Papers by Xiaokang Yang
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. |
ChemReason-Bench: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Procedural Reasoning in Experimental Chemistry (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental protocols in organic synthesis specify not only the intended transformation, but also an executable sequence of operations and conditions. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-validated benchmark for verifiable experimental procedure reasoning . they instantiate 7306 benchmark tasks across six complementary formats . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the evaluations are less diagnostic of procedure-level decision making. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
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%. |