Papers by Xin Mao
Visually Guided Generative Text-Layout Pre-training for Document Intelligence (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior work shows that pre-training techniques can boost the performance of visual document understanding (VDU) . Xu et al., 2020;; Gu e t al, 2021;; Appalaraju e al. 2022) |
| Approach: | They propose a visually guided generative text-layout pre-training method that optimizes hierarchical language and layout modeling objectives to generate interleaved text and layout sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process word-intensive documents of any length and achieves competitive performance over baselines on VDU tasks. |
Full-Step-DPO: Self-Supervised Preference Optimization with Step-wise Rewards for Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve long-chain mathematical reasoning focus on the first erroneous step, but ignore all other steps and rely heavily on external signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a DPO framework that leverages step-wise rewards from the entire reasoning chain instead of optimizing only the first erroneous step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on in-domain and out-of-domain mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
LAFaCT: Attribution-based Localization and Focused Sequential Analysis of Fact-Critical Tokens for Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from hallucinations, severely undermining their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that localizes fact-critical tokens and performs sequential analysis on their hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework localizes fact-critical tokens using Factual Criticality . it then performs a focused sequential analysis on their hidden states . |
SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing TOD datasets present simplified interactions with simple slot-value style constraints and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel TOD dataset that captures complex user requirements using SQL statements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset captures complex, real-world user requirements. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
SCOPE: Compress Mathematical Reasoning Steps for Efficient Automated Process Annotation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing process annotation approaches are computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a compression-based approach that transforms reasoning steps into code and normalizes them through Abstract Syntax Tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on Best-of-N strategy and ProcessBench. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
From Alignment to Assignment: Frustratingly Simple Unsupervised Entity Alignment (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-lingual entity alignment rely on lexical matching and probability reasoning, but they inherit poor interpretability and low efficiency from neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple but effective unsupervised entity alignment method without neural networks that can be used to find the equivalent entities between crosslingual KGs. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed method beats advanced supervised methods across all datasets while having high efficiency, interpretability, and stability. |
Don’t Forget Your Reward Values: Language Model Alignment via Value-based Calibration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating large language models have been criticized for their complexity and instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a value-based calibration method to better align Large Language Models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on AI assistant and summarization datasets, providing impressive generalizability, robustness, and diversity in different settings. |
Sailor: Open Language Models for South-East Asia (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on English data for training, but are often not comparable across other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to develop a family of open language models for SEA languages . they use BPE dropout, aggressive data cleaning and deduplication to improve model robustness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well across four benchmarks, including commonsense reasoning, question answering, reading comprehension and examination. |
TRIDENT: Enhancing Large Language Model Safety with Tri-Dimensional Diversified Red-Teaming Data Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but are vulnerable to harmful content and being exploited for malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to measure the risk coverage of alignment datasets across three dimensions: Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures risk coverage across Lexical Diversity, Malicious Intent, and Jailbreak Tactics. |
FEA-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Repository-Level Code Generation for Feature Implementation (2025.acl-long)
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Wei Li, Xin Zhang, Zhongxin Guo, Shaoguang Mao, Wen Luo, Guangyue Peng, Yangyu Huang, Houfeng Wang, Scarlett Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on standalone programming problems, such as HumanEval, MBPP, and LiveCodeBench. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to evaluate their ability to perform incremental development within code repositories by collecting pull requests from 83 GitHub repositorias and using rule-based and intent-based filtering to construct task instances focused on new feature development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that large language models perform significantly worse in the FEA-Bench, highlighting considerable challenges in repository-level incremental code development. |
Enhancing Language Model with Unit Test Techniques for Efficient Regular Expression Generation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that generative language models lack functional correctness, which is a critical aspect of regular expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that takes functional correctness into account and transforms it into a differentiable gradient feedback using policy gradient techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been used in a regulatory scenario to ensure that all online content is free from non-compliant elements, thereby significantly reducing the workload of relevant personnel. |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
LightEA: A Scalable, Robust, and Interpretable Entity Alignment Framework via Three-view Label Propagation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing EA methods inherit the inborn defects from their neural network lineage: poor interpretability and weak scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-free EA framework that can find equivalent entity pairs between KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework has impressive scalability, robustness, and interpretability. |
An Effective and Efficient Entity Alignment Decoding Algorithm via Third-Order Tensor Isomorphism (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on graph representation learning, but decoding is a key part of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose an EA Decoding Algorithm via Third-order Tensor Isomorphism (DATTI) they combine two sets of isomorphic equations to enhance the decoding process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can deliver significant performance improvements even on the most advanced methods while the extra required time is less than 3 seconds. |
Scaling up Open Tagging from Tens to Thousands: Comprehension Empowered Attribute Value Extraction from Product Title (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models treat each attribute as an entity type and build one set of NER tags for each of them, leading to scalability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose to regard attribute as a query and adopt only one global set of BIO tags for any attributes to reduce the burden of attribute tag or model explosion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and generates promising results for 8,906 attributes. |
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLM-based moderation methods have demonstrated remarkable promise in identifying safety risks associated with both inputs and outputs in human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a classification head on the last-layer hidden states of a dialogue model and use it to detect harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is 300 faster (**1ms**) than previous LLM-based moderation models with 99% less parameters than LlamaGuard. |
LexGenius: An Expert-Level Benchmark for Large Language Models in Legal General Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenjin Liu, Haoran Luo, Xin Feng, Xiang Ji, Lijuan Zhou, Rui Mao, Jiapu Wang, Shirui Pan, Erik Cambria
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for legal general intelligence (GI) are result-oriented and do not evaluate the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese legal benchmark for evaluating legal GI in large language models . they use recent legal cases and exam questions to create multiple-choice questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks lack a systematic evaluation of the legal intelligence of large language models (LLMs) the results show that even the best LLMs lagging behind human legal professionals. |
A Simple Temporal Information Matching Mechanism for Entity Alignment between Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for EA between temporal KGs incorporate relational and temporal information into entity embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate unsupervised alignment seeds using temporal information from TKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous methods by using temporal information. |
Voice Query Auto Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
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Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Kendra Chalkley, Ji Xin, Liming Zhang, Wenyan Li, Gefei Yang, Yajie Mao, Junho Shin, Geoffrey Craig Murray, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing methods fail to complete voice queries from incomplete prefixes because they use orthographic prefix and substrings instead of the true phonetic prefix. |
| Approach: | They propose to condition QAC approaches on intermediate transcriptions to complete voice queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method obtains an 18% relative improvement over previous methods on a speech-enabled smart television with real-life voice search traffic. |