Papers by Xingchen Wan
Survival of the Most Influential Prompts: Efficient Black-Box Prompt Search via Clustering and Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based learning has been an effective paradigm for large pretrained language models (LLMs), enabling few-shot or even zero-shot learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box prompt search method that clusters and prunes the search space to focus exclusively on influential prompt tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance across tasks and LLMs while significantly reducing search costs. |
Astute RAG: Overcoming Imperfect Retrieval Augmentation and Knowledge Conflicts for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not linked the behavior of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with imperfect retrieval, including irrelevant, misleading, or even malicious information. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates external knowledge with source-awareness to overcome imperfect retrieval errors in RAG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is superior to previous robustness-enhanced approaches under the worst-case scenario. |
Fairer Preferences Elicit Improved Human-Aligned Large Language Model Judgments (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language quality. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic Zero-shot Evaluation-oriented Prompt Optimization framework which produces fairer preference decisions and improves human alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces fairer preference decisions and better aligns LLMs with humans. |
Universal Self-Adaptive Prompting (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a hallmark of modern large language models is their impressive general zero-shot and few-shot abilities . however, zero- shot performances are weaker due to the lack of guidance and the difficulty of applying existing automatic prompt design methods in general tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic prompt design approach specifically tailored for zero-shot learning that categorizes a possible NLP task into one of three possible task types and then uses a selector to select the most suitable queries and zero- shot model-generated responses as pseudo-demonstrations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is able to generalize ICL to zero-shot learning tasks while also allowing for a more efficient and efficient prompt design. |
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Self-Adaptive Prompting (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Modern large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities at sophisticated tasks, often through step-by-step reasoning similar to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that uses a set of examples from the LLM zero-shot outputs to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance up to 15% compared to baselines and matches or exceeds few-shot baselines at a range of reasoning tasks. |