Papers by Xuan Xu
Towards Modern Topic Models: A Survey of Taxonomies and Paradigm Shifts from Algorithm-Centric to LLM-Centered Topic Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Topic modeling (TM) is a classic unsupervised learning task in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a new taxonomy that emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy emphasizes the role of LLMs and the design of end-to-end workflows. |
DebateQA: Evaluating Question Answering on Debatable Knowledge (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA benchmarks that provide fixed answers to debatable questions are inadequate for evaluating their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 2,941 debatable questions to assess their ability to provide comprehensive answers to inherently debatably asked questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on 2,941 debatable questions accompanied by human-annotated partial answers that capture a variety of perspectives. |
MalURLBench: A Benchmark Evaluating Agents’ Vulnerabilities When Processing Web URLs (2026.findings-acl)
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Dezhang Kong, Zhuxi Wu, Shiqi Liu, ZhiCheng Tan, Kuichen Lu, Minghao Li, Qichen Liu, Shengyu Chu, Zhenhua Xu, Xuan Liu, Meng Han
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs, despite their ability to process malicious URL's. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ vulnerabilities to malicious URLs and a lightweight defense module to mitigate the vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites. |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
Searching for Best Practices in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Xuan Gao, Feiran Zhang, Yixin Wu, Zhibo Xu, Tianyuan Shi, Zhengyuan Wang, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Ruicheng Yin, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, especially in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose several strategies for deploying RAG that balance performance and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy. |
Pardon? Evaluating Conversational Repair in Large Audio-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large audio-language models focus on answer accuracy and robustness to acoustic perturbations, but they assume that inputs remain semantically answerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a repair-aware evaluation setting that explicitly distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation setting distinguishes between answerable and unanswerable audio inputs. |
Rethinking Multiple-Choice Questions for RLVR: Unlocking Potential via Distractor Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Xu Guo, Qiming Ge, Jian Tong, Kedi Chen, Jin Zhang, Xiaogui Yang, Xuan Gao, Haijun Lv, Zhihui Lu, Yicheng Zou, Qipeng Guo
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to RLVR use multiple-choice questions as verifiable rewards . however, not all tasks provide reliable verification . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that actively constructs high-quality distractors to block elimination shortcuts and promote deep reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. |
Masked Language Models Know Which are Popular: A Simple Ranking Strategy for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that pre-trained language models can improve the typical answer generation of GLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking strategy that exploits WordNet to train a ranker that picks out the most popular answers for commonsense questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed ranking strategy is tested on a commonsense question answering (QA) dataset and on negative samples from WordNet. |
AEQ-Bench: Measuring Empathy of Omni-Modal Large Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on cognitive abilities, such as knowledge retrieval, complex reasoning, and instruction following, largely overlooking empathy evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark two core empathetic capabilities of omnimodal large models (OLMs) generating empatries by comprehending affective cues from multi-modal inputs and judging empathy of audio responses without relying on text transcription. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models with audio output capabilities but is unreliable for evaluating fine-grained paralinguistic expressiveness. |
AntCritic: Argument Mining for Free-Form and Visually-Rich Financial Comments (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Argument mining is a thriving task in natural language processing, but its generalization is limited by existing datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to help model argument mining . the dataset AntCritic supports both argument component detection and argument relation prediction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect arguments and identify their relationships automatically. |
Large Language Models as Reader for Bias Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional methods analyze text from the writer’s perspective, leaving the reader’s viewpoint underexplored. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can be leveraged as readers for bias detection by generating reader-perspective comments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs comparable to GPT4's in detecting bias in media content. |
ViT-TTS: Visual Text-to-Speech with Scalable Diffusion Transformer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-speech (TTS) performance has improved with the advent of denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models . however, perceived quality of audio depends on content, pitch, rhythm, and energy . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers that complement phoneme sequences with visual information to generate high-perceived audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models regardless of visibility of the scene . it can generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for AR and VR applications . |
Semantic Contribution-Aware Adaptive Retrieval for Black-Box Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval-agmented generation fail to generalize effectively in black-box scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the semantic importance of words to dynamically adjust retrieval thresholds and filter information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest score on four long-form, knowledge-intensive generation datasets. |
Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Ran Xu, Hejie Cui, Yue Yu, Xuan Kan, Wenqi Shi, Yuchen Zhuang, May Dongmei Wang, Wei Jin, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Clinical natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield that requires the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of unstructured clinical text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which infuses knowledge into clinical text generation with LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across 8 clinical NLP tasks and 18 datasets by 7.7%-8.7% on average. |
A Simple and Efficient Learning-Style Prompting for LLM Jailbreaking (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Learning-style queries can reliably elicit harmful responses, highlighting a critical safety blind spot in modern LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new reframing paradigm that hides intention by learning from LLMs and uses 4 conceptual components to construct learning-style queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves top attack success rates on most models and across malicious categories while maintaining high efficiency with concise prompts. |
Variational Autoregressive Decoder for Neural Response Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing variational Bayesian models generate responses from a single latent variable, which is not sufficient to model high variability in responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional variable auto-encoder that sequentially introduces latent variables to condition the generation of each word in the response sequence. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model improves on state-of-the-art models on Opensubtitle and Reddit datasets. |
LM-Interview: An Easy-to-use Smart Interviewer System via Knowledge-guided Language Model Exploitation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Semi-structured interviews are a crucial method of data acquisition in qualitative research. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-structured interview system that automates interview preparation, analysis and control by interviewers. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that LM-Interview performs comparable to human interviewers . the system can be used to analyze semi-structured interviews without interviewers' involvement . |
LaoBench: A Large-Scale Multidimensional Lao Benchmark for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jian Gao, Richeng Xuan, Zhaolu Kang, Dingshi Liao, Wenxin Huang, Zongmou Huang, Yangdi Xu, Bowen Qin, Zheqi He, Xi Yang, null Changjinli, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing SEA-focused benchmarks miss Lao-specific cultural grounding and linguistic properties. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for assessing large language models in Lao . they use open-source and held-out subsets to evaluate languages with a hybrid pipeline . |
| Outcome: | LaoBench is the first large-scale, high-quality, and multidimensional benchmark for assessing LLM language understanding and reasoning in Lao. |
Multi-Grained Knowledge Distillation for Named Entity Recognition (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained big models have delivered top performance in Seq2seq modeling, but their deployments in real-world applications are often hindered by excessive computations and memory demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a distillation scheme to efficiently transfer knowledge from big models to their cheaper counterparts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme maximizes the assimilation of knowledge from the teacher model to the student model. |
AI for Science in the Era of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant prowess in tasks involving natural language, such as translating languages, constructing chatbots, and answering questions. |
| Approach: | This tutorial explores the application of large language models to three crucial categories of scientific data: 1) textual data, 2) biomedical sequences, and 3) brain signals. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will explore the application of large language models to three crucial categories of scientific data. |