Papers by Xinyu Duan
AFT-Tab: Adversarial Fine-Tuning for Tabular Data Synthesis with Long Text Columns (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing tabular data synthesis methods fail to account for cross-modal heterogeneity of real-world tables, where structured continuous and discrete attributes coexist with unstructured long-text columns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically trains an LLM-based text generator and a deep-learning-based non-textual generator to quantify cross-modal semantic alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks in fidelity, diversity, and task utility. |
OpenSR: Open-Modality Speech Recognition via Maintaining Multi-Modality Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speech Recognition often gets stuck in the lack of new domain utterances when training a model of new-domain speech. |
| Approach: | They propose a training system Open-modality Speech Recognition that enables zero-shot modality transfer . they use multi-modal alignment in phoneme space to maintain multi-modality alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves zero-shot modality transfer compared to existing methods . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on audio-visual speech recognition and lip-reading with 2.7% and 25.0%, respectively. |
Accurate KV Cache Quantization with Outlier Tokens Tracing (2025.acl-long)
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Yi Su, Yuechi Zhou, Quantong Qiu, Juntao Li, Qingrong Xia, Ping Li, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require substantial computational resources during deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify outlier tokens and exclude them from quantization . they find that the method can deliver a 6.4 times reduction in memory usage and a 2.5 times increase in throughput . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers a 6.4 times reduction in memory usage and a 2.5 times increase in throughput under 2-bit quantization. |
Adaptive Feature-based Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Bayesian Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yixin Ji, Yang Xiang, Juntao Li, Qingrong Xia, Zi Ye, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models require a balance between efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank compression technique that reduces non-essential parameters by decomposing weight matrices into products of two low-ranked matrici. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing pruning and low-rank compression techniques in maintaining model performance at the same compression ratio. |
Alignment-Augmented Speculative Decoding with Alignment Sampling and Conditional Verification (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate autoregressive generation of large language models require training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free alignment-augmented speculative decoding algorithm . it leverages the output distribution obtained in the prefilling phase to provide more aligned draft candidates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method increases the average generation score by 3.3 points for the LLaMA3 model. |
OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, but their ability to continuously refine solutions in response to dynamic environmental feedback remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-improvement capabilities in large-scale search spaces by combining 20 machine learning tasks with 10 classic NP-hard problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates human-like cognitive adaptation and operates via a general perception–memory–reasoning loop, iteratively refining solutions based on environmental feedback. |
OPT-Tree: Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Tree Structure (2025.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models generate one token in one step, limiting inference efficiency . Existing methods do not adapt to different situations to maximize acceptance length . speculative decoding has shown great potential for lossless acceleration . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to construct adaptive and scalable draft trees for autoregressive language models. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OPT-Tree outperforms existing draft trees and achieves speed-up ratio of up to 3.2 compared with autoregressive decoding. |
Revisiting Pre-trained Language Models and their Evaluation for Arabic Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-main)
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Abbas Ghaddar, Yimeng Wu, Sunyam Bagga, Ahmad Rashid, Khalil Bibi, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Chao Xing, Yasheng Wang, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Phillippe Langlais
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models are not well-explored and are not reproducible in the literature. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve existing Arabic language pre-trained language models using a more methodical approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform existing models on ALUE, a leaderboard-powered benchmark for Arabic NLU and NLG tasks. |
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zijie Liu, Xinyu Zhao, Jie Peng, Jinhao Duan, Zhuangdi Zhu, Qingyu Chen, Kaidi Xu, Xia Hu, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks. |
Rhythm Controllable and Efficient Zero-Shot Voice Conversion via Shortcut Flow Matching (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Zuo, Shengpeng Ji, Minghui Fang, Mingze Li, Ziyue Jiang, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on disentangling speakers and content, while others focus on preserving the source's prosody. |
| Approach: | They propose a rhythm-controllable and efficient zero-shot voice conversion model that transforms the source speaker’s timbre into an unseen one while retaining speech content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts the linguistic content duration to the desired speaking style, facilitating the transfer of the target speaker’s rhythm. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
High-order Joint Constituency and Dependency Parsing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Syntactic parsing aims to reveal how sentences are syntactically structured. |
| Approach: | They propose to produce compatible constituency and dependency trees simultaneously for input sentences . they adopt a much more efficient decoding algorithm and explore joint modeling at training phase . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves matching ratio of whole trees compared to separate models . the proposed model adopts a much more efficient decoding algorithm . |
Unveiling Language Competence Neurons: A Psycholinguistic Approach to Model Interpretability (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new study explores how large language models capture aspects of human linguis-tic ability . large language model performance is limited by the mechanisms behind their performance . |
| Approach: | They employ psycholinguistic paradigms to explore neuron-level representations in language models . they found that large language models exhibit human-like abilities in three tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows human-like abilities in sound-shape association, gender association and implicit causality. |
Forge: Quality-Aware Reinforcement Learning for NP-Hard Optimization in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on correctness, overlooking optimality . large language models excel at math, coding, logic and puzzles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training and evaluating Large Language Models on NP-hard optimization problems through quality-aware RLVR. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing benchmarks on math, coding, logic and puzzles. |
Linguistic Minimal Pairs Elicit Linguistic Similarity in Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new analysis leverages linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use linguistic minimal pairs to probe the internal linguistic representations of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis reveals that linguistic similarity is significantly influenced by training data exposure, leading to higher cross-LLM agreement in higher-resource languages. |
MemTR: Enhancing Tool-Calling Reliability via Uncertainty-Triggered FFN-Space Retracing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool-calling methods rely on costly tool-use training data or only constrain syntax, leaving tool selection and argument value errors largely unsolved. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decodes tool evidence from the tool library and mixes it into the output at the uncertain layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces tool calling failures by 2%–9% with only 1%–2% runtime overhead. |
Redundancy Principles for MLLMs Benchmarks (2025.acl-long)
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Zicheng Zhang, Xiangyu Zhao, Xinyu Fang, Chunyi Li, Xiaohong Liu, Xiongkuo Min, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen, Guangtao Zhai
| Challenge: | Rapid growth of Multi-modality Large Language Models has led to significant redundancy among benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve MLLM benchmark design by identifying redundancy at three levels: dimension, instance, and cross-benchmark redundancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework streamlines evaluations and enhances reliability. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has neglected instances-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates and comprehends prompt sensitivity in large language models. |
AraMUS: Pushing the Limits of Data and Model Scale for Arabic Natural Language Processing (2023.findings-acl)
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Asaad Alghamdi, Xinyu Duan, Wei Jiang, Zhenhai Wang, Yimeng Wu, Qingrong Xia, Zhefeng Wang, Yi Zheng, Mehdi Rezagholizadeh, Baoxing Huai, Peilun Cheng, Abbas Ghaddar
| Challenge: | Developing monolingual large Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is shown to be very successful in handling different tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP). |
| Approach: | They present AraMUS, the largest Arabic PLM with 11B parameters trained on 529GB of high-quality Arabic textual data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a diverse set of Arabic classification and generative tasks. |
OmniAlign-V: Towards Enhanced Alignment of MLLMs with Human Preference (2025.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Shengyuan Ding, Zicheng Zhang, Haian Huang, Maosongcao Maosongcao, Jiaqi Wang, Weiyun Wang, Xinyu Fang, Wenhai Wang, Guangtao Zhai, Hua Yang, Haodong Duan, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing open-source multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) focus on enhancing foundational capabilities, leaving a significant gap in human preference alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 200K high-quality training samples featuring diverse images, complex questions, and varied response formats to improve MLLMs’ alignment with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset of 200K high-quality training samples improves human preference alignment while maintaining or enhancing performance on standard VQA benchmarks. |