Papers by Xue Han
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. |
Omni-RewardBench: Toward a Comprehensive Evaluation of Generative Reward Models Across Modalities (2026.acl-long)
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Chi-Min Chan, Yujin Zhou, Pengcheng Wen, Boqin Yin, Jiaming Ji, Juntao Dai, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks for ORMs are largely text-centric or limited to bimodal tasks . a new study examines the effectiveness of Omni-RewardBench for ORms across modalities . |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid automatic-annotation and human-verification pipeline to construct high-quality evaluation data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is the first benchmark for comprehensive evaluation of ORMs across modalities. |
Media Attitude Detection via Framing Analysis with Events and their Relations (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examined the effects of media framing on public perception and understanding of news articles. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract framing devices employed by media to assess their role in framating the narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline models and offers a more detailed and explainable analysis of media framing effects. |
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. |
Parameter Importance is Not Static: Evolving Parameter Isolation for Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Zekai Lin, Chao Xue, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Bob Simons, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to fine-tuning of large language models suffer from task interference and catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning framework that adapts isolation decisions based on online estimates of parameter importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interference and forgetting while releasing outdated parameters to recover plasticity. |
Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Systematic Study of Incomplete Learning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Chao Xue, Yao Wang, Mengqiao Liu, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Chenyao Lu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng, Flora D. Salim
| Challenge: | Incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous in large language models . authors identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies within SFT data, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic-first framework that maps incomplete learning to causes . they identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework maps incomplete learning to causes using observable training and inference signals. |
LASA: Language-Agnostic Semantic Alignment at the Semantic Bottleneck for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Junxiao Yang, Haoran Liu, Jinzhe Tu, Jiale Cheng, Zhexin Zhang, Shiyao Cui, Jiaqi Weng, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Hongning Wang, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated better safety performance in high-resource languages than in low-resourced languages. |
| Approach: | They propose language-agnostic semantic alignment (LASA) which anchors safety alignment directly in semantic bottlenecks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves safety across all languages: average attack success rate drops from 24.7% to 2.8% on LLaMA-3.1-8B-Instruct and remains within 3–4% across Qwen2.5 and Qwend3 Instruct models (7B–32B). |
Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained masked language models can be factual knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs . they find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on illustrative cases and external contexts . the results question the previous findings that MLMs can be reliable factual knowledge bases . |
ProgressLM: Towards Progress Reasoning in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for task progress estimation lack long-horizon and dynamic reasoning . estimating how much of a task has been completed requires long-term reasoning based on partial information. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating progress reasoning from a single observation . they instantiate a two-stage paradigm that combines episodic retrieval with mental simulation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on 14 VLMs on a small scale and shows common failure patterns. |
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. |
Reason Only When Needed: Efficient Generative Reward Modeling via Model-Internal Uncertainty (2026.findings-acl)
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Chao Xue, Yao Wang, Mengqiao Liu, Di Liang, Xingsheng Han, Peiyang Liu, Xianjie Wu, Chenyao Lu, Lei Jiang, Yu Lu, Haibo Shi, Shuang Liang, Minlong Peng, Flora D. Salim
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generating reward models rely on voting-based mechanisms to evaluate CoT outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient generative reward modeling framework grounded in model-internal uncertainty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces inference cost while improving answer accuracy. |
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. |
Boosting Policy and Process Reward Models with Monte Carlo Tree Search in Open-Domain QA (2025.findings-acl)
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Chi-Min Chan, Chunpu Xu, Junqi Zhu, Jiaming Ji, Donghai Hong, Pengcheng Wen, Chunyang Jiang, Zhen Ye, Yaodong Yang, Wei Xue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of both the policy model and the reward model. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Monte Carlo Tree Search for both policy model improvement and reward model improvement to bridge it to more subtle open-domain question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses existing methods for annotation and training data with fewer data points and achieves better performance in test-time scaling strategies. |
A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing syntactically-controlled paraphrase generation models perform well with human-annotated or well-chosen syntaktic templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever to retrieve templates based on the quality of the to-be-generated paraphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can generate high-quality paraphrases without sacrificing quality. |
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. |
Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiaqi Weng, Han Zheng, Hanyu Zhang, Ej Zhou, Qinqin He, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Zhixuan Chu, Xiting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on how SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for interpreting SAE features in safety-critical domains . they train a suite of SAEs with human-readable explanations and systematic evaluations based on pornography, politics, violence, and terror . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces interpretation cost by 55% and improves safety-critical features. |
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Label-Sensitive Reward for Natural Language Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have yielded remarkable performance, but objective mismatch issues hinder RLHF learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Reinforcement Learning framework enhanced with Label-sensitive reward to enhance LLMs' alignment and generation capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on five diverse models across eight tasks. |
Benchmarking Fine-Grained Error Detection in Multimodal Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Process Reward Models (MPRMs) have emerged as a pivotal framework for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate MPRMs’ proficiency in detecting erroneous reasoning steps across diverse error categories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves up to 4.8% performance improvement through test-time scaling. |
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. |
Verifiable LLM-Generated Text Detection via Projected Semantic-Structural Distributions (2026.acl-long)
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Ruochong Xiong, Qien Li, Wangwang Lian, Yulong Wan, Hanlin Xue, Zhouxing Tan, Han Yang, Fengyu Lu, Junfei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting LLM-Generated text suffer from distribution misalignment and limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical framework utilizing supervised subspace learning to extract compact features and construct conditional semantic distributions based on syntactic structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior in cross-domain, cross-model, and adversarial scenarios. |
Strengthened Symbol Binding Makes Large Language Models Reliable Multiple-Choice Selectors (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) are a critical area of research in the study of Large Language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient SFT algorithm for MCQs, termed Point-wise Intelligent Feedback, which constructs negative instances by randomly combing the incorrect option contents with all candidate symbols. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm significantly reduces the model’s selection bias by improving its MCSB capability. |
QuantumQA: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Physics-Consistent Dataset and Verification-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Songxin Qu, Tai-Ping Sun, Yun-Jie Wang, Huan-Yu Liu, Cheng Xue, Xiao-Fan Xu, Han Fang, Yang Yang, Yu-Chun Wu, Guo-Ping Guo, Zhao-Yun Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models lack reliability in scientific domains that require strict adherence to physical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset constructed via a task-adaptive strategy and a hybrid verification protocol that combines deterministic solvers with semantic auditing to guarantee scientific rigor. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and general-purpose preference models and is competitive with proprietary models. |
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 . |
Preference Heads in Large Language Models: A Mechanistic Framework for Interpretable Personalization (2026.acl-long)
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Weixu Zhang, Ye Yuan, Changjiang Han, Yuxing Tian, Zipeng Sun, Linfeng Du, Jikun Kang, Hong Kang, Xue Liu, Haolun Wu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong implicit personalization ability, but most approaches treat this behavior as a black box. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretation perspective and propose 'sparse' set of Preference Heads . they compute a Preference Contribution Score for each attention head and compare their predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework computes a Preference Contribution Score (PCS) for each attention head and measures its causal impact on user aligned outputs. |
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. |