin Wang, Jialong Wu, Shuofei Qiao, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agents suffer from brittle procedural memory that is manually engineered or entangled in static parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a procedural-memory repository that distills past agent trajectories into fine-grained, step-by-step instructions and higher-level, script-like abstractions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed repository can be used to improve agents' performance on travelplanner and Alfworld. |
Identifying Chinese Opinion Expressions with Extremely-Noisy Crowdsourcing Annotations (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent works of opinion expression identification (OEI) rely heavily on the quality and scale of the manually-constructed training corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourcing annotations to build a large-scale but quality-unguaranteed corpus for opinion expression identification in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained with a synthetic expert and is highly consistent with the training and testing phase. |
Recall, Expand, and Multi-Candidate Cross-Encode: Fast and Accurate Ultra-Fine Entity Typing (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use the cross-encoder architecture to concatenate a mention (and its context) with each type and feed it into a pretrained language model (PLM) to score their relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose to perform entity typing in a recall-expand-filter manner and use a novel model to encode and score all these K candidates in one forward pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is thousands of times faster than the CE-based architecture and is very efficient in fine-grained (130 types) and coarse-grain (9 types) entity typing. |
ProductAgent: Benchmarking Conversational Product Search Agent with Asking Clarification Questions (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in conversational information seeking (CIS) suggest a remedy for the lack of interactive clarification when people face unfamiliar domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully autonomous conversational information-seeking agent that couples large language models with a set of domain-specific tools to provide product demand clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can iterate over 2,000 automatically generated sessions and score high on real-world evaluations without human annotation. |
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Xu Han, Guangwei Xu, Xiaobin Wang, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Hong-Gee Kim
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios. |
New Compendium of a Myriad of Plants: A New Dataset Describing Ancient Chinese Plants (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to digitize ancient Chinese texts and extract information from them are shallow and inconsistent with modern realities. |
| Approach: | They propose to expand ancient Chinese datasets using large language model . they focus on Great Compendium of Myriad Flowers, an ancient plants dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract plant-related information from classical Chinese poetry and prose. |
DIALIGHT: Lightweight Multilingual Development and Evaluation of Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | DIALIGHT is a toolkit for developing and evaluating multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for developing and evaluating multilingual Task-Oriented Dialogue systems which facilitates systematic evaluations and comparisons between ToD systems using pretrained language models and those utilising the zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit enables systematic evaluations between ToD systems using pretrained language models and those utilising the zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
U-Fold: Dynamic Intent-Aware Context Folding for User-Centric Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing context-folding methods are designed for single-query or single-intent scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic context-folding framework tailored to user-centric tasks that preserves fine-grained information through dynamic context folding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ReAct and previous folding frameworks on long, noisy tasks. |
MANNER: A Variational Memory-Augmented Model for Cross Domain Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental NLP task that aims at classifying mention spans into entity types. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational memory-augmented few-shot named entity recognition model that uses a memory module to store information from source domain and retrieve relevant information from the memory to augment few-shot task in target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can adapt the learned knowledge from source domain to target domain and achieve superior performance on English and Chinese cross domain few-shot NER datasets. |
Parallel Instance Query Network for Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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Yongliang Shen, Xiaobin Wang, Zeqi Tan, Guangwei Xu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Named entity recognition is a fundamental task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that sets up global and learnable instance queries to extract entities from a sentence in a parallel manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on nested and flat datasets. |
Effective Demonstration Annotation for In-Context Learning via Language Model-Based Determinantal Point Process (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large-scale labeled support sets are not feasible in practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They introduce a language model-based determinant point process that considers uncertainty and diversity of unlabeled instances for optimal selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively select canonical examples on 9 NLU and 2 Generation datasets. |
Coupling Distant Annotation and Adversarial Training for Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Fully supervised neural approaches have achieved significant progress in the task of Chinese word segmentation (CWS) however, they suffer from the cross-domain issue when they come to processing of out-of-domain data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese word as a target domain for distant annotation and adversarial training to reduce noise and maximize utilization of the source domain information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on real-world datasets and significantly outperformed previous state- of-the art methods. |
SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement (2025.acl-short)
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Runnan Fang, Xiaobin Wang, Yuan Liang, Shuofei Qiao, Jialong Wu, Zekun Xi, Ningyu Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Using Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents can enhance their understanding of environments and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine their action knowledge in the current environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and performs Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine action knowledge in the current environment. |
Dial HEALTHDIAL for Advice: A Multilingual and Multi-Parallel Spoken Dialogue Dataset for Knowledge-Grounded Information Seeking (2026.findings-acl)
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Songbo Hu, Yinhong Liu, Ej Zhou, Evgeniia Razumovskaia, Xiaobin Wang, Alexander Fraser, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen
| Challenge: | Creating spoken dialogue datasets is methodologically challenging due to the personally identifiable nature of speech signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multilingual, and multi-parallel dataset for developing and evaluating retrieval-augmented generation-based spoken dialogue systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 6,000 information-seeking dialogues and 163 hours of user speech recorded from native speakers of four official WHO languages. |
CTAP for Chinese:A Linguistic Complexity Feature Automatic Calculation Platform (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools to analyze linguistic complexity are limited and different because of different research purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate Chinese component into CTAP to analyze linguistic complexity . they propose to use 196 linguistic complex indexes to calculate linguistic characteristics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed indexes are compared with three linguistic complexity tools for Chinese . the proposed index sets include four levels of 196 linguistic complex indexe . |