Papers by Xiaofeng He
DAFNet: Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion for Sequential Model Editing in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Qizhou Chen, Dongyang Li, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results, but still suffer from hallucination, i.e., the generation of false information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sequential model editing that aims to rectify mistakes continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines in single-turn and sequential editing. |
HiCLRE: A Hierarchical Contrastive Learning Framework for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches of distantly supervised relation extraction (DSRE) focus on sentence-level or bag-level de-noising, neglecting the explicit interaction with cross levels. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework for distantly supervised relation extraction to reduce noisy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in various mainstream DSRE datasets. |
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency of multi-agent systems rely on aggressive graph topology evolution . however, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution that manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling. |
KEHRL: Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Language Representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | General pre-trained language models (PLMs) leverage relation triples from knowledge graphs (KGs) and integrate external data sources into language models via self-supervised learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn Knowledge-Enhanced language representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (KEHRL) to detect positions for knowledge injection and integrate external knowledge into the model to avoid injecting inaccurate or irrelevant knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect essential positions in texts for knowledge injection and integrate external knowledge into the model to avoid injecting inaccurate or irrelevant knowledge. |
Revisiting and Advancing Chinese Natural Language Understanding with Accelerated Heterogeneous Knowledge Pre-training (2022.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Junwei Dong, Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Ang Wang, Yinghui Liu, Jun Huang, Yong Li, Xiaofeng He
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) can capture internal knowledge, but can't understand external background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models to improve context-aware representations via learning from structured relations in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models outperform strong baselines over various benchmark NLP tasks and in different model sizes. |
Knowledge-Empowered Representation Learning for Chinese Medical Reading Comprehension: Task, Model and Resources (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MRC is a popular task in NLP, aiming to understand a passage and answer the relevant questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-target machine learning task for the medical domain that predicts answers to medical questions and corresponding support sentences from medical information sources simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by fusing context-aware and knowledge-awful token representations. |
TRELM: Towards Robust and Efficient Pre-training for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating external knowledge into language models do not prioritize learning embeddings for entity-related tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incorporating external knowledge into pre-training models that utilize entity-related tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces pre-training time by 50% and outperforms other KEPLMs in knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. |
Meta Fine-Tuning Neural Language Models for Multi-Domain Text Mining (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained neural language models improve learning for various NLP tasks by fine-tuning them on task-specific training sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning procedure to fine-tune neural language models on task-specific training sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure solves a group of similar NLP tasks on a text mining dataset. |
QueueEDIT: Structural Self-Correction for Sequential Model Editing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective for correcting factual inaccuracies but can still suffer from hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a queue-based self-correction framework that addresses parameter bias during sequential model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining competitive performance in single-turn editing. |
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) are slow and cumbersome, resulting in catastrophic knowledge forgetting and degradation of model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method that converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining the overall performance of the model. |
From Complex to Simple: Unraveling the Cognitive Tree for Reasoning with Small Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve complex logical reasoning problems are cumbersome for language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative methodology to construct a cognitive tree using language models . they propose to generate multiple responses by utilizing in-context examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a performance level comparable to that of GPT-3.5 . the proposed model contains fewer parameters than 5% of the model with 175B parameters . |
On the Role of Long-tail Knowledge in Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models (2024.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Dongyang Li, Junbing Yan, Taolin Zhang, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods focus on improving the task performance, without fine-grained process of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects long-tail knowledge in large language models by analyzing retrieved documents and enhancing queries indiscriminately with retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves over 4x speedup in average inference time and consistent performance improvement in downstream tasks compared to existing pipelines. |
BiRRE: Learning Bidirectional Residual Relation Embeddings for Supervised Hypernymy Detection (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | supervised hypernymy detection has been studied under various frameworks . supervised classifiers are more likely to suffer from "lexical memorization" |
| Approach: | They propose a representation learning framework called Bidirectional Residual Relation Embeddings to model the possibility of a term being mapped to another in the embedding space by hypernymy relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines over evaluation frameworks. |
Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Ruyao Xu, Chengyu Wang, Zhongjie Duan, Cen Chen, Minghui Qiu, Dawei Cheng, Xiaofeng He, Weining Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to adapt to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains that captures the implicit graph structure among the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs in closed domains significantly. |
BELLE: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on multi-hop question answering employ specific methods regardless of question types . complexity of multihop question answerrs often exceeds knowledge boundaries of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses chain-of-thought prompting to prompt LLMs to answer multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in multi-hop QA scenarios. |
PE: A Poincare Explanation Method for Fast Text Hierarchy Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work on feature interactions neglects underlying linguistic information in feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for modeling feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces using Poincare Explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to model feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces in a time efficient manner. |
SMedBERT: A Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Model with Structured Semantics for Medical Text Mining (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-based PLMs are based on linked-entity information, but they only use linked-enemy information as auxiliary information. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate semantic knowledge from neighbours of linked-entity into a medical PLM that integrates heterogeneous-entities into the homogeneously neighbouring entity structure. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SMedBERT outperforms baselines in knowledge-intensive Chinese medical tasks. |
Exploratory Neural Relation Classification for Domain Knowledge Acquisition (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation classification are limited and lack of low-frequency relations in specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn a classifier on pre-defined relations and discover new relations expressed in texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can classify entities into a finite set of relations and discover relations with high precision and recall. |
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AMATA outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLMs on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie He, Jennifer Neville, Mengting Wan, Longqi Yang, Hui Liu, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jeff Z. Pan, Pei Zhou
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o. |
UniPSDA: Unsupervised Pseudo Semantic Data Augmentation for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on shallow unsupervised data generated by token surface matching regardless of global context-aware semantics of the surrounding text tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose an Unsupervised Pseudo Semantic Data Augmentation mechanism to enrich training data without human intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on general zero-shot cross-lingual understanding tasks on different languages without human intervention. |
SphereRE: Distinguishing Lexical Relations with Hyperspherical Relation Embeddings (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Lexical relations are relations between terms in lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural representation learning model to distinguish lexical relations among term pairs based on hyperspherical relation embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on several benchmarks. |