Papers by Xingyu Lu
META-GUI: Towards Multi-modal Conversational Agents on Mobile GUI (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current task-oriented dialogue systems focus on multi-turn text/speech interaction, then call back-end APIs to perform task. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system that can perform GUI operations on real APPs without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI-based task-oriented dialogue system can perform GUI operations on real APPs and execute tasks without invoking TOD-specific backend APIs. |
ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)
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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%. |
Synergizing Stylometrics with Semantics: Dual-Path Framework for LLM Detection and Attribution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying MGTs rely on statistical likelihood or deep embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts model-specific stylistic fingerprints across lexical, syntactic, and structural dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a Macro-F1 score of 95.6% on the Wikipedia dataset. |
LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Houcheng Jiang, Kexin Huang, Xiang Shu, Zhibo Zhu, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Junkang Wu, Chi Luo, An Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Currently, most research focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized valuation framework that integrates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
Robust Preference Optimization via Dynamic Target Margins (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an efficient method for ensuring safety and reliability in practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic target margin preference optimization algorithm that adjusts reward margins at the pairwise level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average 4.4% improvement over baselines, setting new benchmarks for state-of-the-art performance. |
TIE: Topological Information Enhanced Structural Reading Comprehension on Web Pages (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for structural reading comprehension (SRC) only focus on comprehension of plain text, tables, tables or knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a topological information enhanced model which transforms a token-level task into a tag-level one by introducing a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. |
Logic: Long-form Outline Generation via Imitative and Critical Self-refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-form outline generation have low knowledge density and lack detail . retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to maintain logical coherence across retrieved information . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that mimics human writers' refinement process by mimicking outlines through imitation and critical self-refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the FreshWiki and WikiOutline datasets and establishes a coherent planning framework and structured knowledge base. |
Alignment for Efficient Tool Calling of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in tool learning have enabled large language models to integrate external tools, enhancing their task performance by expanding their knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines probabilistic knowledge boundary estimation with dynamic decision-making to allow LLMs to better assess when to invoke tools based on their confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements in tool efficiency by reducing unnecessary tool usage. |
CLEAR: Can Language Models Really Understand Causal Graphs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models lack a conceptual framework for understanding causal graphs, but there is still potential for improvement. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to define causal graph understanding by assessing language models’ behaviors through four practical criteria derived from diverse disciplines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines three complexity levels and encompasses 20 causal graph-based tasks across 20 different levels. |
Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with novelty and Reinforcement Learning from human feedback (RLHF) is costly. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Reward Model (RM) and a principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge to enhance creative output over baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly enhances creative output over baselines, but the principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge yields superior generation quality. |
Crossroads of Optimization under Uncertainty: How to Choose the Optimal Model (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Optimization under Uncertainty (OuU) have inherent limitations and advantages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automates the modeling and solving of six types of uncertainty models and generates mapping pairs to explore the potential relationship between optimization problems and optimal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance even on specific model types, with correlation analysis showing that data scale and specific scenario significantly influence model selection. |
MoleculeQA: A Dataset to Evaluate Factual Accuracy in Molecular Comprehension (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate erroneous information and evaluations fail to assess factual correctness of models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MoleculeQA to evaluate molecular factual correctness in large language models by organizing molecules into a taxonomy and building QA pairs through human and LLM efforts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the factual correctness of generated information and enables the development of new models. |
CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks. |
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using a web page and a question, a machine can't understand the contents of web pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel dataset for web-based structural reading comprehension that consists of 400K question-answer pairs and a dataset of 6.4K web pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 400K question-answer pairs, collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. |
Why Can Distillation Work with Limited Resources? A Systematic Study (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiao Hu, Xingyu Lu, Liyuan Mao, YiFan Zhang, Tianke Zhang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have driven reasoning performance . low-resource distillation can boost models' performance, but a framework is missing . |
| Approach: | They conduct a controlled experiment to find out why low-resource distillation can boost model performance . they find that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows more flexible reasoning, the authors show . they show that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
Scaling Laws for Fact Memorization of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Fact knowledge memorization is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate factual and reliable responses. |
| Approach: | They analyze scaling laws for LLM’s fact knowledge and LLMs’ behaviors of memorizing different types of facts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize on unseen facts and its scaling law is similar to general pre-training. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
Leveraging Contextual Information for Effective Entity Salience Detection (2024.findings-naacl)
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Rajarshi Bhowmik, Marco Ponza, Atharva Tendle, Anant Gupta, Rebecca Jiang, Xingyu Lu, Qian Zhao, Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro
| Challenge: | Prior work on salient entity detection focused on machine learning models that require heavy feature engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune medium-sized language models with a cross-encoder style architecture to achieve significant performance gains over feature engineering approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fine-tunes medium-sized pre-trained language models with a cross-encoder style architecture yields substantial performance gains over feature engineering approaches. |
MetaBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Assessing LLMs in Metabolomics (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxing Lu, Xukai Zhao, J. Ben Tamo, Micky C. Nnamdi, Rui Peng, Shuang Zeng, Xingyu Hu, Jinzhuo Wang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on general text, but their proficiency in specialized scientific domains remains uncharacterized. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the capabilities of large language models in metabolomics research using MetaBench . they found that models perform well on text generation tasks, but cross-database identifier grounding remains challenging . |
| Outcome: | The evaluation of 25 open- and closed-source LLMs reveals distinct performance patterns across metabolomics tasks. |
InstructMol: Multi-Modal Integration for Building a Versatile and Reliable Molecular Assistant in Drug Discovery (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can attain professional-level proficiency in specific domains through fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal LLM that aligns molecular structures with natural language via an instruction-tuning approach. |
| Outcome: | InstructMol surpasses existing models and reduces the gap with specialists in drug discovery tasks. |