Papers by Xing Sun

43 papers
Effective and Efficient Query-aware Snippet Extraction for Web Search (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract webpage snippets ignore contextual information of webpages, which may be sub-optimal.
Approach: They propose a query-aware webpage snippet extraction method called DeepQSE that captures contextual information of webpages.
Outcome: The proposed method can significantly improve the performance of DeepQSE without affecting its performance.
Span-level Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis via Table Filling (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to analyze aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on word-level dependencies between aspect and opinion expressions.
Approach: They propose a span-level ABSA model which considers consistency of multi-word opinion expressions at the span- level.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to identify the sentiment polarity of a given aspect . it is based on a table filling method and a regularizer to guarantee consistency .
On the Vulnerability of Safety Alignment in Open-Access LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to malicious exploitation, but are often rejected and limited harmfulness is limited.
Approach: They propose two types of reverse alignment techniques: reverse supervised fine-tuning (RSFT) and reverse preference optimization (RPO).
Outcome: The proposed methods can significantly enhance the success rate and harmfulness of jailbreak attacks, but they face high rejection rates and limited harmfulness.
To Copy Rather Than Memorize: A Vertical Learning Paradigm for Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for embedding knowledge graphs implicitly memorize relation rules to infer missing links, but they are difficult to memorize due to the inherent deficiencies of such implicit memorization strategy.
Approach: They propose a vertical learning paradigm that allows to explicitly copy target information from related factual triples for more accurate prediction.
Outcome: The proposed model improves generalization ability and makes distant link prediction significantly easier.
RoleMRC: A Fine-Grained Composite Benchmark for Role-Playing and Instruction-Following (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing role-playing datasets mostly contribute to controlling role style and knowledge boundaries, but overlook role-following in instruction-follower scenarios.
Approach: They propose a fine-grained role-playing and instruction-following composite benchmark, named RoleMRC, which includes multi-turn dialogues between ideal roles and humans, including free chats or discussions upon given passages .
Outcome: The proposed model improves instruction-following without compromising general role-playing and reasoning capabilities.
Evade the Trap of Mediocrity: Promoting Diversity and Novelty in Text Generation via Concentrating Attention (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that powerful Transformer architectures produce dull high-frequency phrases, severely hurting the diversity and novelty of generated text.
Approach: They propose a method to control the sharpness of the attention distribution by python code and use it to learn a Bayesian approximation of posterior attention.
Outcome: The proposed method improves diversity and novelty while maintaining comparable quality on conditional and unconditional generation tasks.
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge.
Approach: They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities.
Bi-directional CognitiveThinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for reading comprehension are still in their infancy at the level of cognitive intelligence.
Approach: They propose a bi-directional cognitive knowledge framework to simulate reverse thinking and inertial thinking in the brain to answer questions.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task.
Are You Copying My Model? Protecting the Copyright of Large Language Models for EaaS via Backdoor Watermark (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in both text understanding and generation.
Approach: They propose an Embedding Watermark method that implants backdoors on embeddings to protect copyright of large language models.
Outcome: The proposed method protects the copyright of large language models without compromising service quality while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings’ utility.
Plum: Prompt Learning using Metaheuristics (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in prompt learning have led to a need for general prompt optimization methods.
Approach: They propose a branch of discrete non-convex optimization methods with over 100 options as a promising approach to prompt learning.
Outcome: The proposed methods can be used to discover more human-understandable prompts that were previously unknown in reasoning and image generation tasks.
Breaking the Evaluation Paradox: Evaluating High-Entropy Search with Computationally Irreducible Constraints (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a new framework for evaluation of exhaustive search capabilities is needed . high-entropy enumeration tasks make such ground truth impossible for humans to create . VERITAS is a framework built on the principle of computationally irreducible constraints .
Approach: They propose a framework that uses non-optimizable constraints to create verifiable searches . VERITAS can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control .
Outcome: a new evaluation framework for large language models is based on non-optimizable constraints . the framework can generate infinite number of test cases with perfect ground truth and precise difficulty control .
Graph-Reward-SQL: Execution-Free Reinforcement Learning for Text-to-SQL via Graph Matching and Stepwise Reward (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to enhance performance of large language models (LLMs) on Text-to-SQL tasks rely on execution-based or LLM-based reward models.
Approach: They propose a reward model framework for RL-based Text-to-SQL that employs the GMNScore outcome reward model.
Outcome: The proposed reward model outperforms existing reward models on standard benchmarks including Spider and BIRD.
CL-QR: Cross-Lingual Enhanced Query Reformulation for Multi-lingual Conversational AI Agents (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing QR systems that reformulate defective user queries are limited in English due to the scarcity of non-English QR labels.
Approach: They propose a query reformulation method which reformulates defective user queries to improve non-English QR performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves non-English QR performance by leveraging abundant reformulation resources in English.
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores.
Approach: They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values.
Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies attributed verbosity to biased labels, but new research shows that DPO can be effective in mitigating verboses.
Approach: They propose to use a method to reduce the amount of verbosity in LLMs by using a downsampling approach.
Outcome: The proposed approach overcomes the problem of verbosity by reducing the length reliance of the proposed algorithm.
Learning from Cognition: Enhancing RL Efficiency for LLM Reasoning via Hierarchical Metacognitive Decomposition and Refinement (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models have demonstrated notable inferential capacities via reinforcement learning (RL) however, “zero-RL” approaches relying on fixed prompt templates introduce substantial sampling inefficiencies for weak LLMs.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical metacognitive RL framework that decomposes zero-accuracy problems into subproblems and prompts the policy to refine answers by referencing previous wrong solutions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves sample utilization and sample efficiency and accelerates convergence compared to baselines.
Longtriever: a Pre-trained Long Text Encoder for Dense Document Retrieval (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing PLMs are infeasible for processing long documents due to computational costs and incomprehensive document understanding.
Approach: They propose a retrieval model that models local semantics and global context semantics in a tightly-coupled manner.
Outcome: The proposed model overcomes three core challenges of long document retrieval: substantial computational cost, incomprehensive document understanding, and scarce annotations.
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student.
Approach: They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures.
FIPO: Free-form Instruction-oriented Prompt Optimization with Preference Dataset and Modular Fine-tuning Schema (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: naive prompts can enhance the task performance of large language models, but they are resource-intensive.
Approach: They propose an automatic prompt optimization method that refines naive prompts according to task outputs from in-box testing models.
Outcome: The proposed method is based on a large-scale dataset and performed fairly across multiple models.
PersonaTrace: Synthesizing Realistic Digital Footprints with LLM Agents (2026.eacl-industry)

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Challenge: Publicly available corpora cover only slivers of human activity, such as email threads, chat logs, purchase histories, sensor traces, and provide large-scale supervision for data-hungry machine-learning pipelines.
Approach: They propose a method for synthesizing realistic digital footprints using large language model agents from a structured user profile.
Outcome: The proposed method generates diverse sequences of user events, producing corresponding digital artifacts such as emails, messages, calendar entries, reminders, etc.
Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Large language models have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses, but their robustness is still far from optimal.
Approach: They propose a two-stage training framework that helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations.
Outcome: The proposed training framework improves diversity and aligns the model with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses.
MoVa: Towards Generalizable Classification of Human Morals and Values (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Identifying human morals and values embedded in language is essential to empirical studies of communication.
Approach: They propose a framework for generalizable classification of human morals and values . they recommend a classification strategy that scores all related concepts simultaneously .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms fine-tuned models across domains and frameworks.
HiChunk: Evaluating and Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Chunking (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for document chunking are inadequate due to evidence sparsity . evaluators are unable to evaluate different chunking methods due to the evidence sparing .
Approach: They propose a QA benchmark for document chunking and a hierarchical document structuring framework for it.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves document chunking quality within reasonable time consumption.
RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction.
Approach: They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels.
Efficient-FedRec: Efficient Federated Learning Framework for Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of user click behavior data, which may lead to privacy concerns and hazards.
Approach: They propose a federated learning framework for privacy-preserving news recommendation . they propose aggregation of news representations and user model by a client .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces computation and communication cost on clients while keeping promising model performance.
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs.
Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent literature reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization.
Approach: They propose a self-detection method to detect which questions an LLM does not know by combining the two components to identify whether the model generates a non-factual response to the question.
Outcome: The proposed method can detect which questions an LLM does not know across factoid question-answering, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks.
ENPMR-Bench: Benchmarking Proactive Memory Retrieval for Emotional Support Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research treats memory as a mechanism for factual retention, neglecting its role in shaping users’ emotional experiences.
Approach: They propose a benchmark for evaluating Emotional Need-aware Proactive Memory Retrieval (ENPMR) it enables agents to infer users’ latent emotional needs and proactively retrieve appropriate memories to support empathetic interaction.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark includes over 1,800 memory-augmented dialogues and defines structured mappings between emotional needs and supportive memory types.
Recurrence Boosts Diversity! Revisiting Recurrent Latent Variable in Transformer-Based Variational AutoEncoder for Diverse Text Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Variational Auto-Encoder (VAE) has been widely adopted in text generation due to its ability to learn flexible representations.
Approach: They propose a Transformer-based recurrent VAE structure that imposes recurrence on segment-wise latent variables with arbitrarily separated text segments and constructs the posterior distribution with residual parameterization.
Outcome: The proposed structure can deduce a non-zero lower bound of the KL term and enhance the entanglement of each segment and preceding latent variables, providing a theoretical guarantee of generation diversity.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach: They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.
Rethinking the Video Sampling and Reasoning Strategies for Temporal Sentence Grounding (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for temporal sentence grounding ignore two crucial issues . 1) Boundary-bias: the video downsampling process may lose these two frames . 2) Reasoning-biases: such incorrect new boundary frames lead to the reasoning bias .
Approach: They propose a siamese sampling mechanism to generate additional contextual frames . they use a reasoning strategy to learn the inter-relationship among these frames a .
Outcome: Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of a new siamese sampling network on three challenging datasets.
Collision to Cognition: Hash-Driven Graph Construction for Efficient RAG (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been used for enhancing large language models with external knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework for mining efficient graph structures via hashing to enhance RAG . they adopt an inductive paradigm where global graph structure emerges from local hash collisions .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while requiring no GPU resources or token budget.
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions .
Approach: They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers .
Outcome: The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios.
A Survey on Multi-modal Intent Recognition: Recent Advances and New Frontiers (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multi-modal intent recognition (MIR) requires integrating non-verbal cues from real-world contexts to enhance human intention understanding.
Approach: They present a comprehensive review of multi-modal intent recognition . they provide a survey of the field covering textual, visual, and acoustic signals .
Outcome: The present survey summarises the current state of multi-modal intent recognition . it includes a comprehensive taxonomy and advanced methods .
Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversations (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on single-session counseling are limited to a single-session setting.
Approach: They propose to use a large language model to deliver automated psychological counseling to a dataset constructed using real client profiles from publicly available psychological case reports.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better than baseline models across multiple sessions.
Human-Agent Collaborative Paper-to-Page Crafting (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to create project pages from academic papers have focused on static slides and posters, but the dynamic nature of webpages remains an unaddressed challenge.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-agent system that deconstructs paper-to-page creation into a coarse-to fine pipeline from narrative planning to multimodal content generation and interactive rendering.
Outcome: The proposed system generates high-quality, visually appealing pages in under 15 minutes for less than $0.1 .
Fuse It More Deeply! A Variational Transformer with Layer-Wise Latent Variable Inference for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Variational Auto-Encoders are often used for text generation tasks due to the sequential nature of the text.
Approach: They propose a variational Transformer framework that learns a series of layer-wise latent variables with each inferred from those of lower layers and tightly coupled with the hidden states by low-rank tensor product.
Outcome: The proposed framework can learn latent variables from lower layers and incorporate more information.
Query-Aware Knowledge Retrieval via Hyperbolic Structuring (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches focus primarily on retrieving isolated factual knowledge entities while neglecting the critical reasoning relationships.
Approach: They propose a query-centric retrieval framework that explicitly integrates structured knowledge graphs to support complex reasoning tasks.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets show that HyperRAG outperforms baselines.
Improving Contextual Query Rewrite for Conversational AI Agents through User-preference Feedback Learning (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Contextual query rewriting (CQR) is a crucial component in Conversational AI agents, leveraging contextual information from previous user-agent conversations to improve comprehension of current user intent.
Approach: They propose a framework to enhance the CQR model's capability in generating user preference-aligned rewrites.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the CQR model's ability to generate user preference-aligned rewrites.
DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Dongba pictographic is the only pictograph script still in use in the world.
Approach: DongbaMIE is the first dataset focusing on multimodal information extraction of Dongbe pictographs.
Outcome: The dataset contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level high-quality text-image pairs.
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model.
CuBridge: An LLM-Based Framework for Understanding and Reconstructing High-Performance Attention Kernels (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to support diverse attention variants trade performance for flexibility . expert-written kernels achieve high efficiency but are difficult to adapt .
Approach: They propose a framework that adapts expert-written attention kernels to GPUs . they use a structured lift–transfer–lower workflow to make execution explicit .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and compilers on diverse variants and GPU platforms.
LogitSpec: Accelerating Retrieval-based Speculative Decoding via Next Next Token Speculation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Speculative decoding (SD) is a promising technique for LLM inference acceleration.
Approach: They propose a method to generate draft tokens in a retrieval-based manner to reduce drafting overhead and improve inference speed.
Outcome: Extensive tests show that *LogitSpec* can achieve 2.61 speedup and 3.28 mean accepted tokens per decoding step.

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