Papers by Xiaolin Li
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Tension Between Ethical Reasoning and Safety Alignment in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) safety alignment predominantly operates on a binary assumption that requests are either safe or unsafe. |
| Approach: | They propose a methodology that embeds harmful requests within ethical framings to exploit this vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high success rates by exploiting model's own ethical reasoning to frame harmful actions as morally necessary compromises. |
Original Content Is All You Need! an Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task (2022.coling-1)
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Liang Wen, Juan Li, Houfeng Wang, Yingwei Luo, Xiaolin Wang, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhicong Cheng, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing answer selection approaches for community question answering lack additional answer summaries due to redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. |
| Approach: | They constructed a dataset which contains a corresponding reference summary for each original lengthy answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of a question and candidate answer on a WikiHowQA dataset. |
A Batch Normalized Inference Network Keeps the KL Vanishing Away (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is widely used to approximate a model’s posterior on latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose to let the Kullback–Leibler divergence individual follow a distribution across the whole dataset and analyze that it is sufficient to prevent posterior collapse by keeping the expectation of the KL’s distribution positive. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can avoid posterior collapse effectively and efficiently without introducing any new model component or modifying the objective. |
GraphBTM: Graph Enhanced Autoencoded Variational Inference for Biterm Topic Model (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Conventional topic models suffer different problems in different settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel way to model word-pairs named biterms in the whole corpus and a Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) with residual connections to extract transitive features from biterm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent topics compared with previous methods. |
SATQuest: A Verifier for Logical Reasoning Evaluation and Reinforcement Fine-Tuning of LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yanxiao Zhao, Yaqian Li, Zi-Hao Bo, Rinyoichi Takezoe, Haojia Hui, Mo Guang, null Renlei, Xiaolin Qin, Kaiwen Long
| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit strong general reasoning abilities, yet the community lacks controllable, scalable, and verifiable tools to analyze and improve them. |
| Approach: | They propose a verifier that generates diverse SAT-based reasoning tasks from CNF instances and checks answers objectively with PySAT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier generates diverse SAT-based reasoning tasks from CNF instances and checks answers objectively with PySAT. |
DEBUG: A Dense Bottom-Up Grounding Approach for Natural Language Video Localization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language video localization are top-down and bottom-up . however, both approaches suffer several limitations, leading to performance degradation . |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down approach for localizing a natural language description in a video sequence . they propose 'DEnse Bottom-Up Grounding' which uses the temporal boundaries of each video frame . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches the speed of top-down models while surpassing the state-of-the-art models. |