Papers by Xinyu Xiao
Revisiting Chain-of-Thought Prompting: Zero-shot Can Be Stronger than Few-shot (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) is an essential emergent ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They introduce CoT to exemplars of ICL to enhance the reasoning capability . however, it remains unclear whether CoT exemplar is still beneficial for recent, stronger models in such tasks. |
| Outcome: | The enhanced exemplars fail to improve the model’s reasoning performance, despite being constructed using answers from advanced models such as Qwen2.5-Max and DeepSeek-R1. |
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Sun, null Ymyang, Xinyi Jiang, Yu Tian, Junnan Zhu, Jiang Zhong, Qin Lei, Jingwang Huang, Haoyang Zeng, Xinyu Zhou, Xin Xiao, Kaiwen Wei
| Challenge: | Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility . |
| Approach: | They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis. |
Task Oriented In-Domain Data Augmentation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models suffer from two major issues: in-domain data are scarce compared with general domain-agnostic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework that uses in- domain data selection and task-orientated synthetic passage generation to adapt LLMs to two domains: advertisement and math. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLM performance by 8% in the advertisement domain and 7.5% in the math domain. |
Reward Mixology: Crafting Hybrid Signals for Reinforcement Learning Driven In-Context Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning (ICL) performance rely on quality and ordering of demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that models iterative demonstration selection as a Markov Decision Process and craft hybrid reward signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines outcome-based accuracy signals with process-oriented signals like stepwise influence and label entropy improvement. |
Memory-Guided Hard Data Augmentation for Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinyu Liu, Kai fu, Yinghan Shi, Quanyou Chu, Ming Du, Hongya Wang, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Yanghua Xiao, Bo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named Entity Recognition (NER) ignore the internal state of the target model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to repair model-specific errors by using a model-based approach . they employ cross-validation to identify model- specific Hard Data and a memory tree to induce macro-level error patterns from micro-level failures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields significant performance gains on Twitter and other platforms. |
Glyph: Scaling Context Windows via Visual-Text Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Jiale Cheng, Yusen Liu, Xinyu Zhang, Yulin Fei, Wenyi Hong, Ruiliang Lyu, Weihan Wang, Zhe Su, Xiaotao Gu, Xiao Liu, Yushi Bai, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) traditionally represent text as sequences of discrete tokens . a long-context scaling problem requires processing more tokens more efficiently . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders long texts into compact visual pages and processes them with a vision-language model. |
Merge then Realign: Simple and Effective Modality-Incremental Continual Learning for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enhanced their versatility as they integrate a growing number of modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple MCL paradigm that addresses forgetting and misalignment . they propose 'MErge then ReAlign' to extend existing models to more modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm is easy to deploy and highly reusable in the MLLM community. |
Guiding the Flowing of Semantics: Interpretable Video Captioning via POS Tag (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of video captioning use a network and semantics are mixed into one feature. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Semantic Guidance Network which instantiates whole video semantics to different POS-aware semantics with supervision of part of speech (POS) tag. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed model is more efficient than state-of-the-art models. |
Position IDs Matter: An Enhanced Position Layout for Efficient Context Compression in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to compress context information ignore holistic contextual dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that adjusts position encodings to minimize the distance between context tokens and special tokens. |
| Outcome: | Enhanced Position Layout (EPL) improves compression of context information in large language models. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Bei Li, Jiahao Liu, Junhao Ruan, Kechen Jiao, Hongyin Tang, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | High-order numerical methods enhance performance in tasks like NLP but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative implicit Euler Transformer which simplifies high-order numerical methods by iterating implicit Eule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and reduces inference overhead by 55% while retaining 99.4% of the original task accuracy. |
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongxin Xu, Ruizhe Zhang, Xinke Jiang, Yujie Feng, Yuzhen Xiao, Xinyu Ma, Runchuan Zhu, Xu Chu, Junfeng Zhao, Yasha Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines. |
Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-Context Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Liu, Runsong Zhao, Pengcheng Huang, Chunyang Xiao, Bei Li, Jingang Wang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods, tasks and benchmarks to measure model’s effective memory length are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is robust to the tested corpus and experimental settings, and can be applied to any model size. |
Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive text generation models still fall behind in translation quality . authors propose a model that learns implicitly categorical codes as latent variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive Transformer model that implicitly categorizes latent variables into decoding . they find it improves translation quality by introducing more informative decoder inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable or better performance in machine translation tasks than strong baselines. |
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. |
GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | SQA is an emerging application of NLP in the medical, geography, and legal domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in geography domain at high school level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level. |
SEMIROUTER: Sparse-Data Enhanced Routing for Adaptive Multi-LLM System (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing routing methods suffer from poor scalability and dependence on datasets for training . energy footprint is also considered in the decision to implement our new LLM routing framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM routing framework that dynamically allocates queries to the most appropriate LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves data efficiency, adaptability, and routing accuracy compared to existing methods. |
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved to enhance document retrieval by reformulating queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models that leverages a reranker framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides ranking feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives without needing signals from annotations and supports both online and offline training models. |
Polymorphic Universal Transformer (2026.acl-long)
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Yilong Chen, Zitian Gao, Yihao Xiao, Jason Klein Liu, Xinyu Yang, Yifan Luo, Haoming Luo, Zhengmao Ye, Tingwen Liu, Ran Tao, Bryan Dai
| Challenge: | Compute Distribution Skew is a pathological phenomenon in ultra-deep recurrent models . it causes over-smoothing, representation rank collapse, and degraded reasoning performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture that redefines recursive computation by decoupling parameter count from depth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves representation rank and reasoning robustness while reducing computation by 64.7%. |