Papers by Xue Xiong
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Editing-Based SQL Query Generation for Cross-Domain Context-Dependent Questions (D19-1)
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Rui Zhang, Tao Yu, Heyang Er, Sungrok Shim, Eric Xue, Xi Victoria Lin, Tianze Shi, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Generating SQL queries from user utterances is an important task to help end users acquire information from databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a context-dependent text-to-SQL generation task that edits previous queries . they use an utterance-table encoder and a table-aware decoder to incorporate context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is flexible to change individual tokens and robust to error propagation. |
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (2026.findings-acl)
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Guanhua Huang, Tingqiang Xu, Mingze Wang, Qi Yi, Xue Gong, Siheng Li, Ruibin Xiong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that RLVR training is slow and results plateau as policy entropy collapses . low-probability regularization (Lp-Reg) reduces the number of low-quality exploratory tokens induced by RL training . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce RLVR over-penalization by eliminating low-probability exploratory tokens . they propose 'Low-provability Regularization' to reduce the gradual elimination of low-quality exploratory entropy tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates low-probability exploratory tokens and prevents suppression of potentially valuable low-property candidates. |
DocQueryNet: Value Retrieval with Arbitrary Queries for Form-like Documents (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that only address a fixed set of fields are difficult to use for different form types. |
| Approach: | They propose a value retrieval method with arbitrary queries for form-like documents . they propose 'docQueryNet' to predict target value based on understanding of layout and semantics of a form . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on value retrieval . it improves document understanding on large-scale model pre-training by 17% . |
Contra4: Evaluating Contrastive Cross-Modal Reasoning in Audio, Video, Image, and 3D (2025.emnlp-main)
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Artemis Panagopoulou, Le Xue, Honglu Zhou, Silvio Savarese, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Chris Callison-Burch, Mark Yatskar, Juan Carlos Niebles
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that multimodal models can reason across multiple modalities . a limited number of models are able to reason across a variety of inputs . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for contrastive cross-modal reasoning across four modalities . they use human annotations and a mixture-of-models round-trip-consistency filter . |
| Outcome: | a new model evaluates models on multiple modalities to determine which one best answers a natural language prompt . the model must select the one that best satisfies the query and then fine-tune it . state-of-the-art models still achieve only 56% accuracy overall and 42% in four-modal settings . |
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. |
CKDST: Comprehensively and Effectively Distill Knowledge from Machine Translation to End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) data are limited due to the limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework for speech translation that integrates knowledge from machine translation and decouples knowledge from non-target class knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a benchmark dataset. |
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (D19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Heyang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. |
TagRouter: Learning Route to LLMs through Tags for Open-Domain Text Generation Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with limited performance and limited training can be difficult to use in large-scale applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free model routing method that optimizes synergy among multiple LLMs for open-domain text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 13 baseline models and reduces costs by 17.20%. |