Papers by Xin Qian
From Text Segmentation to Enhanced Representation Learning: A Novel Approach to Multi-Label Classification for Long Texts (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on pre-trained language models, which have a maximum input sequence length of 512 tokens, and therefore have 'input length limitation'. |
| Approach: | They propose a text segmentation algorithm which guarantees to produce the optimal segmentation to address the issue of input length limitation caused by PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both text and label representations on MLTC datasets, unraveling the intricate correlations between texts and labels. |
Exploring Diverse Expressions for Paraphrase Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural paraphrase generation methods focus on single paraphrases while ignoring the fact that diversity is essential for enhancing generalization capability and robustness of downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach with two discriminators and multiple generators to generate a variety of different paraphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model gains significant diversity and improves quality over state-of-the-art datasets. |
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
SURE: Mutually Visible Objects and Self-generated Candidate Labels For Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Joint relation extraction models face high computational complexity, complex network architectures, difficult parameter tuning and limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They develop a candidate label marker mechanism that prioritizes strategic label selection over simple label generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed candidate label marks improve the SOTA methods by 2.5%, 1.9%, 1.2% . the proposed candidate labels improve the performance of the proposed methods . |
MDERank: A Masked Document Embedding Rank Approach for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Keyphrase extraction (KPE) extracts phrases in a document that provide a concise summary of the core content. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that ranks candidates by similarity between embeddings of source document and masked document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on six benchmarks . it achieves average 3.53 improvement over the existing method . |
CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing certified robustness methods for certifying input-specific text perturbations have shown promise in certifyling UTPs, but masking only adversarial words can eliminate the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to certify a language model’s robustness against UTPs by using random smoothing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high certified accuracy under extensive masking and achieves state-of-the-art results in multiple settings. |
Tell Me More! Towards Implicit User Intention Understanding of Language Model Driven Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Cheng Qian, Bingxiang He, Zhong Zhuang, Jia Deng, Yujia Qin, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Jie Zhou, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Current language model-driven agents lack mechanisms for effective user participation, which is crucial given the vagueness commonly found in user instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to inspect users’ implicit intentions through explicit queries and a model expert as the upstream in agent design to enhance user-agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach excels at identifying vague user tasks, recovering and summarizing critical missing information, setting precise and necessary agent execution goals, and minimizing redundant tool usage, thus boosting overall efficiency. |
An Ensemble-of-Experts Framework for Rehearsal-free Continual Relation Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) are rehearsal-based and need to store samples and thus may encounter privacy and security issues. |
| Approach: | They propose an Ensemble-of-Experts framework for rehearsal-free continual relation extraction that discriminates between experts and augments analogous relations across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing rehearsal-free methods and is even better than existing methods. |
Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved satisfactory performance in counterfactual generation, however, there are misalignments between LLMs and humans which hinder LLM from handling complex tasks like relation extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose to mimic the episodic memory retrieval mechanism of human hippocampus to align LLMs’ generation process with that of humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing methods in terms of quality of counterfactuals. |
DocAgent: A Multi-Agent System for Automated Code Documentation Generation (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating documentation using Large Language Models (LLMs) produce incomplete, unhelpful, or factually incorrect outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel collaborative system that uses topological code processing for incremental context building to generate documentation by agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in completeness, helpfulness, and truthfulness evaluations. |
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Jiabo Ye, Anwen Hu, Haiyang Xu, Qinghao Ye, Ming Yan, Guohai Xu, Chenliang Li, Junfeng Tian, Qi Qian, Ji Zhang, Qin Jin, Liang He, Xin Lin, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots. |
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. |
Prompting Large Language Models for Counterfactual Generation: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in a wide range of natural language understanding and generation tasks, but their ability to generate counterfactuals has not been examined systematically. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs' ability to generate counterfactuals based on key factors including intrinsic properties and prompt design. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the strengths and weaknesses of large language models (LLMs) and identifies factors that influence their ability to generate counterfactuals. |
FOCUS: A Fine-Grained Customer-Oriented Sentiment Dialogue Summarization Dataset for Chinese Customer Service (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies largely overlook fine-grained sentiment dynamics expressed by customers . current methods often exhibit misalignment between aspects and sentiments . |
| Approach: | They propose a three-stage approach to building an aspect-aware sentiment dataset . they use a fine-grained customer-oriented Chinese dialogUe summarization dataset based on this scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves faithfulness and interpretability of the proposed dataset. |
MASFactory: A Graph-centric Framework for Orchestrating LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems with Vibe Graphing (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language model-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used to extend agentic problem solving via role specialization and collaboration. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-centric framework for orchestrating large language model-based multi-agent systems . they compile a user's natural-language intent into an editable workflow specification and then into an executable graph . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compiles natural-language intent into an executable graph and then compile and executes it at runtime. |
Distance between Relevant Information Pieces Causes Bias in Long-Context LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Runchu Tian, Yanghao Li, Yuepeng Fu, Siyang Deng, Qinyu Luo, Cheng Qian, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Zhong Zhang, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Huadong Wang, Xiaojiang Liu
| Challenge: | Positional biases in large language models hinder their ability to process long inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess positional bias in large language models involving multiple pieces of relevant information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the performance of long-context language models by examining their models with different input lengths and tasks. |
Generating Commonsense Counterfactuals for Stable Relation Extraction (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction struggle to identify causal terms under the invariant entity constraint. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate commonsense counterfactuals for stable relation extraction by using a knowledge base WordNet and a constituency parser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances the stability of relation extraction models. |
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that lets agents learn shortcuts from their past tasks and use them for future task execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. |
Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dayu Yang, Tianyang Liu, Daoan Zhang, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent breakthrough models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 show powerful task-solving capabilities, particularly advances in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose future research directions that may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed research may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence. |
SolEval: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Repository-level Solidity Smart Contract Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on Python and Java, neglecting Solidity, the programming language for Ethereum smart contracts. |
| Approach: | They construct a repository-level benchmark for Solidity to evaluate the performance of LLMs on Ethereum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the best performing LLM achieves only 26.29% Pass@10, highlighting room for improvement in Solidity code generation. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |