Papers by Yang Ping
DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, they struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed and achieves 7.5% improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel. |
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)
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Ping Gong, Jiawei Yi, Shengnan Wang, Juncheng Zhang, Zewen Jin, Ouxiang Zhou, Ruibo Liu, Guanbin Xu, Youhui Bai, Bowen Ye, Kun Yuan, Tong Yang, Gong Zhang, Renhai Chen, Feng Wu, Cheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach for Dialogue Policy Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is the main dialogue policy learning method in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach to dialogue policy learning . they propose evaluating the quality of experiences generated by the world model using a discriminator . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the effectiveness and efficiency of dialogue policy learning by 20% with fewer human-machine interactions. |
Uncovering Limitations of Large Language Models in Information Seeking from Tables (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Table Information Seeking (TabIS) are lacking in reliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the table information seeking abilities of large language models . they use a single-choice question format instead of a text-based evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is more reliable than existing models and is available online. |
Temporal Token Matters: Investigating and Interpreting the Consistency of Temporal Ordering in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit notable deficiencies in temporal reasoning . phrasing changes can lead LLMs to produce inconsistent outputs . |
| Approach: | They investigate the mechanistic interpretability of temporal ordering within event temporal reasoning . they identify a sparse subset of attention heads that are causally responsible for reasoning outcomes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models in a variety of tasks and is validated by intervention-based experiments. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
Rethinking Sentiment Style Transfer (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text style transfer are unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based method to extract attribute content from sentences . they propose an efficient regularization to leverage attribute-dependent content as guiding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a YELP and IMDB dataset and it is able to detect errors in the human evaluation. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
Putting Captions to the Test: Evaluating Video Caption Quality through Multiple-Choice Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics for video captioning are based on text-based comparisons with ground-truth references. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-free benchmark that assesses video captions based on their utility . they will release the benchmark to facilitate reproducible research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves on human-verified, fine-grained questions . it correlates significantly better with human judgments than existing metrics . |
Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)
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Ping Yang, Junjie Wang, Ruyi Gan, Xinyu Zhu, Lin Zhang, Ziwei Wu, Xinyu Gao, Jiaxing Zhang, Tetsuya Sakai
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot learning are format-agnostic and can address new learning tasks without additional training. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learning that is format agnostic and compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as text classification and commonsense reasoning. |
Option Symbol Matters: Investigating and Mitigating Multiple-Choice Option Symbol Bias of Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a widely used task in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free, causal effect driven debiasing method which intervenes the activations of identified components according to their causal effects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the aforementioned bias and improves the performance of LLMs. |
V-MAGE: A Game Evaluation Framework for Assessing Vision-Centric Capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Ping Yu, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Lijuan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing static image-text benchmarks are insufficient for evaluating multimodal large language models’ dynamic perception and interactive reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-based evaluation framework to assess multimodal large language models’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically assesses MLLMs’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
Improving Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition with Semantics Confrontation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implicit discourse relation recognition (IDRR) are unsatisfactory for the task. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains PLMs through two semantics enhancers to implicitly differentiate logical and general semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exceeds baseline by 3.81% F1 score on PDTB 2.0 dataset . it infers discourse logical relations without explicit connectives, but performance remains unsatisfactory . |
Constructing Your Model’s Value Distinction: Towards LLM Alignment with Anchor Words Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a study of large language models (LLMs) shows that they can generate outputs that are honest, positive, harmless, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that amplifies logits difference between positive and negative tokens . they propose to use the logits gap to generate positive and positive tokens after alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective alignment, but requires fewer computational resources compared to training-time alignment methods. |
NOTA: Multimodal Music Notation Understanding for Visual Large Language Model (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing general-domain visual language models lack ability of music notation understanding . Symbolic music is represented in two distinct forms: auditory music and symbolic music . |
| Approach: | They propose to train a multimodal music notation model using a large-scale dataset . they use cross-modal alignment to train the model for music notations analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on music understanding by training with a multimodal music notation model. |
Faster MoE LLM Inference for Extremely Large Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference optimizations for coarse-grained Mixture-of-Experts models implicitly assume a fixed activation budget, which is poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free policy that adapts token-level activation using router confidence and entropy while remaining within the model’s original budget. |
| Outcome: | The proposed skipping policy can provide substantial throughput gains, but optimal static schedules vary significantly across models and routing mechanisms. |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li, Yonghong Deng, Xinyue Zhang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on spatial intelligence from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence have not explored whether visual intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a linguistic perspective to investigate spatial intelligence from a theoretical perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy. |
AceMath: Advancing Frontier Math Reasoning with Post-Training and Reward Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce a suite of math models that excel in solving complex math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning process that achieves competitive performance across general domains, followed by targeted fine- tuning for the math domain using a carefully curated set of prompts and synthetically generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-72B-Instruct, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet in the math domain. |
Where CoT Reasoning Commits: Entropy Traces Identify Interpretable Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing body of work suggests a disconnect between the generated rationale and the model's actual choice. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanism-aware framework that interprets the evolving "choice state" of attention heads during CoT generation . they identify a set of intervention targets and perform Selective Head Fine-Tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework interprets the "choice state" of attention heads during CoT generation . it detects two functional behaviors: Steadfast Heads and Wavering Heads . |
The Music Maestro or The Musically Challenged, A Massive Music Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks to evaluate LLMs' capabilities are inadequate for assessing their musical capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale music benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the music-related capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates 16 large language models in the domain of music. |
UniEX: An Effective and Efficient Framework for Unified Information Extraction via a Span-extractive Perspective (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches for information extraction (IE) are limited by the number of subtasks and the isolation of the subtask. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for universal information extraction that is compatible with any schema format and applicable to a list of IE tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms generative universal IE models on 14 benchmarks with the supervised setting and the state-of-the-art performance in low-resource scenarios. |
Lightweight LLM Agent Memory with Small Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaquan Zhang, Chaoning Zhang, Shuxu Chen, Zhenzhen Huang, Pengcheng Zheng, Zhicheng Wang, Ping Guo, Fan Mo, Sung-Ho Bae, Jie Zou, Jiwei Wei, Yang Yang
| Challenge: | Existing external memory systems for LLMs have low online overhead but are unstable in accumulating latency over long interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models . lightmem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation . they show consistent gains across model scales and high efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves agent memory but has low latency and low online overhead . it separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation . the proposed system achieves an average F1 improvement of 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo . |
Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step math reasoning problems, but their internal implementation is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a "C**ausal **E**ffect **D**riven **F**ine-tuning method" to improve LLMs' reasoning ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's reasoning ability by enhancing key components that are used to execute mixed arithmetic calculations. |
Whether LLMs Know If They Know: Identifying Knowledge Boundaries via Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active retrieval (AR) rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify knowledge boundaries in active retrieval by retrieving historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training. |
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li, Xinyue Zhang, Wenyu Gao, Jiacheng Wang, Chengzhi Li, Xiangrui Liu, Ping Jian
| Challenge: | Existing advances in Spatial Intelligence rely on vision-Language Models . however, a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models without pixel-level input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark challenges large language models to perform symbolic reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. |
Label Drop for Multi-Aspect Relation Modeling in Universal Information Extraction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extractive UIEs can solve model explosion problems using a relatively small model . single-target instruction UIE enables the extraction of only one type of relation at a time . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that assigns different relations to different levels for understanding and decision-making. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LDNet outperforms state-of-the-art systems on 9 tasks, 33 datasets . LDnet outperformed state- of-the art systems on single-modal and multi-modal tasks . |