Papers by Xue Feng
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, but most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question translation data to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities by using mechanistic interpretability methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual alignment even with unannotated answers in English and a wide range of languages even with instruction-tuned LLMs. |
S2S-Arena: Evaluating Paralinguistic Instruction Following in Speech-to-Speech Models (2026.acl-long)
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Feng Jiang, Zhiyu Lin, Yiyang Liu, Liumeng Xue, Fan Bu, Yuhao Du, Xiangying Chen, Benyou Wang, Haizhou Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rely heavily on text-based evaluation and largely ignore paralinguistic cues such as prosody, emotion, and speaker traits. |
| Approach: | They propose a speech-native benchmark for evaluating instruction-following S2S models with explicit assessment of both semantic understanding and paralinguistic expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system enables more natural, robust, and human-aligned speech agents. |
SwiftPrune: Hessian-Free Weight Pruning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a novel post-training pruning method relies on the Hessian matrix to perform pruning . current pruning methods are computationally intensive and lack performance due to second-order derivative calculations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hessian-free weight pruning method that reduces computational burden . they use an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average technique to bypass weight sorting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves hardware-efficient model compression by eliminating computational intensive calculations. |
SGA-MCTS: Decoupling Planning from Execution via Training-Free Atomic Experience Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval, but high latency of inference-time search and supervised fine-tuning are limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that casts LLM planning as non-parametric retrieval . they leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to explore the solution space . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that SGA-MCTS can match the performance of SOTA systems without task-specific fine-tuning. |
How to Train a Real-World Silicon Concierge? Internalizing Complex Business Workflow to Only OneModel (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Traditional industrial agents rely on modular workflows that fracture into a labyrinth of ad-hoc patches, leading to cascading errors and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift from external workflows to internalized knowledge representation that consolidates complex business logic and SOPs directly into the model’s parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model breaks the impossible triangle of latency, accuracy, and complexity. |
Log-FGAER: Logic-Guided Fine-Grained Address Entity Recognition from Multi-Turn Spoken Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing name entity recognition methods combine pre-trained language models with supervised models such as BiLSTM/LSTM-CRF to perform poorly in a spoken dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-guided fine-grained address recognition method that softly applies the logic rule to improve the accuracy of FGAER. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves fine-grained address entity recognition from multi-turn spoken dialogues. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhijun Wang, Jiahuan Li, Hao Zhou, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They investigate the existence of code-switching in the pre-training corpus and categorize it into four types within two quadrants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance across benchmarks and representation space. |
MultiPL-MoE: Multi-Programming-Lingual Extension of Large Language Models through Hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MultiPL is a special case of multiple natural languages and requires limited computational resources to generate multilingual code. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend LLMs by combining two paired experts to optimize expert selection at token and segment levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension improves the performance of the base LLMs while retaining the most popular ones using limited computational resources. |
Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness. |
CodeContests-O: Powering LLMs via Feedback-Driven Iterative Test Case Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Jianfeng Cai, Jinhua Zhu, Ruopei Sun, Kangwen Zhao, Dongyun Xue, Mingxiao Feng, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to synthesize test cases using Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on the model’s intrinsic generation capabilities without external feedback, resulting in insufficiently diverse cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-driven iterative framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate initial test cases, execute them against known correct and incorrect solutions, and utilizes the failed results as feedback to guide the LLM in refining the test cases toward high fidelity and discriminability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing codecontests and codecontests+ models by 4.30% and 8.78%. |
Are the Values of LLMs Structurally Aligned with Humans? A Causal Perspective (2025.findings-acl)
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Yipeng Kang, Junqi Wang, Yexin Li, Mengmeng Wang, Wenming Tu, Quansen Wang, Hengli Li, Tingjun Wu, Xue Feng, Fangwei Zhong, Zilong Zheng
| Challenge: | Current approaches to value alignment focus on a few core values, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent causal value graphs to guide two lightweight value-steering methods . role-based prompting and sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering are also used . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Gemma-2B-IT and Llama3-8B- IT show that the proposed methods are effective and controllable. |
Large Language Models Are Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Free Reasoners (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across multiple languages, but the relationship between capabilities in different languages is less explored. |
| Approach: | They decompose the process of reasoning tasks into two separate components: knowledge retrieval and knowledge-free reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be transferred across source-target languages despite secondary impact of resource in some specific target languages, while cross-lingual knowledge retrieval significantly hinders the transfer. |
Soft Orthogonal Low-Rank Adaptation for Knowledge Sharing in Large Language Model Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for continual learning (CL) are designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while neglecting knowledge sharing across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting by assigning task-specific parameter subspaces to new tasks . they then leverage attribution scores to evaluate task similarity and employ soft orthogonality between task- specific subspace . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. |
Disco-RAG: Discourse-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Dongqi Liu, Hang Ding, Qiming Feng, Xurong Xie, Zhucun Xue, Chengjie Wang, Jian Li, Jiangning Zhang, Yabiao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing RAG strategies treat retrieved passages in a flat and unstructured way, which prevents the model from capturing structural cues and constrains its ability to synthesize knowledge from dispersed evidence across documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly injects discourse signals into the generation process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on question answering and long-document summarization benchmarks show the efficacy of the proposed framework. |
SIV-Bench: A Video Benchmark for Social Interaction Understanding and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been lacking due to the rich nature of social interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a video benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' capabilities across social scene understanding, social state reasoning, and social dynamics prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks evaluate MLLMs' capabilities across social scene understanding, social state reasoning, and social dynamics prediction tasks. |
PEGRL: Improving Machine Translation by Post-Editing Guided Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong promise for LLM-based machine translation . however, translation-oriented RL remains challenged by high-variance policy gradients induced by Monte Carlo baselines and large trajectory space that favors global exploration over fine-grained local optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that uses post-editing as an auxiliary task to stabilize training and guide overall optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports global exploration and fine-grained optimization while supporting global exploration. |
Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual context retrieval is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They evaluate cross-lingual context retrieval of over 40 large language models . they use cross-linguistic machine reading comprehension as a representative scenario . |
| Outcome: | The results show that open LLMs show strong cross-lingual context retrieval ability . the results also show that their oracle performances improve after training . |
Enhancing LLM-Based Social Bot via an Adversarial Learning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Social media platforms provide an ideal testbed for large language models that exhibit human-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based social **Bot that enhances human-like generative capabilities through an adversarial learning framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates human-like content aligned with diverse user profiles . it exhibits strong social responsiveness, more accurately modeling opinion dynamics . |
How Good Are LLMs at Out-of-Distribution Detection? (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is crucial for ensuring AI safety . large language models (LLMs) are becoming more prevalent due to their scale, pre-training objectives, and paradigms used for inference. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to investigate out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in machine learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms other OOD detectors in zero-grad and fine-tuning scenarios. |
Dynamic and Multi-Channel Graph Convolutional Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | . - (EN) |
| Approach: | . - (EN) |
| Outcome: | . - (EN) |
Self-attention-based Graph-of-Thought for Math Problem Solving (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating reasoning paths in a chain structure are inefficient and non-human-like. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding method for a chain-based LLM that constructs a thought graph simultaneously as an LLM inference and generates reasoning steps with a graph-structured self-attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning accuracy without huge computational over-expensive LLMs and avoids performance degradation issues when the LLM is too small to comprehend complex prompts. |
Beyond Layout Embedding: Layout Attention with Gaussian Biases for Structured Document Understanding (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for encoding layout information rely on millions of learnable parameters . polar coordinates provide superior choice for layout modeling, study finds . |
| Approach: | They propose to model layout attention with Gaussian biases by feeding polar coordinates into 2-D Gausssian kernels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three widely used benchmarks. |
ChildEval:WHEN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS MEET CHILDREN’S PERSONALITIES (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in effectively understanding and generating human language, leading to a revolutionary era in LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to infer and follow child-centered preferences in long-context conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark spans five top-level and fourteen sub-level categories covering children’s daily lives and development. |