Papers by Xing Yue
Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Kernels (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical studies show that our approach gains approximately an improvement of 1 BLEU score on most benchmarks over the Transformer baseline. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract several semantic kernels from a source sentence to capture global semantic information. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach improves 1 BLEU score on benchmarks . it is also 1.7 times faster than previous works on average at inference time . |
Red-Teaming LLM Multi-Agent Systems via Communication Attacks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) have revolutionized complex problem-solving capability by enabling agent collaboration through message-based communications. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that exploits communication mechanisms in Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (LLM-MAS) by intercepting and manipulating inter-agent messages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack exploits communication mechanisms in large language model-based multi-agent systems by intercepting and manipulating inter-agencies. |
Towards Knowledge Checking in Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Representation Perspective (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Bingheng Li, Yuping Lin, Tianqi Zheng, Dante Everaert, Hanqing Lu, Hui Liu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge and tend to prioritize external information over internal knowledge learned during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM representation behaviors and demonstrate the significance of using representations in knowledge checking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifiers improve performance even when dealing with noisy knowledge databases. |
InquireMobile: Teaching VLM-based Mobile Agent to Request Human Assistance via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qihang Ai, Pi Bu, Yue Cao, Yingyao Wang, Jihao Gu, Jingxuan Xing, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Zhicheng Zheng, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled mobile agents to perceive and interact with real-world mobile environments based on human instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model that actively seeks human confirmation at critical decision points and a model inspired by reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an improvement of 46.8% in inquiry success rate and the best overall success rate among existing baselines on InquireBench. |
Uncertainty-Aware Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for neural machine translation only observe one source sentence at training time . this discrepancy in data distribution leads to a formidable learning challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose an uncertainty-aware semantic augmentation approach to capture universal semantic information among multiple source sentences and enhance hidden representations with this information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline and existing methods on translation tasks. |
Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing controllable story generation systems ignore the psychological changes of the protagonists and focus on the appointed keywords or emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) that generates stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines and shows that it can generate stories with more consistent psychological changes. |
Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness, whereas general LLMs perform suboptimal on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks while demonstrating strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths. |
GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-Distribution Generalization Perspective (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Linyi Yang, Shuibai Zhang, Libo Qin, Yafu Li, Yidong Wang, Hanmeng Liu, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have improved generalization performance but the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a benchmark for evaluating out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight the importance of OOD robustness and provide insights on how to measure it and improve it. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
Bi-directional CognitiveThinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activities (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for modeling motivations, emotions and actions in language-based human activities have been limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to model motivations, emotions and actions in language-based human activities using a dataset called Story Commonsense. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can better reveal the essential relationship between motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods. |
Answering Narrative-Driven Recommendation Queries via a Retrieve–Rank Paradigm and the OCG-Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate narrative-driven recommendation are based on large language models (LLMs) but the RAG paradigm is inherently ill-suited for such special queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieve-rank paradigm that generatively retrieves structurally adaptive and semantically aligned candidates, ensuring both extensive candidate coverage and high-quality information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms the existing paradigm and the existing one under real-world scenarios. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
Data Poisoning for In-context Learning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a capability of large language models (LLMs) but there is limited understanding of its vulnerability against data poisoning attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack method that exploits ICL’s unique learning mechanisms by identifying discrete text perturbations that influence LLM hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack method exploits ICL’s learning mechanisms by identifying discrete text perturbations that influence LLM hidden states. |
A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations. |
DRAGON: Domain-specific Robust Automatic Data Generation for RAG Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Haiyang Shen, Hang Yan, Zhongshi Xing, Mugeng Liu, Yue Li, Zhiyang Chen, Yuxiang Wang, Jiuzheng Wang, Yun Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation paradigms rely heavily on public knowledge . Existing RAGs reliant on public information and often falter when faced with domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines a data-construction modeling approach with a scalable synthetic data-generation pipeline to optimize domain-specific retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework optimizes domain-specific retrieval performance and bolsters retriever robustness. |
AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Ding-Chu Zhang, Xiaowen Zhang, Yue Fei, Renjun Hu, Xiao-Wen Yang, Zhi Zhou, Baixuan Li, Yu-Feng Li, Xing Shi, Wei Lin
| Challenge: | Existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability . existing methods are limited by their reliance on metadata from specific corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to generate scalable RAG benchmarks using corpus-agnostic methods . they propose a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach evolves queries significantly more challenging than existing methods . it is able to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query . |
MultiChallenge: A Realistic Multi-Turn Conversation Evaluation Benchmark Challenging to Frontier LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Kaustubh Deshpande, Ved Sirdeshmukh, Johannes Baptist Mols, Lifeng Jin, Ed-Yeremai Hernandez-Cardona, Dean Lee, Jeremy Kritz, Willow E. Primack, Summer Yue, Chen Xing
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for large language models have limited coverage for multi-turn conversations . multi-turned conversations require accurate instruction following, context allocation, and in-context reasoning at the same time. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models' ability to conduct multi-turn conversations with humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks achieve near perfect scores on existing benchmarks but only a 41.4% accuracy on the frontier models. |
Towards Context-Robust LLMs: A Gated Representation Fine-tuning Approach (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with external contexts face challenges in handling imperfect evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can balance internal knowledge with external contexts . they propose gating mechanisms and low-rank representation adapters to adjust hidden representations based on a lightweight intervention function . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can effectively balance internal knowledge with external context, similar to human cognitive processes. |
Can We Steer Reasoning Direction by Thinking Intervention? (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Reason Models suffer from overthinking and erroneous reasoning problems due to the lack of fine-grained control over their reasoning behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm to enable fine-grained control over LRMs’ reasoning behaviors by aligning reasoning trajectories with specific cognitive patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves integration intervention throughout model reasoning processes. |
PEAR: Planner-Executor Agent Robustness Benchmark (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies examine isolated attack surfaces or specific scenarios, leaving a lack of holistic understanding of MAS vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the utility and vulnerability of planner–executor MAS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates planner–executor MAS on a widely adopted design. |
Towards Understanding Jailbreak Attacks in LLMs: A Representation Space Analysis (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage hidden representations into existing jailbreak targets to move the attacks along the acceptance direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are validated using the objective of existing jailbreak attacks. |
PREE: Towards Harmless and Adaptive Fingerprint Editing in Large Language Models via Knowledge Prefix Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing black-box fingerprinting techniques rely on overfitting high-perplexity trigger patterns . experimental results show that model editing in the fingerprint domain exhibits unique advantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-enhanced fingerprint editing framework that encodes copyright information into parameter offsets through dual-channel knowledge edit to achieve covert embedding of fingerprint features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing framework achieves 90% trigger precision in mainstream architectures . the proposed model editor achieves the 90% accuracy in mainstream models . |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memory (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents store private user-agent interactions in memory for demonstrations, introducing new privacy risks for LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that extracts private information from memory under a black-box setting and propose a method that can be used to attack the agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is effective under a black-box setting and it is demonstrated on two representative agents. |
Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Jie Ren, Tianqi Zheng, Hanqing Lu, Han Xu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing literature suggests that RAG systems may face privacy issues when the retrieval process involves private data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage synthetic data generation paradigm that uses attributes to preserve contextual information from the original data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves key contextual information from the original data while reducing privacy risks. |
Financial Sentiment Analysis: An Investigation into Common Mistakes and Silver Bullets (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent dominance of machine learning-based natural language processing methods has overemphasized model accuracies rather than studying the reasons behind their errors. |
| Approach: | They investigate the error patterns of some widely acknowledged sentiment analysis methods in the finance domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are based on the existing models and have important clues for improving them. |
A Reward-Guided Dual-Phase Framework for Adaptive Inference-Time Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yingqian Cui, Zhenwei Dai, Pengfei He, Bing He, Hui Liu, Zhan Shi, Xianfeng Tang, Jingying Zeng, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Benoit Dumoulin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made strong progress in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-phase test-time scaling framework that separates planning and execution and performs search over each phase independently. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning and code generation benchmarks show that the proposed approach improves accuracy while reducing redundant computation. |
Phun-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Phonological Understanding in Chinese (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on LLMs’ phonological abilities are either solvable through rote memorization or intertwined with other abilities, making them inadequate to measure LLM’s genuine ability in *phonological understanding*. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' phonological understanding to test their ability to recall correct pronunciations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that LLMs excel at recalling correct pronunciations, but struggle to leverage phonological knowledge in the flexible and intuitive way that human speakers do. |
A Generic Method for Fine-grained Category Discovery in Natural Language Texts (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained category discovery neglect semantic similarities of fine-grain categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects fine-grained clusters of semantically similar texts guided by a novel objective function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark tasks. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |
KIEval: A Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Wenjin Yao, Yidong Wang, Wei Ye, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang, Shikun Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect contaminated texts focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework which incorporates an LLM-powered “interactor” role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a question in a standard LLM benchmark and can be used to evaluate models in real-world conversations. |
Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jingxuan Xing, Yue Cao, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ziming Wang, Yingxiu Zhao, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |