Papers by Xiaodong Yu
Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown effectiveness in literature understanding tasks, especially when tuned via contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task contrastive learning framework that enables common knowledge sharing across different scientific literature understanding tasks while preventing task-specific skills from interfering with each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art pre-trained language models on a comprehensive dataset. |
Self-Taught Agentic Long Context Understanding (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yufan Zhuang, Xiaodong Yu, Jialian Wu, Ximeng Sun, Ze Wang, Jiang Liu, Yusheng Su, Jingbo Shang, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments across seven long-context tasks demonstrate that AgenticLU significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-consumer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance an LLM's understanding of long-context questions by integrating targeted self-clarification with contextual grounding within an agentic workflow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompting methods and specialized long-context LLMs in seven long-constitut tasks. |
Event Linking: Grounding Event Mentions to Wikipedia (2023.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new task for natural language understanding is called Event Linking . the context where an event is mentioned lacks the details of this event . |
| Approach: | They propose a new task to link an article's event mention to the most appropriate Wikipedia page . they collect a training set from Wikipedia and evaluate two models to test the task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a dataset and a real-world news domain . it is expected that the most appropriate Wikipedia page will provide rich knowledge about the mention . |
Towards Consistent Natural-Language Explanations via Explanation-Consistency Finetuning (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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%) |
On the Strength of Character Language Models for Multilingual Named Entity Recognition (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Character-level patterns have been widely used in English Named Entity Recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use corpus-agnostic character-level language models to capture name tokens . they demonstrate they can capture name and non-name tokens in a diverse set of languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of an off-the-shelf NER system for multiple languages. |
The Microsoft Toolkit of Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks for Natural Language Understanding (2020.acl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu Ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao
| 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. |
ReEval: Automatic Hallucination Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models via Transferable Adversarial Attacks (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing static benchmarks do not guarantee that models can use the provided evidence for answering, which is essential to avoid hallucination when the required knowledge is new or private. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically perturb existing static one for dynamic evaluation by using a chatGPT framework and a set of open-domain QA datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates new test cases on two open-domain QA datasets and is human-readable and useful to trigger hallucination in LLMs. |
Lightweight Spatial Modeling for Combinatorial Information Extraction From Documents (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Yanfei Dong, Lambert Deng, Jiazheng Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Ting Lin, Francesco Gelli, Soujanya Poria, Wee Sun Lee
| Challenge: | Existing datasets do not cover documents with complex spatial structures and a lack of spatial information for document entity classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a new spatial bias in attention calculation based on the K-nearest-neighbor graph of document entities that limits entities’ attention to their local radius. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in most entity types and is highly parameter-efficient compared to existing methods. |
Pairwise Representation Learning for Event Coreference (2022.starsem-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work induces mention representations independently by extracting features from the sentence that contains the mention, without using the context of the other mention. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pairwise Representation Learning scheme for the event mention pairs that jointly encodes a pair of text snippets so that the representation of each mention in the pair is induced in the context of the other one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme outperforms state-of-the-art representations on cross-document and within-document benchmarks. |
Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Samuel Schmidgall, Yusheng Su, Ze Wang, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Jiang Liu, Michael Moor, Zicheng Liu, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Approach: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
| Outcome: | Agent Laboratory is an autonomous LLM-based framework that can complete the entire research process. |
Capturing the Content of a Document through Complex Event Identification (2022.starsem-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work grouped granular events into more general events, called complex events . however, this approach assumes that a given complex event is always described in consecutive sentences . |
| Approach: | They propose a context-augmented representation learning approach that uses contextual information to model pairwise relation between granular events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on the complex event identification task. |
Stabilizing Efficient Reasoning with Step-Level Advantage Selection (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models generate long and verbose reasoning traces at inference time . short context post-training alone induces substantial reasoning compression . |
| Approach: | They propose a step-level advantage selection approach that reduces reasoning length by over 30% . they propose to use GRPO without any length-aware objective to train models in a shorter context window . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces average reasoning length by over 30% while improving Pass@1 accuracy by 3.79 points over the strongest length-aware baseline. |
AUGUST: an Automatic Generation Understudy for Synthesizing Conversational Recommendation Datasets (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on conversational recommendation systems lacks high-quality data . existing datasets lack large-scale and high-level data based on human annotators . |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic dataset synthesis approach that generates large-scale recommendation dialogues using structured graphs based on user-item information from the real world. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can generate large-scale and high-quality recommendation dialogues . it exploits user preferences, knowledge graphs, and conversation ability from existing datasets based on real-world data . |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| 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 . |
Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Chinese Ancient Documents: From OCR to Knowledge Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haiyang Yu, Yuchuan Wu, Fan Shi, Jinghui Lu, Ke Niu, Xiaodong Ge, Minghan Zhuo, Jingqun Tang, Bin Li
| Challenge: | Existing document benchmarks focus on English printed texts or simplified Chinese . current vision-language models struggle with visual complexity and poor adaptability . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Chinese ancient documents' visual/linguistic complexity . ancient documents are valuable cultural heritage, but they face challenges in digitization and understanding . |
| Outcome: | the first benchmark for Chinese ancient documents evaluates VLMs from OCR to knowledge reasoning . ancient documents carry thousands of years of Chinese history and culture . traditional methods only scan images, while current models struggle with visual complexity . |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| 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. |
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models. |
Design Challenges in Low-resource Cross-lingual Entity Linking (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing techniques for grounding mentions of entities in a foreign language do not rise to the challenges introduced by text in low-resource languages (LRL) and fail to generalize to text not taken from Wikipedia, on which they are usually trained. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual XEL technique that uses search engines to locate and search for foreign language entries in Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system shows an increase of 25% in gold candidate recall and 13% in end-to-end linking accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. |
TTT-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Ability with Simple and Novel Tic-Tac-Toe-style Games (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have driven significant breakthroughs across various reasoning tasks including deductive, arithmetic, commonsense, relational, and symbolic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a programmatic approach to evaluate basic strategic, spatial, and logical reasoning abilities in large reasoning models through four two-player Tic-Tac-Toe-style games that humans can effortlessly solve from a young age. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs 41% lower on TTT-Bench than MATH 500 and AIME 2024 models, while the larger models perform better on longer reasoning traces. |
Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using customized retrieval models, model transferability and scalability are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular retrieval model where individual modules correspond to key skills that can be reused across datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms self-supervised retrievers in zero-shot evaluations and achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuned retrieval performance on NQ, HotpotQA and OTT-QA. |
Learning to Decompose: Hypothetical Question Decomposition Based on Comparable Texts (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to end-to-end questionanswering assume that pre-trained language can decompose complex tasks into more straightforward sub-tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use distant supervision to train decomposition-based transformers for large-scale parallel news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on semantic parsing and on hotpotQA and strategyQA datasets by 20% to 30%. |
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
| 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. |
DRIFT: Transferring Reasoning Priors for Efficient MLLM Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Chao Huang, Zeliang Zhang, Jiang Liu, Ximeng Sun, Jialian Wu, Xiaodong Yu, Ze Wang, Chenliang Xu, Emad Barsoum, Zicheng Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made rapid progress in perception and alignment, but their reasoning ability often lags behind strong text-only LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers reasoning knowledge in the gradient space while preserving multimodal alignment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multimodal reasoning benchmarks show that DRIFT outperforms naive merging and standard SFT. |
Posterior Differential Regularization with f-divergence for Improving Model Robustness (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained models suffer catastrophic degradation in out-of-domain generalization to datasets with domain shift or adversarial scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to regularize the posterior difference between clean and noisy inputs by using a Jacobian regularization framework and a virtual adversarial training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve model robustness in fully supervised and semi-supervised settings. |
Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) focus on analyzing subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service, but they are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to track customer satisfaction in chatbots using a dialogue-level classification module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and shows that it significantly outperformed multiple baselines. |
Stand on The Shoulders of Giants: Building JailExpert from Previous Attack Experience (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Xi Wang, Songlei Jian, Shasha Li, Xiaopeng Li, Bin Ji, Ma Jun, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Wang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Feilong Bao, null Wangbaosheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate human-aligned content with a “jailbreak prompt” are inefficient and repetitive, causing inefficiency and a lack of experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates past attack experiences to aid current jailbreak attempts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves both attack effectiveness and efficiency compared to the current black-box jailbreak method. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| 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. |
RevCore: Review-Augmented Conversational Recommendation (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommendation systems lack item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where reviews are seamlessly incorporated into conversational recommendation systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields better performance on recommendation and conversation responding. |
CogCompNLP: Your Swiss Army Knife for NLP (L18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Daniel Khashabi, Mark Sammons, Ben Zhou, Tom Redman, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Vivek Srikumar, Nicholas Rizzolo, Lev Ratinov, Guanheng Luo, Quang Do, Chen-Tse Tsai, Subhro Roy, Stephen Mayhew, Zhili Feng, John Wieting, Xiaodong Yu, Yangqiu Song, Shashank Gupta, Shyam Upadhyay, Naveen Arivazhagan, Qiang Ning, Shaoshi Ling, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | a corpus-reader module supports popular corpora, feature extraction and annotation modules for semantic and syntactic tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that provides modules to address different challenges . they provide a corpus-reader module that supports popular corpora in the NLP community . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library simplifies the process of design and development of NLP applications by providing modules to address different challenges. |