Papers by Xin Xiao
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimise pretraining performance have not addressed the complexities of domain-adaptive continual pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically assesses learning velocity and adjusts data proportions accordingly, favouring slower learning domains while de-emphasising faster learning ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains in math and code reasoning tasks and command-line generation benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | commercial LLMs can be difficult to use in real-world clinical decision-making . a lightweight LLM can be used to collaborate with diverse clinical tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight LLM that can be used to build medical LLMs as agents . they use recursive curriculum learning to optimize the LLM in an easy-to-hard progression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human experts in medical examinations on diverse datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Masked diffusion models (MDMs) leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process. |
| Approach: | They investigate the attention behaviors of Masked diffusion models by revealing the phenomenon of Attention Floating. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model doubles the performance of autoregressive models in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for insurance claims adjudication are limited to information retrieval or simple multiple-choice setups. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that provides complete reasoning traces linking factual inputs, relevant policy clauses, and final verdicts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that models often produce correct decisions but fail to provide precise justifications, highlighting a critical discrepancy between decision accuracy and logical reasoning capabilities. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data proves that ChatGPT performs no less than humans in text generation and knowledge Q&A. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ChatGPT to map vulnerabilities to common weakness enumeration (CWE), common attack pattern ennumeration and classification (ATT&CK) techniques and other classifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than human experts on many tasks, but it can't replace professional security engineers in vulnerability analysis. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the success of speech recognition, how to encode the speech features effectively remains an open problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a Progressive Down-Sampling technique which compresses acoustic features into coarser-grained units containing more complete semantic information, like text-level representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method yields comparable or better results on the speech recognition task and inference speedups ranging from 1.20x to 1.47x. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that some parameters in pre-trained language models can be pruned away without severe accuracy degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates more features with very cheap operations from the remaining features and can be applied to unpruned BERT models to enhance their performance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results on the GLUE benchmark on three backbone models (i.e., BERT, RoBERTa and ELECTRA) verify the efficacy of the proposed method. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods do not use graph contextualized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to model subgraphs in a medical KG and integrate it with a pre-trained language model to do knowledge generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on several medical NLP tasks . it improves on MedERNIE, and the proposed model is effective . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to integrate lexical knowledge into deep learning models are limited by large-scale dynamic lexicons. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in lexicon incorporation approach for BERT based sequence labeling tasks . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new SOTA even with large scale lexicons, the authors show . they adopt word-agnostic tag embeddings to avoid re-training the representation . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirically, we show that HyperText outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses hyperbolic geometry to model tree-like hierarchies in natural language sentences by embedding words or ngrams in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model outperforms FastText on a range of text classification tasks with much reduced parameters. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress context information ignore holistic contextual dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts position encodings to minimize the distance between context tokens and special tokens. |
| Outcome: | Enhanced Position Layout (EPL) improves compression of context information in large language models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph construction frameworks require predefined schemas, limiting their scalability and domain coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for fully autonomous knowledge graph construction that eliminates the need for predefined schemas. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on multi-hop QA tasks and enhances LLM factuality. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving historical messages are based on similarity-based mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that integrates System-1 similarity search with a complementary System-2 mechanism, termed Global Selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on long-term memory benchmarks and 93.9 on LoCoMo and 91.6 on LongMemEval-S. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs) however, the ability to align LLMs with human values is still vulnerable to malicious attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM safety by using a framework to design jailbreak prompts automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of 88% and 60% in cold-start scenarios. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Motivational interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique that encourages individuals to change behaviors through emphatic conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate more controllable dialogues with explainability by prompting LLMs to predict appropriate strategies as reasoning and utilizing these strategies to guide dialogue generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more controllable and explainable dialogues with a set of MI skills. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated extensive potential in medical applications . however, their practical deployment in healthcare faces significant challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free multi-turn reasoning framework and a post-training methodology that provides external knowledge support for large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework elicits internal thought, external thought, and fusion thought, with an entropy-based reward that encourages selective citation of beneficial external knowledge while penalizing noisy citations. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for classification of labels are limited by feature aggregation and encoding. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hyperbolic capsule networks to capture fine-grained label information . they also propose a new routing method to adaptively adjust capsule number during routing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of multi-label classification on tail labels. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models and the scarcity of high-quality multi-modal alignment data have inspired numerous researches on synthetic VLM data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal data construction pipeline that organizes the final output into a Python code format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves visual question answering and visual grounding benchmarks across different VLMs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing Chart2code-related training datasets suffer from limited scale, limited type coverage, and inadequate complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize chart2code-related training datasets using web plotting code and chart images to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset exhibits the greatest diversity and higher complexity compared to other open-source Chart2code related datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems invoke LLMs to extract episodic and semantic memory, and this leads to substantial token consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that stores incoming interactions in a subconscious memory layer and encodes them using lightweight embedding models for retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RecMem reduces the memory construction token cost of three SOTA memory systems by up to 87% while exceeding their accuracy. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the choice of space for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings has significant effects on the performance of KG completion tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Fourier transform to convert between real and complex hyperbolic space to capture hierarchical patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the baseline models for knowledge graph (KG) embeddings. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning focus on unit test feedback to construct preference pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Preference Learning improves on BigCodeBench and BigCodeBind tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT are computationally expensive and limited to resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the other methods on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 14.9x smaller. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language model evaluation benchmarks focus on English, while current multilingual tasks lack parallel questions that specifically assess cross-lingual reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The MMLU-ProX is a comprehensive benchmark covering 29 languages, built on an English benchmark. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on the models, neglecting the full deployment pipeline . previous studies have underestimated the practical success of these attacks . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the effectiveness of jailbreak attacks targeting LLM safety alignment . they highlight critical gaps and call for further refinement of detection accuracy and usability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks can detect at least one safety filter across the entire deployment pipeline. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the success of neural machine translation, simultaneous neural machine translators are challenging due to syntactic structure difference and simultaneity requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for adapting neural machine translation to translate simultaneously . they propose 'prefix translation' that utilizes a consecutive NMT model to translate source prefixes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework balancing quality and latency on three translation corpora and two language pairs shows that it performs well. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, traditional RAG attacks are difficult to pose an effective threat to GraphRAg systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents into GraphRAG systems by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on GraphRAG systems in both effectiveness and stealth. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to classify documents using labels only assign one label to document . multi-label text classification is a challenging task because of the huge amount of documents, words and labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a Label-Specific Attention Network (LSAN) to learn a label-specific document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four datasets . it can predict low-frequency labels, and it can be used in sentimental analysis . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that KV cache compression can increase hallucination scores in LLMs . modern LLM models support extremely long sequences, but their impact on model hallucinosity remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination across multiple models and datasets while preserving computational efficiency. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reward LLMs' outputs are not effective in mathematical reasoning scenarios and may lead to a decline in performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-based self-rewarding pipeline that integrates long-thought reasoning, step-wise LLM-as-a-Judge, and step- wise preference optimization within the existing paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of Large Language Models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and shows that it can surpass human capabilities. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that automatically searches architecture hyper-parameters in BERT . they use one-shot learning and the search space to provide an adaptive development way . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms both the baseline and distillation-based methods on GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing multi-step reasoning have not fully translated to multilingual contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages language-conditioned hints to guide exploration in non-English reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework improves reasoning performance without compromising language consistency. |