Papers by Xiaokang Liu
Uncovering the Impact of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Direct Preference Optimization: Lessons from Text-to-SQL (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is effective in complex reasoning tasks like math word problems and code generation, but Text-to-SQL datasets often include only final answers (gold SQL queries) without detailed CoT solutions. |
| Approach: | They found that Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is crucial for unlocking DPO's potential by augmenting Text-to-SQL datasets with synthetic CoT solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on Text-to-SQL datasets. |
BERT-EMD: Many-to-Many Layer Mapping for BERT Compression with Earth Mover’s Distance (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been proposed and applied to many NLP tasks, yielding state-of-the-art performance, but high storage and computational costs obstruct them to be effectively deployed on resource-constrained devices and real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a BERT distillation method which allows each intermediate student layer to learn from any intermediate teacher layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn from different teacher layers adaptively for different NLP tasks. |
PedagogyBench: A Cognitive-Driven Benchmark for Multimodal Instructional Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing video understanding benchmarks do not adequately capture the pedagogical logic embedded in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a pedagogy-driven segmentation strategy and a dual-stream semantic injection pipeline that combines machine pre-annotation with expert refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on discriminative tasks but degrades on higher-order pedagogical diagnosis, relying on parametric memory rather than grounded visual perception. |
Uncovering and Categorizing Social Biases in Text-to-SQL (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Text-to-SQL models are trained on clean, neutral datasets, such as Spider and WikiSQl, but these models contain social bias at different rates. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data to map natural language utterances to SQL queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can contain social bias at different rates in the downstream Text-to-SQL task. |
KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjiang Liu, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Xiaokang Jin, Yilin Wang, Qingyu Niu, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Yidan Liang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods compress content for gist browsing, but they break prerequisite logic in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. |
Can Language Models Make Fun? A Case Study in Chinese Comical Crosstalk (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been widely used in NLP, but their social or cultural impact is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They build a dataset consisting of numerous **C**hinese **C*omical **C***rosstalk scripts, which is for a popular Chinese performing art called ‘Xiangsheng’ or ‘’ since 1800s. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can generate humor as humans do, but it is still in its infancy. |
ChemActor: Enhancing Automated Extraction of Chemical Synthesis Actions with LLM-Generated Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for extracting chemical procedures from literature are insufficient and low-quality due to the inherent ambiguity of chemical language and the high cost of human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully fine-tuned large language model (LLM) as a chemical executor to convert between unstructured experimental procedures and structured action sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on R2D and D2A tasks by 10%. |