Papers by Xu Shao
Assisting in Writing Wikipedia-like Articles From Scratch with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to write grounded, long-form articles have limited planning capacity and require extensive research and planning in the pre-writing stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for the Synthesis of Topic Outlines throughRetrieval and Multi-perspective Question Asking that models the pre-writing stage by (1) discovering diverse perspectives in researching the given topic, (2) simulating conversations where writers carrying different perspectives pose questions to a topic expert grounded on trusted Internet sources, (3) curating the collected information to create an outline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on a dataset of high-quality Wikipedia articles and evaluates the pre-writing stage. |
Rehearsal-free Continual Language Learning via Efficient Parameter Isolation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhicheng Wang, Yufang Liu, Tao Ji, Xiaoling Wang, Yuanbin Wu, Congcong Jiang, Ye Chao, Zhencong Han, Ling Wang, Xu Shao, Wenqiu Zeng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning continual tasks do not cache history data, which makes the problem more challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that allocates a small portion of private parameters and learns them with a shared pre-trained model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is comparable to existing methods and comparable to those using historical data. |
SecureWebArena: A Holistic Security Evaluation Benchmark for LVLM-based Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zonghao Ying, Yangguang Shao, Jianle Gan, Gan Xu, Wenxin Zhang, Quanchen Zou, Junzheng Shi, Zhenfei Yin, Mingchuan Zhang, Aishan Liu, Xianglong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing security benchmarks only cover user-level prompts and environmental threats . however, these models are vulnerable to pop-up attacks and prompt injections . |
| Approach: | They propose a security benchmark that covers a set of six attack vectors that span both user-level and environment-level manipulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed security benchmarks cover a set of six real-world web environments with 2,970 adversarial trajectories and a multi-layered evaluation protocol dissecting agent failures across internal reasoning, behavioral execution, and task outcomes. |
Sparse Activation Editing for Reliable Instruction Following in Narratives (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to capture the challenges of instruction following in complex narrative contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that identifies and edits instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions without requiring labelled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following by identifying and editing instruction-relevant neurons using only natural language instructions, without requiring labelled data. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
ArchiDocGen: Multi-Agent Framework for Expository Document Generation in the Architectural Industry (2025.acl-industry)
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Junjie Jiang, Haodong Wu, Yongqi Zhang, Songyue Guo, Bingcen Liu, Caleb Chen Cao, Ruizhe Shao, Chao Guan, Peng Xu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | drafting method statements is labor-intensive and time-consuming . traditional methods involve using static templates filled in manually by engineers . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automates method statement generation by using multi-agent collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4.38 ContentScore, excelling in specialization, completeness, organization, and clarity. |
Continual Training of Language Models for Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on applying large language models (LMs) achieves impressive performance in many NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to continuously post-train an LM with unlabeled domains to expand its knowledge without forgetting previous skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves few-shot end-task learning in these domains. |
M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Bo Zeng, Liangying Shao, Yichen Dong, Xinwei Wu, Jiang Zhou, Tianyu Dong, Xiangxiang Zeng, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | prevailing methods for machine translation are often hindered by misleading reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns large language models to human preferences . they propose 'M2PO' to correct the bias towards partial errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models and achieves parity with proprietary models. |
RBPtool: A Deep Language Model Framework for Multi-Resolution RBP-RNA Binding Prediction and RNA Molecule Design (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiyue Jiang, Yitao Xu, Zikang Wang, Yihan Ye, Yanruisheng Shao, Yuheng Shan, Jiuming Wang, Xiaodan Fan, Jiao Yuan, Yu Li
| Challenge: | RNA-binding proteins play key roles in post-transcriptional gene regulation . existing methods focus on shallow sequence features or coarse structural representations . large language models allow for precise modeling and biologically informed de novo RNA design . |
| Approach: | They extend RPI15223 into a multi-resolution, structure-level RBP-RNA dataset and introduce RBPtool, a framework that fuses sequence and structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks and the RPI15223 dataset while supporting fine-grained level predictions. |
AnaMeta: A Table Understanding Dataset of Field Metadata Knowledge Shared by Multi-dimensional Data Analysis Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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Xinyi He, Mengyu Zhou, Mingjie Zhou, Jialiang Xu, Xiao Lv, Tianle Li, Yijia Shao, Shi Han, Zejian Yuan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data analysis is performed everyday across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 467k tables with supervision labels for four types of field metadata. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the understanding capability of tabular models by incorporating distribution and knowledge information. |
AprilE: Attention with Pseudo Residual Connection for Knowledge Graph Embedding (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph embedding methods are difficult to model diverse relational patterns, especially symmetric and antisymmetric relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which employs triple-level self-attention and pseudo residual connection to model relational patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models on public datasets on symmetric and antisymmetric relations. |
Long and Diverse Text Generation with Planning-based Hierarchical Variational Model (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for data-to-text generation are insufficient to produce long and diverse texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a planning-based hierarchical variational model that plans a sequence of groups and then realizes each sentence conditioned on the planning result and the previously generated context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in long and diverse text generation. |
Don’t Act Blindly: Robust GUI Automation via Action-Effect Verification and Self-Correction (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhe Zhang, Xianwei Xue, Xingyong Wu, Mengke Chen, Chen Liu, Xinran He, Run Shao, Feiran Liu, Huanmin Xu, Qiutong Pan, Haiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents assume deterministic environment responses, generating actions without verifying whether previous operations succeeded. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI agent that explicitly models action outcomes and recovery under noisy environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent reduces failure loops and improves recovery success in noisy environments while maintaining competitive standard task performance. |
SEEK: Segmented Embedding of Knowledge Graphs (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graph embedding can not make a proper trade-off between the model complexity and the model expressiveness, which makes them far from satisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight modeling framework that can achieve highly competitive relational expressiveness without increasing the model complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve highly competitive relational expressiveness without increasing model complexity. |
Learning What Matters: Dynamic Dimension Selection and Aggregation for Interpretable Vision-Language Reward Modeling (2026.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Chen, Hongsen Huang, Jiahe Chen, Qian Shao, Jintai Chen, Hongxia Xu, Renjie Hua, Ren Chuan, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal reward models are interpretable but slow, while discriminative ones are opaque "black boxes." |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically decomposes evaluation into granular, interpretable dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source reward models on benchmarks like VL-RewardBench. |
X-Boundary: Establishing Exact Safety Boundary to Shield LLMs from Jailbreak Attacks without Compromising Usability (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM security compromise usability, study finds . boundary-safe representations close to harmful representations are disrupted, resulting in usability decline . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to push harmful representations away from boundary-safe representations and obtain an exact distinction boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces over-refusal rate and maintains general capability . it pushes harmful representations away from boundary-safe representations, thereby reducing usability. |
SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that combining both proposed methods leads to a gain of 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE configured with BERT base. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to deal with dropout noise and a dimension-wise contrastive learning objective to address feature corruption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE and 1.4 points for DiffCSE. |
Reinforced IR: A Self-Boosting Framework For Domain-Adapted Information Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle with highly specialized situations that require extensive domain expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates additional information from an LLM-based generator to enhance query performance and train the retriever to better discriminate the relevant documents identified by the generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing domain adaptation methods by a large margin and leads to substantial improvements in retrieval quality across a wide range of application scenarios. |
Identifying Collective Intelligence Factor in LLM Agent Groups for Generalizable Multi-Agent System Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on designing customized MAS for specific tasks . a critical research question remains: do LLM agent groups exhibit a form of "general intelligence" |
| Approach: | They find a Collective Intelligence factor in human groups that captures their general capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the ACI factor based on the features of LLM agent groups and can improve generalization abilities. |
Vision-Flan: Scaling Human-Labeled Tasks in Visual Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyang Xu, Chao Feng, Rulin Shao, Trevor Ashby, Ying Shen, Di Jin, Yu Cheng, Qifan Wang, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities as general visual assistants, but there are two challenges to their performance: (1) lacking task diversity in pretraining and visual instruction tuning; (2) annotation error and bias in GPT-4 synthesized instruction tuning data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage instruction tuning framework that fine tunes VLMs firstly and further tuned on GPT-4 synthesized data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the traditional single-stage visual instruction tuning framework and achieves state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multi-modal evaluation benchmarks. |
Revisiting Representation Degeneration Problem in Language Modeling (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language modeling is a fundamental task in natural language processing, applications include machine translation, image captioning and speech recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a cosine regularization method to solve the representation degeneration problem by analyzing the limitations of the proposed method and then propose an alternative regularization technique to tackle the problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in language modeling and image captioning. |
Icon2: Aligning Large Language Models Using Self-Synthetic Preference Data via Inherent Regulation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qiyuan Chen, Hongsen Huang, Qian Shao, Jiahe Chen, Jintai Chen, Hongxia Xu, Renjie Hua, Ren Chuan, Jian Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require high quality preference datasets to align with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages inherent regulation of LLMs’ representation space for efficient and tailored preference dataset construction, named Icon2. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on benchmarks like AlpacaEval 2.0 and Arena-Hard while reducing computational costs by up to 48.1%. |
DistillCSE: Distilled Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to sentence embeddings are based on contrastive learning (CL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which performs contrastive learning under the self-training paradigm with knowledge distillation and propose 'Group-P shuffling strategy' and averaging logits from multiple teacher components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms many strong baseline methods and yields a new state-of-the-art performance. |
Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for process-oriented math reward models rely on manual annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the bottleneck of manual supervision in two scenarios. |
WenetSpeech-Wu: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Models for a Unified Chinese Wu Dialect Speech Processing Ecosystem (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyou Wang, Mingchen Shao, Jingbin Hu, Zeyu Zhu, Hongfei Xue, Bingshen Mu, Xin Xu, Xingyi Duan, Binbin Zhang, Zhu Pengcheng, Chuang Ding, Xiaojun Zhang, Hui Bu, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | despite its linguistic significance, the Wu dialect of Chinese has long been hindered by the lack of large-scale speech data, standardized evaluation benchmarks, and publicly available models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use WenetSpeech-Wu as a large-scale, multi-dimensionally annotated open-source speech corpus for the Wu dialect of Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 8,000 hours of speech data and strong open-source models . the proposed dataset is competitive and empirically validated . |
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are often finetuned for downstream tasks, which has been shown to improve performance over non-pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for few-shot learning with pretrained language models by gradient-free algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse datasets show that the proposed method outperforms manual prompts by 2.6 points. |
High-Quality Medical Dialogue Synthesis for Improving EMR Generation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating EMRs from doctor-patient dialogues produce rigid and repetitive dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Intent Graph Planning, Dual-Agent Simulation and Rule-Reward Quality Control to generate realistic doctor-patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly enhances realism, diversity and downstream EMR quality, reducing physician editing efforts. |
Adapting a Language Model While Preserving its General Knowledge (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing DA-training methods do not explicitly identify what knowledge should be preserved and what should be changed by the domain corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an unlabeled corpus of aparticular domain to train a pre-trained general-purpose language model to adapt the LM so that end-tasks in the domain can give improved performances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of pre-trained general-purpose language models by contrasting the representations of the general and the full (both general and domain knowledge) to learn an integrated representation with both general and specific knowledge. |
EfficientQAT: Efficient Quantization-Aware Training for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Quantization-aware training (QAT) is a low-bit training solution that requires substantial training resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that reduces memory consumption by low-bit representations with minimal accuracy loss. |
| Outcome: | EfficientQAT achieves 2-bit Llama-2-70B model on single GPU in 41 hours . compared to previous methods, it obtains model with less than 3 points accuracy degradation . |
Diffuse Thinking: Exploring Diffusion Language Models as Efficient Thought Proposers for Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet their autoregressive generation paradigm makes it computationally prohibitive to explore diverse reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines diffusion-based generation with autoregressive evaluation to efficiently generate diverse intermediate reasoning thoughts and employ LLMs as evaluators to assess and select candidates based on their plausibility and correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves inference efficiency while maintaining competitive or superior reasoning accuracy. |
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization . they focus on task scaling and zero-shooting to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot generalization efficiency by 30 times with task scaling. |