Papers by Xiaobo Liang
Dynamic and Efficient Inference for Text Generation via BERT Family (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve performance of pre-trained language models are limited due to large-scale parameters and the universal autoregressive decoding paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuning method which can make a single pre-trained model support Dynamic and Efficient infERence and achieve an adaptive trade-off between model performance and latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher BLEU scores than the strong autoregressive Transformer model on translation tasks with 3 12 times speedup and faster inference speed compared with the BART model on four GLGE benchmark tasks. |
MMA: Cross-Domain Knowledge Integration via Mixture of Multi-Domain Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | achieving synergistic improvements between generalization and domain specialization remains a challenge in pre-training and post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time cross-domain knowledge integration method that integrates general-purpose and domain-specific models to enhance their performance on complex, domainspecific tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines the outputs of general-purpose and domain-specific models to improve their performance on complex, domainspecific tasks. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
Unleashing LLM Reasoning Capability via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited due to the proprietary nature of the data. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis method that generates large-scale mathematical reasoning datasets using lightweight 7B-scale models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing open-source datasets in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations and shows improvements in code reasoning tasks. |
Neural Relation Classification with Text Descriptions (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods for relation classification suffer from data sparsity issue greatly. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural relation classification method which integrates entities’ text descriptions into deep neural networks models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better experimental results than other state-of-the-art methods on the SemEval 2010 dataset. |
Generative Reward Modeling via Synthetic Criteria Preference Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) leverage synthesized Chains of Thought (CoT) but this approach introduces risks of overoptimization due to the inability to guarantee the correctness of the CoTs. |
| Approach: | They propose a criteria-based preference tree for GenRMs that uses chain of thought to generate reasoning . they show that synthesized data can be learned using a long CoT format . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows significant improvements over baselines on multiple human preference benchmarks. |
JANUS: Joint Autoregressive and Non-autoregressive Training with Auxiliary Loss for Sequence Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to train autoregressive and non-autoregressive models only consider relevance of model parameters, ignoring correlations between the two manners. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint autoregressive and non-autoregressive training method using aUxiliary losS to enhance the model performance in both AR and NAR manners simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model performance in both AR and NAR manners and reduces the inference latency. |
Tool learning via Inference-time Scaling and Cycle Verifier (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In inference-time scaling, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data is scarce or even unavailable. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which establishes an inference cycle to synthesize user queries and CoT data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 75.4% pass rate and a 79.6% win rate using small models in StableToolBench. |
Unlocking Recursive Thinking of LLMs: Alignment via Refinement (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for recursive reasoning are limited due to lack of expert-curated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that unlocks the potential of Large Language Models for recursive reasoning through long-form Chain of Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms preference optimization methods on the openAI o1-series models by 20% on 3k synthetic samples. |
Escaping the Echo Trap: On Credit Assignment Failure in Multi-turn LLM Self-Reflection (2026.acl-long)
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Linxuan Du, Guangquan Xue, Xiaobo Liang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Xinyu Shi, Zhang Yijun, Ji Qi, Wenpeng Zhu, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-turn self-reflection are limited by the Echo Trap problem . the model is limited by its inherent capabilities and repeats earlier reflections to preserve reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection which enables more accurate advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across benchmarks. |
From Awareness to Adaptability: Enhancing Tool Utilization for Scientific Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches enhance reasoning through Chain-of-Thought, Program-ofThough, and Tool-Integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-awareness training method that leverages both forward and backward data generation strategies to strengthen the model’s conscious and selective tool utilization in multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's tool utilization capabilities, including proactivity and execution success rates. |
Cross-Domain NER using Cross-Domain Language Modeling (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition (NER) use labeled data for both source and target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language modeling as a bridge between NER domains to perform cross-domain and cross-task knowledge transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts domain differences from cross-domain LM contrast, allowing unsupervised domain adaptation while giving state-of-the-art results among supervised domain adapters. |
Open-ended Long Text Generation via Masked Language Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained autoregressive language models have dominated OPen-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) however, the low inference efficiency of AR impedes their usability. |
| Approach: | They propose a representative iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding strategy to improve inference efficiency for Open-LTG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate short text and collapse for long text modeling. |