Papers by Xiaobing Sun
Implicit n-grams Induced by Recurrence (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that self-attention based models have limitations on modeling sequential transformations. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract some explainable features from trained RNNs that are reminiscent of classical n-grams features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can model interesting linguistic phenomena such as negation and intensification. |
CLaMP 3: Universal Music Information Retrieval Across Unaligned Modalities and Unseen Languages (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shangda Wu, Guo Zhancheng, Ruibin Yuan, Junyan Jiang, SeungHeon Doh, Gus Xia, Juhan Nam, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Music information retrieval (MIR) is a field that aims at developing computational tools for processing, organizing, and accessing music data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns music modalities with multilingual text in a shared representation space. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show CLaMP 3 performs state-of-the-art on multiple MIR tasks . it surpasses baselines and shows excellent generalization in multimodal and multilingual contexts . |
Understanding Attention for Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on whether local attention weights reflect the importance of input representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze for each word token the following two quantities: its polarity score and its attention score, where the latter is a global assessment on the token’s significance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be improved under conditions where the interplay between the two quantities can contribute towards model performance. |
Musical Score Understanding Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models’ Comprehension of Complete Musical Scores (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Congren Dai, Yue Yang, Krinos Li, Huichi Zhou, Shijie Liang, Zhang Bo, Enyang Liu, Ge Jin, Hongran An, Haosen Zhang, Peiyuan Jing, KinHei Lee, Zhenxuan Zhang, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for musical score understanding are narrow in scope, focusing on isolated fragments, short excerpts, or multiple-choice formulations, rather than supporting holistic reasoning over entire scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for score-level musical understanding across textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The musical score understanding benchmark contains 1,800 question-answer pairs from works by Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Debussy, and others. |
CLaMP 2: Multimodal Music Information Retrieval Across 101 Languages Using Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Shangda Wu, Yashan Wang, Ruibin Yuan, Guo Zhancheng, Xu Tan, Ge Zhang, Monan Zhou, Jing Chen, Xuefeng Mu, Yuejie Gao, Yuanliang Dong, Jiafeng Liu, Xiaobing Li, Feng Yu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current music information retrieval systems struggle to meet linguistic diversity challenges . current systems struggle with text queries in non-English languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a music information retrieval system that supports both ABC notation and MIDI . CLaMP 2 includes a multilingual text encoder and a multiple-modal music encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art results in multilingual semantic search and music classification across modalities. |
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Andong Chen, Yuan Sun, Xiaobing Zhao, Rosella Galindo Esparza, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang, Tiejun Zhao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Low-resource questions pose a significant challenge within the field of Question-Answering (QA) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large models' internal knowledge to enhance the quality of augmented data by Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing augmentation strategies on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA. |
Scaling Laws or Threshold Effects: Exploring the Optimal Vocabulary Size for Balancing Performance and Efficiency in Low-Resource Languages (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | vocab expansion scaling laws are well-established for high-resource languages, but they remain unverified in low-resourced settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale trilingual vocabulary for languages with 140 to 195,000 tokens . they find that BBPE follows a "decline-then-rise" pattern, whereas BPE improves monotonically . |
| Outcome: | The proposed configuration reduces pre-training duration by over 71% across 1.5B to 8B models while improving downstream performance. |
Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Neural networks have become indispensable across a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a theoretical approach based on Neural Tangent Kernels to investigate neural networks' internal mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to analyze language modeling tasks . it shows that the choice of activation function can affect feature extraction . |
Enhancing Cross-Lingual Transfer through Reversible Transliteration: A Huffman-Based Approach for Low-Resource Languages (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models demonstrate cross-lingual transfer capabilities, but these capabilities often fail to extend to low-resource languages, especially those utilizing non-Latin scripts. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine character transliteration with Huffman coding to create a complete transliterations framework that can be extended to other low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces storage requirements and improves accuracy and accuracy across multiple downstream tasks while maintaining performance on high-resource languages. |
League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xiaobing Sun, Tian Xia, Kai Chen, Xiaofeng Wang, Baosheng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
Question Generation Based on Grammar Knowledge and Fine-grained Classification (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research on question generation has achieved great success, but some question types and answers did not match. |
| Approach: | They construct a question type classifier and a query generator to solve the problem of question types not matching with other questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy of interrogative words in generated questions. |
Lingxi: A Diversity-aware Chinese Modern Poetry Generation System (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese modern poetry generation is a challenging task because of the word segmentation problem and decoding methods . the decoding method may induce repetition and boredom and lower the diversity of generated poetry. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese word segmentation-based decoding system that incorporates Chinese word segments into tokenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can achieve high vocabulary coverage rate with a reasonable vocabulary size. |