Papers by Yanyan Wang
Transductive Learning for Unsupervised Text Style Transfer (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for style transfer are based on an inductive learning approach, which represents the style as embeddings, decoder parameters, or discriminator parameters and directly applies these general rules to the test cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based context-aware style representation that involves top-K relevant sentences in the target style in the transfer process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several strong baselines and is general and effective to the task of unsupervised style transfer. |
DNN-driven Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-term Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) use pre-specified lexicons to extract sentiment features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Deep Neural Network-driven approach for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) that leverages shared features between labeled and unlabeled instances for knowledge conveyance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance on real benchmark data. |
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weixiang Zhao, Yichen Zhang, Yingshuo Wang, Yang Deng, Yanyan Zhao, Xuda Zhi, Yongbo Huang, Hao He, Wanxiang Che, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks. |
| Approach: | They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments. |
| Outcome: | The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation. |
Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a key concept in the field of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance EI of large language models by naive fine-tuning on EI-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves EI of two LLM-based assistants without compromising GI. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
C2D2 Dataset: A Resource for the Cognitive Distortion Analysis and Its Impact on Mental Health (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Cognitive distortions refer to patterns of irrational thinking that can lead to distorted perceptions of reality and mental health problems in individuals. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the C2D2 dataset to detect cognitive distortions in everyday life scenes to improve existing models of mental health detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 7,500 cognitive distortion thoughts in everyday life scenes. |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
Chain of Strategy Optimization Makes Large Language Models Better Emotional Supporter (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weixiang Zhao, Xingyu Sui, Xinyang Han, Yang Deng, Yulin Hu, Jiahe Guo, Libo Qin, Qianyun Du, Shijin Wang, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) fails to address these issues, as it trains models on single gold-standard responses without modeling nuanced strategy trade-offs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that optimizes strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves strategy selection preferences at each dialogue turn. |
Look Beyond Feeling: Unveiling Latent Needs from Implicit Expressions for Proactive Emotional Support (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are gaining popularity as scalable tools for mental health support . however, nearly half of individuals do not receive timely support due to limited selfawareness or reluctance to seek help. |
| Approach: | They propose a proactive emotional support framework that leverages principles of active listening to uncover implicit user needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model elicits implicit emotional needs and delivers empathetic support compared to baselines . |
ESDM: Early Sensing Depression Model in Social Media Streams (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to use social media data for depression detection are based on traditional risk detection (TRD) and early risk detection of depression (ERD). |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses two modules: classification with partial information module (CPI) and decision for classification moment module (DMC) and an early detection loss function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms benchmarks in both accuracy and accuracy with evolving partial data. |
End-to-End Learnable Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Depression Detection on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect depression from social media posting history are limited by frozen screening models and lack of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a frozen screening model to train a risky post detection model with psychiatric scales to enable a learnable end-to-end learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several strong baseline methods and qualitative analysis confirms that it better captures users’ mental states than others. |
TransESC: Smoothing Emotional Support Conversation via Turn-Level State Transition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a goaldirected task with the goal of reducing the emotional distress of people. |
| Approach: | They propose to take turn-level state Transitions of ESC from three perspectives to generate smooth transitions between utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates smoother and more effective responses on automatic and human evaluations. |
Supervised Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) can be performed by Gradual Machine Learning (GML) but the current unsupervised solution is limited by inaccurate knowledge conveyance. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised approach which leverages binary polarity relations between instances to enable supervised knowledge conveyance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms pure DNN solutions on real benchmark data. |
Improving Chinese Spelling Check by Character Pronunciation Prediction: The Effects of Adaptivity and Granularity (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a fundamental NLP task that detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an auxiliary task of Chinese pronunciation prediction to improve CSC . they propose adaptive weighting schemes and a delicate correction strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed auxiliary task improves Chinese pronunciation prediction on three benchmarks. |
Ro-SLM: Onboard Small Language Models for Robot Task Planning and Operation Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) provide robots with contextual reasoning abilities to comprehend human instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables reliable SLM-driven robot operation by distilling LLMs’ knowledge and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables reliable SLM-driven robot operation by distilling LLMs’ knowledge and reasoning. |
Psychological Counseling Cannot Be Achieved Overnight: Automated Psychological Counseling Through Multi-Session Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on single-session counseling are limited to a single-session setting. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model to deliver automated psychological counseling to a dataset constructed using real client profiles from publicly available psychological case reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than baseline models across multiple sessions. |
Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models struggle with forget quality and model utility, leading to over-unlearning or partial unlearning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses reverse KL-divergence based knowledge distillation for unlearning to achieve significant forget quality while maintaining model utility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in forget quality and model utility with larger unlearning datasets. |
SAPT: A Shared Attention Framework for Parameter-Efficient Continual Learning of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Weixiang Zhao, Shilong Wang, Yulin Hu, Yanyan Zhao, Bing Qin, Xuanyu Zhang, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer in large language models (LLMs) ignore potential of aligning the two modules to effectively address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfers simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a Shared Attentive Learning & Selection module to align the PET learning and selection modules to address catastrophic forgetting and knowledge transfer simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two CL benchmarks show that the proposed framework is superior when scaled to different model sizes, different model architectures and unseen tasks. |
Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to abstractly summarize dialogues are limited to two or more interlocutors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing document summarization models to capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |