Papers by Xinya Du
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to induce natural language rules from natural language facts using natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. |
Zero-Shot Classification by Logical Reasoning on Natural Language Explanations (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that CLORE is superior to baselines on zero-shot classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for classification by logically parsing and reasoning on natural language explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on zero-shot classification tasks. |
FaithScore: Fine-grained Evaluations of Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) lack the capacity to handle multimodal inputs effectively. |
| Approach: | They introduce a reference-free and fine-grained evaluation metric that measures the faithfulness of the generated free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric measures the faithfulness of free-form answers from large vision-language models. |
Large Language Models for Automated Open-domain Scientific Hypotheses Discovery (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on hypothetical induction is limited by the observation annotations in the dataset and the ground truth hypotheses are mostly commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a first dataset for social science academic hypotheses discovery using raw web corpus as observations and propose valid, useful scientific hypothese . they propose 'a multi-module framework' that includes feedback mechanisms to boost performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset generates valid, novel, and helpful scientific hypotheses, even new to humanity, using open-domain data and a web corpus as observations. |
Retrieval-Augmented Generative Question Answering for Event Argument Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract arguments from documents are based on generating and post-processing a complex target sequence (template). |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generative QA model that retrieves the most similar QA pair and augments it as prompt to the current example's context, then decodes the arguments as answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms prior methods across fully supervised, domain transfer, and fewshot learning settings and compares with clustering-based sampling strategies. |
Document-Level Event Role Filler Extraction using Multi-Granularity Contextualized Encoding (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event extraction requires a view of a larger context to determine which spans of text correspond to event role fillers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity reader to dynamically aggregate information captured by neural representations learned at different levels of granularities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs substantially better than previous models on the MUC-4 event extraction dataset. |
Automatic Error Analysis for Document-level Information Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level information extraction (IE) tasks have been revisited in earnest . evaluation of the approaches has been limited in a number of dimensions . |
| Approach: | They propose a transformation-based framework for automating error analysis in document-level event and (N-ary) relation extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares two state-of-the-art document-level template-filling approaches on datasets from three domains and four systems from the MUC-4 evaluation. |
Event Extraction by Answering (Almost) Natural Questions (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work in event argument extraction relies heavily on entity recognition as a preprocessing/concurrent step, causing error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a question answering task that extracts event arguments in an end-to-end manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior work on the ACE 2005 task on event argument extraction. |
Leveraging Structured Metadata for Improving Question Answering on the Web (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using metadata information from web pages can improve the performance of answer passage selection/reranking models. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural passage selection model that leverages metadata information with a fine-grained encoding strategy to learn the representation for metadata predicates in a hierarchical way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the MS MARCO and Recipe-MARCO datasets and shows that it is more accurate than baseline models. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Is Grokking Worthwhile? Functional Analysis and Transferability of Generalization Circuits in Transformers (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with the "curse of two-hop reasoning" in compositional tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to form a "Generalization Circuit" during a prolonged "grokking" phase . they argue that grokkking is the process of integrating memorized atomic facts into an easy-acquire reasoning path. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to non-grokked models, but it requires a large computational cost . the study shows that grokking is not the sudden acquisition of a new reasoning paradigm . |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
SciEvent: Benchmarking Multi-domain Scientific Event Extraction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on scientific information extraction relies on entity-relation extraction in narrow domains . current models struggle in domains such as sociology and humanities . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-domain benchmark for scientific abstract annotations using a unified event extraction schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 500 abstracts across five research domains with manual annotations of event segments, triggers, and fine-grained arguments. |
GRIT: Generative Role-filler Transformers for Document-level Event Entity Extraction (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level role-filler entity extraction (REE) is a classic problem in information extraction (IE) and NLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level role-filler entity extraction framework that can make extraction decisions across sentence boundaries and implicitly recognizes noun phrase coreference structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than previous models on a MUC-4 dataset. |
FIFA: Unified Faithfulness Evaluation Framework for Text-to-Video and Video-to-Text Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for VideoMLLMs are limited to one task and fail to assess hallucinations in open-ended, free-form responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that extracts comprehensive descriptive facts and models their semantic dependencies via a Spatio-Temporal Semantic Dependency Graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns more closely with human judgment than existing evaluation methods and improves factual consistency in both text and video generation. |
Harvesting Paragraph-level Question-Answer Pairs from Wikipedia (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that only take into account sentence-level information do not generate question-answer pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network approach that incorporates coreference knowledge via a novel gating mechanism for paragraphlevel question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a Wikipedia article question-answer generation task. |
Be Consistent! Improving Procedural Text Comprehension using Label Consistency (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for procedural text comprehension still struggle with this task . evaluative work shows that consistent predictions from multiple entities can improve performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages label consistency during training to improve prediction performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves prediction performance over previous state-of-the-art systems on a standard benchmark dataset for procedural text, ProPara. |
Template Filling with Generative Transformers (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Template filling tasks are usually tackled by a pipeline of two separate systems, one for role-filler extraction and another for template/event recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that naturally models the dependence between entities within a single event and across multiple events described in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms pipeline-based approaches and other neural baselines that do not model between-event dependencies on documents containing multiple events. |
Leveraging Structured Information for Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering and Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Neural models, including large language models (LLMs), achieve superior performance on multi-hop question-answering tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the chain-of-thought mechanism to generate both the reasoning chain and the answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework generates more faithful reasoning chains and significantly improves the QA performance on two benchmark datasets. |
Improving Event Duration Prediction via Time-aware Pre-training (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Understanding duration of event expressed in text is crucial task in NLP . current methods focus on developing features and cannot utilize external textual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose two models that incorporate external knowledge by reading temporal-related news sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baseline models and capture duration information more accurately. |
Dynamic Global Memory for Document-level Argument Extraction (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on document-level event argument extraction is restricted by sequence length constraints and ignores global context between events. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a document memory store to extract contextual event information and leverage it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prior methods and is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with constrained decoding design. |
Probing Representations for Document-level Event Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Document-level information extraction tasks require a more comprehensive understanding that often extends to the entire input document. |
| Approach: | They propose to use probing to analyze document-level information extraction representations by embedding probes into a standard dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve argument detections but struggle with document length and cross-sentence discourse. |
QAEVENT: Event Extraction as Question-Answer Pairs Generation (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | a novel approach to document-level event extraction requires linguistic expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-and-answer-pair representation of document-level events as question and answer pairs (QAEVENT) this allows for more scalable and faster annotations from crowdworkers without linguistic expertise. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces high-quality data for document-level event extraction compared to pre-defined schemas . it is scalable and faster than existing methods, with no linguistic expertise. |
POE: Process of Elimination for Multiple Choice Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Current language models perform well on multiple choice reasoning tasks, but the options are not treated equally. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-step scoring method that scores options and masks them to make the final prediction from the remaining options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is especially performant on logical reasoning tasks. |
FG-PRM: Fine-grained Hallucination Detection and Mitigation in Language Model Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect hallucinations in large language models lack nuanced understanding of their types and manifestations. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes hallucinations into six types . they propose an augmented model to detect and mitigate hallucinosity in a fine-grained manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects and mitigates hallucinations in a fine-grained manner . it significantly boosts the performance of LLMs on GSM8K and MATH benchmarks. |
LMR-BENCH: Evaluating LLM Agent’s Ability on Reproducing Language Modeling Research (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuo Yan, Ruochen Li, Ziming Luo, Zimu Wang, Daoyang Li, Liqiang Jing, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Juntong Ni, George Michalopoulos, Yue Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Mian Zhang, Zhiyu Chen, Xinya Du
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in advancing scientific discovery, but their capability in reproducing code from research papers remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents' ability to reproduce scientific research papers by analyzing code reproduction tasks from 23 research papers published in top-tier NLP venues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the capability of large language model (LLM) agents on code reproduction from Language Modeling Research. |
End-to-end Case-Based Reasoning for Commonsense Knowledge Base Completion (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have been shown to store knowledge in their parameters and have achieved reasonable performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide retrieved passages that contain relevant knowledge as additional input to the commonsense knowledge base completion (CKBC) task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates more valid, informative, and novel knowledge than the state-of-the-art COMET model for commonsense knowledge base completion (CKBC) tasks. |
Document-level Causal Relation Extraction with Knowledge-guided Binary Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on Event-Event Causal Relation Extraction (ECRE) has highlighted the lack of document-level modeling and causal hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-guided binary Question Answering method with event structures for ECRE that utilizes cross-task knowledge in IE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the MECI and MAVEN-ERE datasets. |
Search Wisely: Mitigating Sub-optimal Agentic Searches By Reducing Uncertainty (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled their use in informationintensive tasks such as question answering and knowledge synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-based training method that incorporates confidence thresholds to reward high-certainty search decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on seven QA benchmarks and demonstrates that it is more efficient than existing methods. |
Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot learning are based on labeled examples, but they are non-trivial . few-sshot learning is challenging due to the imbalance in the amount of data between the source and target domains. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based methods for intent classification and slot filling tasks . they use a batch-softmax objective to learn similar contextualized representations for spans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous systems on the CLINC and SNIPS benchmarks. |
FIHA: Automated Fine-grained Hallucinations Evaluations in Large Vision Language Models with Davidson Scene Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to large vision-language models rely on costly annotations and are not comprehensive in terms of evaluating all aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated method which can access LVLMs hallucination in an LLM-free and annotation-free way and model the dependency between different types of halluciNations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model the dependency between different types of hallucinations and generate Q&A pairs on any image dataset at minimal cost. |
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict slots and their values do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models’ zero-shot capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a QA-driven slot filling model which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by over 5% on the SNIPS benchmark. |