Papers by Yao Dong

44 papers
Connect-the-Dots: Bridging Semantics between Words and Definitions via Aligning Word Sense Inventories (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing supervised models struggle to make correct predictions on rare word senses due to limited training data.
Approach: They propose a gloss alignment algorithm that can align definition sentences with the same meaning from different sense inventories to collect rich lexical knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms previous methods on both frequent and rare word senses.
When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using sports data, an LLM can analyze sports narratives to infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and draw conclusions.
Approach: They propose a method to synthesize NBA basketball game narratives using real NBA basketball data and propose 'SportsGen' they find that most models fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns and open-source models suffer from significant score hallucinations.
Outcome: The proposed method can evaluate LLMs’ reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information.
RotateCT: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Rotation and Coordinate Transformation in Complex Space (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graph embedding methods fail to model non-commutative composition patterns . Existing methods are limited to complex space, resulting in a large number of parameters.
Approach: They propose a knowledge graph embedding method that transforms the coordinates of each entity and then represents each relation as a rotation from head entity to tail entity in complex space.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on link prediction and path query answering.
EmoMM: Benchmarking and Steering MLLM for Multimodal Emotion Recognition under Conflict and Missingness (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown promise in MER, but their internal decision-making mechanisms under modality conflict and missingness remain underexplored.
Approach: They propose a multimodal large language model that can detect and control modality conflicts and missing subsets by a lightweight mechanism that detects and controls modality conflict.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance across settings, showing it can handle conflict and missing behaviors.
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

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Challenge: OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation.
Approach: They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation.
Outcome: The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web.
ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing autoregressive models for dialogue generation suffer from high latency and stability issues.
Approach: They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) zero-shot spoken dialogue generation model based on flow-matching.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in speech generation due to poor speech intelligibility and turn-taking precision.
Fact-and-Reflection (FaR) Improves Confidence Calibration of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the confidence calibration of LLMs have not explored the effects of different prompting strategies on LLM performance.
Approach: They propose Fact-and-Reflection prompting which improves LLM confidence calibration . they propose to use human cognition to elicit known "facts" and ask model to "reflect" over them .
Outcome: The proposed method lowers the expected calibration error by 23.5% on multi-purpose QA tasks.
DeFine: Decision-Making with Analogical Reasoning over Factor Profiles (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models are ideal for decision-making, but they can be difficult to process when they are verbose and include repetition, hedging, and vagueness.
Approach: They propose a framework that constructs probabilistic factor profiles from complex scenarios and integrates them with analogical reasoning to guide LLMs in making decisions in new situations.
Outcome: The proposed framework separates the tasks of quantifying uncertainty and incorporating it into LLM decision-making.
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented code generation methods fail to accurately fetch the knowledge required for code generation for consecutive code fragments.
Approach: They propose a paradigm that enables large language models to Self-express their information needs to enhance retrieval-augmented code generation methods.
Outcome: Experiments show that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG.
DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in the field of computer vision have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines.
Approach: They propose a reasoning-based object detection paradigm that leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user’s instructions and the visual scene.
Outcome: The proposed method enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity.
How do Words Contribute to Sentence Semantics? Revisiting Sentence Embeddings with a Perturbation Method (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on sentence representation learning focus on human annotation, but they neglect the critical property that essential contents should contribute to sentence semantics more than non-essential contents when encoding a sentence.
Approach: They propose a perturbation method for unsupervised semantic analysis that uses a sentence compression metric to adapt sentence compression datasets for automatic evaluation.
Outcome: The proposed method can capture the main semantics of sentences better than several SOTA unsupervised sentence embedding models.
C-MORE: Pretraining to Answer Open-Domain Questions by Consulting Millions of References (2022.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to pretrain open-domain question answering systems lack task-specific annotations.
Approach: They propose to pretrain a two-stage open-domain question answering system with strong transfer capabilities by using a dictionary and a large-scale corpus.
Outcome: The proposed approach leads to 2%-10% gains in top-20 accuracy and improves with reader.
Superpose Task-specific Features for Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for model merging are limited by resource demands . recent studies validate the linear representation hypothesis .
Approach: They propose a method that superposes task-specific features from individual models into a merged model.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks and models.
Z-LaVI: Zero-Shot Language Solver Fueled by Visual Imagination (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large-scale pretrained language models suffer from reporting bias, describing the lack of explicit commonsense knowledge in written text.
Approach: They propose to endow language models with visual imagination capabilities by recalling existing images and synthesizing nonexistent images via text-to-image generation.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the performance of existing language models across a diverse set of language tasks.
Meta-Information Guided Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing meta-learning models rely on implicit instance statistics and are unreliability and weak interpretability.
Approach: They propose a meta-information guided meta-learning framework that uses semantics to guide meta- learning . experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework .
Outcome: The proposed framework can establish connections between instance-based information and semantic-based data, enabling faster initialization and adaptation.
Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) acquire a wide range of abilities during pre-training, but aligning LLMs under Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) can lead to forgetting pretrained abilities, which is also known as the alignment tax.
Approach: They propose to use a model averaging technique to find the most powerful alignment-forging Pareto front among RLHF algorithms.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves the strongest alignment-forging Pareto front among competing methods.
Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object.
Approach: They propose a novel EM framework that consists of Heterogeneous Information Fusion and Key Attribute Tree Induction to decouple feature representation from matching decision.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms SOTA EM models on 6 public datasets and 3 industrial datasets.
Seeking Rational Demonstrations for Large Language Models: A Domain Generalization Approach to Unsupervised Cross-Domain Keyphrase Generation (2025.acl-short)

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Challenge: Unsupervised cross-domain keyphrase generation is crucial in real-world natural language processing scenarios, but its accuracy is limited by the distribution shift between source and target domain.
Approach: They propose to seek rational demonstrations from the source domain and to use them to improve their ability in the unsupervised cross-domain keyphrase generation setting.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on widely used cross-domain KG benchmarks and the results are published in the journal Nature.
Multi-XScience: A Large-scale Dataset for Extreme Multi-document Summarization of Scientific Articles (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multi-XScience is a dataset construction protocol that favours abstractive modeling approaches.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multi-document summarization dataset that is based on articles and lexical databases and WordNet synonymy information to generate related-work sections of a paper.
Outcome: The proposed method is based on lexical databases and WordNet synonymy information to write related work sections of a paper based upon their abstract and the articles they reference.
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities.
Approach: They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge.
A Survey on Sparse Autoencoders: Interpreting the Internal Mechanisms of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can disentangle complex features into more interpretable components.
Approach: They propose to use Sparse Autoencoders to disentangle LLM features into more interpretable components.
Outcome: The proposed method disentangles complex features into more interpretable components.
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined.
Approach: They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration.
Outcome: The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets.
Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a prompt tuning framework that reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on text classification and question answering tasks and prevents unstable tuning problems in low-resource settings.
A Survey of Post-Training Scaling in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in understanding and generating human natural languages.
Approach: They propose a framework for scaling large language models using supervised fine-tuning, RLxF and test-time compute methodologies.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to understand and generate human natural languages.
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites.
Outcome: The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups.
From Language Modeling to Instruction Following: Understanding the Behavior Shift in LLMs after Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in aligning with user intentions.
Approach: They develop local and global explanation methods and a feed-forward-based method for input-output attribution to investigate the impact of instruction tuning on user intentions.
Outcome: The proposed method compares explanations from pre-trained and instruction-tuned models . it empowers LLMs to recognize the instruction parts of user prompts, it encourages response generation .
Efficient Zero-shot Event Extraction with Context-Definition Alignment (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Conventional supervised methods cannot generalize to event types out of the pre-defined ontology.
Approach: They propose to use two separate transformer models to model the definition semantics of an event type name into the same embedding space and then minimize their embeddable distance via contrastive learning.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all previous zero-shot EE methods with fast inference speed due to the disjoint design.
Evaluating the Smooth Control of Attribute Intensity in Text Generation with LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Controllable text generation is increasingly tailored to individual preferences.
Approach: They propose to evaluate the attribute intensity of text generated by large language models on five different attributes for error, variation of the generated sentence's intensities and relevance to the generation questions.
Outcome: The proposed methods are based on Elo rating system and GPT4 and are able to be trained without training.
Dual Complex Number Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graph embedding methods fail to model non-commutative composition patterns . extending to such sophisticated spaces increases the amount of parameters, which greatly reduces the parameter efficiency.
Approach: They propose a new knowledge graph embedding method that maps entities to the dual complex number space and represents relations as rotations in 2D space via dual complex multiplication.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple benchmark knowledge graphs show that the proposed method improves link prediction and path query answering.
Persona-E²: A Human-Grounded Dataset for Personality-Shaped Emotional Responses to Textual Events (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: A critical bottleneck is the lack of ground-truth human data to link personality traits to emotional shifts.
Approach: They propose a large-scale dataset to capture reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives.
Outcome: The proposed model captures reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives.
InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) ability to follow instructions have not been able to provide a detailed analysis of their compliance with instructions.
Approach: They propose a new metric for evaluating Large Language Models' ability to follow instructions and a benchmark for DRFR.
Outcome: The proposed metric and benchmark compared with traditional scoring methods and explores annotation sources including human experts, crowd-sourced workers, and GPT-4.
Learning-by-Narrating: Narrative Pre-Training for Zero-Shot Dialogue Comprehension (2022.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing models for dialogue comprehension are not available for the pre-training of such a model.
Approach: They propose a narrative-guided pre-training strategy that learns by narrating key information from a dialogue input.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better on four dialogue-based tasks and is comparable to existing models.
SWE-Dev: Building Software Engineering Agents with Training and Inference Scaling (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly from conversational problem solving to addressing real-world tasks involving tool use, such as software engineering (SWE).
Approach: They propose to build an LLM-based software engineering agent that synthesizes test cases and scales up agent trajectories to build training data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the SWE-bench-Verified benchmark.
Think Both Ways: Teacher-Student Bidirectional Reasoning Enhances MCQ Generation and Distractor Quality (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating high-quality MCQs struggle with contextual relevance and plausible distractors.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates bidirectional reasoning perspectives to generate contextually relevant questions and plausible distractors while student reasoning evaluates question clarity and the misleading nature of distractors.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in generating text-grounded questions and high-quality distractors for narrative contexts.
MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely on knowledge distillation.
Approach: They propose a multi-view fine-tuning method that exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods that rely heavily on LLM teachers . it grants models generalization ability across views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete data.
Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to learn sentence embeddings do not capture the semantic similarity of sentences.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates compositional sentence operations into the embedding space and optimizes operator networks and a bottleneck encoder-decoder model to produce meaningful and interpretable sentence embeddables.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the interpretability of sentence embeddings on four textual generation tasks while maintaining strong performance on traditional semantic similarity tasks.
Salience Allocation as Guidance for Abstractive Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Abstractive summarization models implicitly learn to capture the salient information from scratch.
Approach: They propose a method that uses salience expectation to guide abstractive summarization by averaging salient content to a fixed threshold.
Outcome: The proposed method can be easily adapted to documents with various abstractiveness and achieves high performance.
Uncertainty Propagation on LLM Agent (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) focus on final-step outputs, which fail to account for cumulative uncertainty over multi-step decision-making process and dynamic interactions between agents and their environments.
Approach: They propose a framework that propagates uncertainty through each step of an LLM-based agent’s reasoning process.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 20%.
MMC: Advancing Multimodal Chart Understanding with Large-scale Instruction Tuning (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing large language models have limited ability to perform tasks effectively.
Approach: They propose a large-scale multimodal chart instruction dataset with 600k instances supporting diverse tasks and chart types.
Outcome: The proposed LMM achieves state-of-the-art performance on existing chart QA benchmarks.
Adapt-and-Distill: Developing Small, Fast and Effective Pretrained Language Models for Domains (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large pre-trained models suffer from domain shift and are not optimal for specific domains.
Approach: They propose a general approach to developing small, fast and effective pretrained models for specific domains by adapting off-the-shelf general pretrained model and performing task-agnostic knowledge distillation in target domains.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves better performance over the BERT BASE model in domain-specific tasks while 3.3 smaller and 5.1 faster than the BRT BASE.
Breaking the Ceiling: Exploring the Potential of Jailbreak Attacks through Expanding Strategy Space (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to exploit black-box jailbreaks fail to capture key attack patterns . a novel framework decomposes jailbreak strategies into essential components .
Approach: They propose a framework that decomposes jailbreak strategies into essential components and develops genetic-based optimization with intention evaluation mechanisms.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 90% success rate on Claude-3.5, where prior methods completely fail . it also surpasses specialized safeguard models in evaluation accuracy .
AICA-Bench: Holistically Examining the Capabilities of VLMs in Affective Image Content Analysis (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on factual correctness, semantic grounding, visual reasoning, or multimodal large language models.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess AICA, which integrates perception, reasoning, and generation into a unified framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework corrects intensity errors and significantly enhances descriptive depth.
RIMRULE: Improving Tool-Using Language Agents via MDL-Guided Rule Learning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) struggle to use tools reliably in domain-specific settings.
Approach: They propose a neuro-symbolic approach to adapt large language models to task-specific tools . they propose reusable rules that are distilled from failure traces and injected into the prompt .
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed approach outperforms prompting-based adaptation methods and complements finetuning.
NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries (2024.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Creating spreadsheet formulas remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users . a novel task is proposed to generate spreadsheet formulae from a user's NL query .
Approach: They propose a task to generate formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table given a Natural Language query as input.
Outcome: The proposed task generates formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a natural language query as input.

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