Papers by Xingdi Yuan
Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that large language models have a complete understanding of their environment, overlooking potential gaps in their grasp of actual world dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that discovers world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, verifies the correctness of these dynamics, and evolves new, advanced dynamics tailored to the current situation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework discovers, verifies, and evolves world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, and compares the automatically generated dynamics with human-annotated world dynamics. |
Simple and Effective Curriculum Pointer-Generator Networks for Reading Comprehension over Long Narratives (P19-1)
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Yi Tay, Shuohang Wang, Anh Tuan Luu, Jie Fu, Minh C. Phan, Xingdi Yuan, Jinfeng Rao, Siu Cheung Hui, Aston Zhang
| Challenge: | Using a pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, we propose a framework for learning over long narratives where documents easily span over thousands of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning (CL) based pointer-generator framework for reading/sampling over large documents, enabling diverse training of the neural model based on the notion of alternating contextual difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the NarrativeQA reading comprehension benchmark and reaches state-of-the-art performance. |
Interactive Language Learning by Question Answering (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension tasks lack interactive information-seeking component of comprehension. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-asking task that asks questions in a text-based environment . they propose QAit, which uses a game generator to build models that include deep reinforcement learning agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task poses questions about existence, location, and attributes of objects found in environment. |
An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. |
| Approach: | They propose to compare the generalizability of KPG models with other models by analyzing the most crucial factors that may affect their generalizarability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to predict keyphrases from a set of input sequences, and it can be compared with existing models. |
Interactive Machine Comprehension with Information Seeking Agents (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) models do not scale effectively to real-world applications like web-level information retrieval and question answering (QA). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reframes existing machine reading comprehension (MRC) datasets as interactive, partially observable environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method "occludes" the majority of a document’s text and adds context-sensitive commands that reveal "glimpses" of the hidden text to a model. |
Llama See, Llama Do: A Mechanistic Perspective on Contextual Entrainment and Distraction in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | *contextual entrainment* occurs across a wide range of language models (LMs) and prompt settings. |
| Approach: | They hypothesize that there is a circuit of attention heads that corresponds to the phenomenon *contextual entrainment* . when they "turn off" these heads, the effect of contextual entraining is significantly attenuated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that LMs assign higher logits to tokens that have previously appeared in the context prompt, even for random tokens. |
ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | We show that language models can generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus of 32 reasoning-focused text games expressed as hundreds of lines of Python code to facilitate this task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed games can generate runnable games on unseen topics in 28% of cases. |
Bringing Structure into Summaries: a Faceted Summarization Dataset for Long Scientific Documents (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Faceted summarization provides briefings of a document from different perspectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a faceted summarization benchmark built on Emerald journal articles . they propose faceted models that bring structure into faceted documents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on Emerald journal articles and covers a diverse range of domains. |
It Takes Two to Tango: Navigating Conceptualizations of NLP Tasks and Measurements of Performance (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a meta-analysis and survey of practitioners reveal that benchmarks suffer from operationalization disagreements. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of disagreement to explain disagreements in NLP benchmarks . they propose defining how tasks are conceptualized and operationalizing benchmarks to document their limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy identifies two types of disagreements among NLP practitioners . it shows that benchmarks are not clearly conceptualized and suffer from operationalization disagreements . |
Interactive Machine Comprehension with Dynamic Knowledge Graphs (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on iSQuAD suggest that graph representations can result in significant performance improvements for RL agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use graph representations to build and update graphs during information gathering and neural models to encode graph representation in RL agents. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on iSQuAD show that graph representations can improve performance for RL agents. |
One Size Does Not Fit All: Generating and Evaluating Variable Number of Keyphrases (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for keyphrase generation do not provide a desideratum for the number of keyphrases in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent generative model that generates multiple keyphrases as delimiter-separated sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on all datasets. |
Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators? (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have pointed towards an alternative approach by leveraging the huge amount of knowledge contained in their pre-training datasets. |
| Approach: | They build and use a benchmark to quantify how well text-based simulators can serve as text-driven world simulators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to quantify how well language models can serve as world simulators. |
OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning . however, there is n'a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components on task performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates the core components essential for embodied learning tasks . they integrate a multi-agent design into the Planner component of their LLM-centric architecture . |
| Outcome: | OPEx delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks . integrating a multi-agent design into the Planner component of the LLM-centric architecture further elevates performance. |
General-to-Specific Transfer Labeling for Domain Adaptable Keyphrase Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large distribution shifts among different domains hinder transferability of keyphrase generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline which guides KPG models’ learning focus from general syntactical features to domain-related semantics in a data-efficient manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can produce good quality keyphrases in new domains and achieve consistent improvements after adaptation with limited in-domain annotated data. |
Selecting Better Samples from Pre-trained LLMs: A Case Study on Question Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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Xingdi Yuan, Tong Wang, Yen-Hsiang Wang, Emery Fine, Rania Abdelghani, Hélène Sauzéon, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive prowess in natural language generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to select high-quality questions from LLM-generated candidates using round-trip and prompt-based scoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can select high-quality questions from a set of LLM-generated candidates without modification of the underlying model nor rely on human annotations. |