Papers by Xiaodan Wang
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Automated theorem proving (ATP) benchmarks focus on symbolic inference but rarely involve understanding complex number combination reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that requires a model to reduce a trigonometric expression with step-by-step proof and evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates a generative LM’s reasoning ability on formulas and ability to manipulate, group, and factor number terms. |
DAGN: Discourse-Aware Graph Network for Logical Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent QA with logical reasoning questions requires passage-level relations among the sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware graph network that aggregates passage-level clues for QA by using discourse-based information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on two logical reasoning QA datasets. |
Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which is over-simplified and has limited support for multi-turn systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn ES conversation system that uses lookahead heuristics to estimate future user feedback after using particular strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly outperforms baselines in both dialogue generation and strategy planning. |
AlignedCoT: Prompting Large Language Models via Native-Speaking Demonstrations (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are delicate and elusive in prompt words and styles. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-acquainted prompting technique that includes proficient "native-speaking" they propose to use in-context learning to prompt LLMs to perform high-performance reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves step-wise prompts in zero-shot scenarios while maintaining the prompt quality. |
DT-Solver: Automated Theorem Proving with Dynamic-Tree Sampling Guided by Proof-level Value Function (2023.acl-long)
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Haiming Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Jing Xiong, Enze Xie, Han Shi, Yujun Li, Lin Li, Jian Yin, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural theorem-proving resort to large language models and tree searches. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic-Tree Driven Theorem Solver to accommodate general theoremes by guiding the search procedure with state confidence and proof-level values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular theorem-proving datasets with a 6.65% improvement on average in terms of success rate. |
Emotion Inference in Multi-Turn Conversations with Addressee-Aware Module and Ensemble Strategy (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies on three different benchmark conversation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model over several strong baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose an addressee-aware module to automatically learn whether the participant keeps the historical emotional state or is affected by others in the next upcoming turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the participant's emotion in the next upcoming turn without knowing the participant’s response yet. |
Weighted Contrastive Learning With False Negative Control to Help Long-tailed Product Classification (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Item categorization (IC) aims to classify a product into leaf nodes in a categorical taxonomy due to scarce supervision. |
| Approach: | They propose to use K-positive contrastive loss (KCL) to address IC task’s long-tail issue by re-weighting positive pairs in the KCL loss with a regularization that the sum of weights should be constrained to K+1 as close as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the long-tail issue in the image classification task and when using text-based contrastive learning, it can be applied on the IC task. |
Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to data-to-text generation focus on improving content fidelity, but lack explicit control over writing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to control writing styles by using existing sentences as "soft" templates . they conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains to test their approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. |
FAIRGAMER: Evaluating Social Biases in LLM-Based Video Game NPCs (2026.acl-long)
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Bingkang Shi, Jen-tse Huang, Luo Long, Tianyu Zong, Hongzhu Yi, Yuanxiang Wang, Songlin Hu, Xiaodan Zhang, Zhongjiang Yao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced or replaced traditional non-player characters in video games. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate social biases across three interaction patterns: transaction, cooperation, and competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses four bias types across transaction, cooperation, and competition using a novel metric, FairMCV. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
CocaCLIP: Exploring Distillation of Fully-Connected Knowledge Interaction Graph for Lightweight Text-Image Retrieval (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-image retrieval are limited to edge devices and real-time situations due to the substantial indexing and inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully-Connected knowledge interaction graph technique for cross-modal pre-training distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves SOTA performances on the widely-used Flickr30K and MSCOCO benchmarks under the lightweight setting. |
Getting More Juice Out of Your Data: Hard Pair Refinement Enhances Visual-Language Models Without Extra Data (2025.naacl-long)
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Haonan Wang, Minbin Huang, Runhui Huang, Lanqing Hong, Hang Xu, Tianyang Hu, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li, Hong Cheng, Kenji Kawaguchi
| Challenge: | Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) is a standard for cross-modal image-text representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances pre-trained CLIP models by exploiting challenging text-image pairs within existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves CLIP models by exploiting text-image pairs in training. |
EfficientBERT: Progressively Searching Multilayer Perceptron via Warm-up Knowledge Distillation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable results on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the feed-forward network (FFN) in BERT with a higher computational cost than improving the multi-head attention (MHA). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 6.9 smaller and 4.4 faster than BERTBASE and has competitive performances on GLUE and SQuAD Benchmarks. |
ORMind: A Cognitive-Inspired End-to-End Reasoning Framework for Operations Research (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in various domains, but their practical application in industry-relevant operations research presents significant challenges and opportunities. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive-inspired framework that enhances optimization through counterfactual reasoning . they use a workflow that transforms requirements into mathematical models and executable solver code . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ORMind outperforms existing methods in the NL4Opt dataset and ComplexOR dataset. |
OssCSE: Overcoming Surface Structure Bias in Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhan Shi, Guoyin Wang, Ke Bai, Jiwei Li, Xiang Li, Qingjun Cui, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that contrastive learning is effective in sentence representation learning . but, the surface structure bias is a problem in the current model . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a sentence with a sub-semantic sentence to investigate the surface structure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on standard semantic textual similarity tasks using different pre-trained backbones. |