Papers by Xin Du
Steering Away from Refusal: A Black-box Jailbreak Method Based on First-Token Distribution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze black-box jailbreaks lack direct optimization signals to refine adversarial prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-jailbreak attack method that selects effective jailbreak templates and iteratively optimizes adversarial suffixes by maximizing the KL divergence from the standard refusal distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate (ASR) on all tested open-source models and delivers over 94% ASR on GPT-4.1. |
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Leon Derczynski, Xingjian Du, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Gv, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Jiaju Lin, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Johan Wind, Stanisław Woźniak, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
| Challenge: | recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. |
Stock Embeddings Acquired from News Articles and Price History, and an Application to Portfolio Optimization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that news articles can be leveraged to improve price prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to encode the influence of news articles through a vector representation of stocks . they use a deep learning framework to acquire the vector representation using news articles and price history . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied to other financial problems besides price prediction. |
ZSEE: A Dataset based on Zeolite Synthesis Event Extraction for Automated Synthesis Platform (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Automated synthesis of zeolite holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. |
| Approach: | They propose an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can significantly expedite automated synthesis of zeolites owing to its machine readability. |
Evaluating Object Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models (LVLMs) suffer from object hallucinations, i.e., they tend to generate objects inconsistent with the target images in the descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate powerful large vision-language models (LVLMs) they propose a polling-based query method to evaluate object hallucination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can evaluate object hallucination in a more stable and flexible way. |
Light-R1: Curriculum SFT, DPO and RL for Long COT from Scratch and Beyond (2025.acl-industry)
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Liang Wen, Yunke Cai, Fenrui Xiao, Xin He, Qi An, Zhenyu Duan, Yimin Du, Junchen Liu, Tanglifu Tanglifu, Xiaowei Lv, Haosheng Zou, Yongchao Deng, Shousheng Jia, Xiangzheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that opensource curriculum training is more effective when distinct datasets are available for different training stages. |
| Approach: | They propose an opensource suite for training long reasoning models using publicdata and models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DeepSeek-R1-DistillQwen-32B models in math reasoning. |
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hanyu Lai, Xiao Liu, Junjie Gao, Jiale Cheng, Zehan Qi, Yifan Xu, Shuntian Yao, Dan Zhang, Jinhua Du, Zhenyu Hou, Xin Lv, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages. |
Beyond the Last Frame: Process-aware Evaluation for Generative Video Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks often rely on single-frame assessments, which can lead to outcome-hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-aware evaluation paradigm that uses a hierarchical rubric to evaluate the validity of the intermediate steps and the final result. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves POC@1.0 only about 20% and exhibits significant outcome-hacking. |
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating vulnerability repair suffer from syntactic overfitting . nvd published 49,230 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in 2025 alone . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware reward framework that optimizes for code semantic equivalence rather than lexical mimicry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on repository-level splits . it incorporates expert-aligned reasoning mechanism that grounds patch generation in structured diagnosis. |
S2R: Teaching LLMs to Self-verify and Self-correct via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to incentivize LLMs’ deep thinking abilities require large-scale data or significant training efforts. |
| Approach: | They introduce an efficient framework that enhances LLM reasoning by teaching models to self-verify and self-correct during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models trained on long-CoT distilled data with 3.1k initialization samples and achieves an accuracy improvement of 51.0% to 81.6%. |
Data-Centric Explainable Debiasing for Improving Fairness in Pre-trained Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data-centric debiasing strategies mainly leverage explicit bias words for counterfactual data augmentation to balance the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses an explainability method to search for implicit bias words to assist in debiasing PLMs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art debiasing performance and strong generalization while maintaining predictive abilities. |
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Bei Li, Quan Du, Tao Zhou, Yi Jing, Shuhan Zhou, Xin Zeng, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE). |
| Approach: | They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency. |
Can Prompts Rewind Time for LLMs? Evaluating the Effectiveness of Prompted Knowledge Cutoffs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used for temporal prediction tasks . however, their reliance on pretraining data can lead to contamination concerns . |
| Approach: | They investigate the capability of prompting to simulate an earlier knowledge cutoff in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fails to induce forgetting when the forgotten content is not directly asked but causally related to the query. |
Too Consistent to Detect: A Study of Self-Consistent Errors in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hexiang Tan, Fei Sun, Sha Liu, Du Su, Qi Cao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing detection methods fail to account for **self-consistent error** . study identifies self-consistency errors and evaluates them . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fuses hidden state evidence from an external verifier LLM to detect self-consistent errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances performance on self-consistent errors across three LLM families. |
BioTool: A Comprehensive Tool-Calling Dataset for Enhancing Biomedical Capabilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | despite the success of large language models, their performance in highly specialized domains remains unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose a biomedical tool-calling dataset designed for fine-tuning LLMs . the dataset contains 34 frequently used tools from the NCBI, Ensembl, and UniProt databases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms commercial LLMs on biomedical domains. |
Prompt Tuning Pushes Farther, Contrastive Learning Pulls Closer: A Two-Stage Approach to Mitigate Social Biases (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing debiasing techniques use Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA) to balance the training corpus, but this technique slightly modifies the original corpus limiting the representation distance between different demographic groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage debiasing model using Contrastive learning with Continuous Prompt Augmentation to mitigate social biases in PLMs’ encoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in terms of debiasing performance while maintaining the language modeling capability of PLMs. |
Improving Fine-grained Entity Typing with Entity Linking (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained entity typing require a large tag set and knowledge of the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep neural model that uses context and information from entity linking to improve fine-grained entity typing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 5% absolute strict accuracy improvement over the state of the art on two datasets. |
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)
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Zhe Zhao, Hui Chen, Jinbin Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tao Liu, Wei Lu, Xi Chen, Haotang Deng, Qi Ju, Xiaoyong Du
| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Jiajie Zhang, Hongchang Lyu, Jiankai Tang, Zhidian Huang, Zhengxiao Du, Xiao Liu, Aohan Zeng, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding that extends context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms to improve models' long context capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models but struggles on longer contexts. |
BaseCal: Unsupervised Confidence Calibration via Base Model Signals (2026.acl-long)
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Hexiang Tan, Wanli Yang, Junwei Zhang, Xin Chen, Rui Tang, Du Su, Jingang Wang, Yuanzhuo Wang, Fei Sun, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Post-trained LLMs typically compromise reliability with severe overconfidence, resulting in inaccurate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a solution that feeds PoLLMs into the base LLM to get confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution reduces expected calibration error (ECE) by 42.90% compared to the best unsupervised baselines. |