Papers by Xiaodong Chen
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning is a widely used technique for reducing the size of pre-trained language models, but current methods overlook the potential of compressing the hidden dimension d in PLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach that projectes features into a space defined by principal components before masking the hidden dimension d in pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on benchmarks show that SP3 can reduce d by 70%, compress 94% of the BERTbase model, and maintain over 96% accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for human-like dialogue tasks are deficient due to the complexity of human conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale Chinese E-commerce conversation corpus with 1 million dialogues, 20 million utterances, and 150 million words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1 million multi-turn dialogues, 20 million utterances, and 150 million words. |
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| Challenge: | a new method for dialogue representation and understanding is proposed . pre-trained language models (PLMs) are inappropriate for dialogue understanding tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains pre-trained language models to fit dialogues . they use a hierarchical segment-wise self-attention network to model dialogues more comprehensively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and achieves a 3.3% improvement on average. |
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| Challenge: | a novel approach to contrastive learning for language understanding is not fully explored . contrastive training has been widely applied to self-supervised representation learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a label anchored contrastive learning approach for language understanding using a class label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on GLUE and CLUE benchmarks by 4.1% compared to the state-of-the-art approaches . the proposed approach also improves under the few-shot and data imbalance settings . |
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| Challenge: | Admin (Adaptive model initialization) is more stable, converges faster, and leads to better performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a model initialization algorithm to stabilize early training and unleash its full potential in the late stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model initialization method stabilizes early training and unleashes full potential in late stage. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate convincing, fluent explanations, but they often generate inconsistent explanations on different inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adapts large language models to generate more consistent explanations on related examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields a 10.0% relative explanation consistency improvement across a variety of question-answering datasets and generalizes to 7 out-of-distribution datasets not seen during finetuning (+4.5%) |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adversarial regularization treat adversarials and defending players equally, which is undesirable because only the defending player contributes to the generalization performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which formulates adversarial regularization as a Stackelberg game and induces a competition between a leader and a follower. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing adversarial regularization baselines on a set of machine translation and natural language understanding tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained speech models have advanced speech-related tasks, including speech recognition and translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained speech model that incorporates modifications to ensure consistent speech representations during training and inference phases for streaming speech inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on speech recognition and translation tasks and achieves a superior balance between quality and latency. |
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| Challenge: | MT-DNN is an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it allows researchers and developers to train customized deep learning models . |
| Approach: | They present MT-DNN, an open-source natural language understanding toolkit . it is designed to facilitate rapid customization for a broad spectrum of NLU tasks . MT supports multi-task knowledge distillation, which can substantially compress a deep neural model without significant performance drop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly compress a large model without significant performance drop. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models perform well in offline machine translation when the complete source sentence is provided . however, in many real scenarios, the source tokens arrive in a streaming manner and simultaneous machine translation is required . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that includes constructing supervised fine-tuning data for simultaneous machine translation (SiMT) to achieve SiMT, source and target tokens are rearranged into interleaved sequences, separated by special tokens according to varying latency requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across various SiMT benchmarks and evaluation metrics while maintaining efficient auto-regressive decoding. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on developing conversational recommendation system (CRS), which provides valuable recommendations to users through conversations. |
| Approach: | They construct an authentic Chinese dialogue dataset consisting of over 25k dialogues and 770k utterances, which contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains user profile, product knowledge base, and multiple sequential real conversations between users and recommenders. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods only consider feature information of entity pairs, but our model exploits both feature information and previous predictions of entity pair. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level relation extraction model with iterative inference to extract relations between entities from raw texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on three commonly-used datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing curriculum learning approaches to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) require sampling sufficient amounts of “easy” samples from training data at the early stage of training. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise curriculum learning approach that creates sufficient amounts of easy samples from training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on five language pairs on low-resource languages. |
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| Challenge: | 'lottery tickets' can be trained to match the performance of a full model . subnetwork training can also outperform random sampled subnetworks of the same size . |
| Approach: | They propose to train a subnetwork of 'lottery tickets' to match the full model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms subnetworks of the same size in a phase transition phenomenon . the proposed model improves single task fine-tuning by 0.9 points on BERT-base and 1.0 points on GLUE large . |
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot continual relation extraction are overfitting memory samples, resulting in insufficient activation of old relations and limited ability to handle confusion of similar classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot continual relation extraction task that uses memory-enhanced modules to train a model on incrementally few-shot data to avoid forgetting old relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two commonly-used datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Neural named entity recognition (BioNER) methods require large amount of annotated data, while the annotating BioNER datasets are often difficult to obtain and small in scale due to the limitations of privacy, ethics and high degree of specialization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes latent multi-granularity information in annotated bioNER datasets to alleviate the lack of training samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the BioBERT baseline and can get more than 3% improvement of F1score in low-resource scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance speech translation focus on enhancing knowledge transfer . factors in speech that are not relevant to translation content, such as timbre and rhythm, often limit the efficiency of knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that excludes content-agnostic perturbations from speech representations to mitigate their negative impact on ST. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves translation performance across all translation directions in three settings and achieves preeminent performance under a *transcript-free* setting. |
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| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to regularize models require generating a perturbation for each sample in each epoch. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial regularization method where perturbations are generated and cached once every several epochs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly eases the computational burden (saves up to 70% of computational time) it produces a notably better (in most of the tasks) or comparable model generalization. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-agent collaboration use a fixed communication graph and manage collaboration structure and shared memory in separate modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses an evolving hypergraph topology for multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 3.2% to 7.8% accuracy gains over state-of-the-art methods and efficient, reducing token consumption by up to 23.5%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on data marketplaces model static equilibria and complete information, which limits their realism. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-driven game-theoretic agent that makes equilibrium-consistent decisions in analytically tractable data marketplaces with evolving and incomplete-information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches equilibrium-consistent decision execution in a static data marketplace with a dynamic game tree memory and mechanism-guided reflection without updating parameters. |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods to learn representations of knowledge graphs are conceptually simple and can be applied to tasks like factoid question answering (Saxena et al., 2020) and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer model to jointly learn Entity-relation composition and Relational contextualization based on a source entity’s neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple link prediction datasets and can be integrated into BERT and demonstrate its effectiveness on two Freebase factoid question answering datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate empathetic responses are monotonous and generic, resulting in shallow empathy and few connections to the context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use explicit control to guide the empathy expression and a framework DiffusEmp to unify the utilization of dialogue context and attribute-oriented control signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on EmpatheticDialogue in terms of controllability, informativeness, diversity, and diversity without the loss of context-relatedness. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have demonstrated their effectiveness for few-shot table understanding, but few-shoot table understanding is rarely explored due to the deficiency of public table pre-training corpus and well-defined downstream benchmark tasks. |
| Approach: | They establish a benchmark dataset and use it to explore few-shot table understanding in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the few-shot table understanding in Chinese. |
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| Challenge: | Existing routing strategies rely on local token probabilities or post-hoc verification, introducing significant inference overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-wise collaboration framework that generates only the first token of each reasoning step and routes it to a larger model only when initial token entropy exceeds a threshold. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces inference latency while preserving accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to streaming speech translation use an offline model with a wait-k policy . however, there is a mismatch problem with an offline inference model trained with complete utterances . |
| Approach: | They propose an offline streaming speech translation model with wait-k policy to support different latency requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better trade-offs between translation quality and latency than baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work on open-domain question answering focuses on either extractive or generative readers exclusively. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid approach to extractive and generative readers that leverages both models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA respectively. |
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| Challenge: | Existing non-simultaneous sign language translation methods suffer from inherent inference delays in real-time scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive policy for simultaneous sign language translation that progressively converts incrementally received sign video into its corresponding natural sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed policy excels in situations requiring extremely low latency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches that integrate LLMs and KGs either underutilize the reasoning abilities of LLM or suffer from prohibitive computational costs due to tight coupling. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can strike a balance between performance and efficiency via an iterative paradigm. |
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal a significant performance gap . ML models lack the fine-grained cross-modal reasoning required to bridge visual discontinuities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that renders fragmented documents directly from Markdown to facilitate evaluation of VRDU tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark renders fragmented documents directly from Markdown. |
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| Challenge: | XGLUE provides a benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models . XCLUE provides 11 diversified tasks that cover both understanding and generation scenarios . |
| Approach: | They introduce a new benchmark dataset to train large-scale cross-lingual pre-trained models using multilingual and bilingual corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is labeled in English and includes only natural language understanding tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-party data valuation approach that assesses the value of individual data samples and proposes a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, showing significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer open-domain questions use sparse representations and sparsity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which augments a query by generating relevant contexts from heuristically discovered contexts without external supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art dense retrieval methods on natural questions and triviaQA datasets. |
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| Challenge: | a hybrid neural network (HNN) model for commonsense reasoning is proposed . it combines language models and semantic similarity models to achieve new state-of-the-art results . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural network model for commonsense reasoning . it combines a masked language model and a semantic similarity model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the WNLI, WSC and PDP60 benchmarks on three commonsense reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning vector-space representations of text are multitask learning and language model pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task deep neural network (MT-DNN) that leverages cross-task data and incorporates a pre-trained bidirectional transformer language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on ten NLU tasks and pushes the GLUE benchmark to 82.7% (2.2% absolute improvement) |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that inter-sentence information is helpful for improving the performance of document-level Neural Machine Translation models, but what information should be regarded as context remains ambiguous. |
| Approach: | They propose a cache-based document-level NMT model which conducts dynamic caching guided by theme-rheme information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves substantial improvements over the state-of-the-art models on NIST evaluation sets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sign language translation (SLT) rely on signer identity labels, which is often impractical and costly in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a signer diversity-driven data augmentation method that can generalize to signers not encountered during training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results without relying on signer identity labels. |
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| Challenge: | Multi-domain machine translation (MDMT) is a unique challenge due to varying levels of linguistic complexity across domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a resource-rational framework that learns to modulate inference between intuitive and deliberate reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Evaluated on 15 benchmarks spanning in-domain and out-of-domain settings, as well as 3 seen and 59 unseen languages, with ablations across three backbone models, TwT-7B and Twt-14B outperform much larger SOTA reasoning models in translation quality, while reducing token usage by 32–60%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained models fail to generalize to unseen data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for robust and efficient fine-tuning for pre-trained models . proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art performance on a number of NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art T5 model on GLUE, SNLI, SciTail and ANLI. |
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| Challenge: | Pruning has become a widely adopted technique for reducing the hardware requirements of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use model pruning techniques to maintain high performance while reducing hardware requirements for large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model pruning law can be generalized to larger dataset sizes, larger model sizes, and higher pruning rates, offering valuable insights for resource allocation in pruned LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-to-SQL semantic parsing require strict structured prediction due to its application scenario where the output SQL will be sent to an executor program directly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use schema linking and structural linking to link NL to the database schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows significant gains on the Spider dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models struggle with compositional generalization (CG) a crucial property of human language learning is its compositional globalization (GC), the algebraic ability to understand and produce a potentially infinite number of novel combinations from known components. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) extension which learns to compose representations of different encoder layers dynamically for different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive results on two comprehensive and realistic benchmarks, which empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
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| Challenge: | Current open-domain question answering systems follow a Retriever-Reader architecture . current systems do not use a reranker, which reranked passages based on top predictions of the reader . |
| Approach: | They propose a reader-guIDEd reranking method that reranked passages based on top predictions . they show that RIDER achieves 10 to 20 absolute gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 10 to 20 gains in top-1 retrieval accuracy and 1 to 4 Exact Match gains without training. |