Papers by Yi He

46 papers
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules.
Approach: They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time.
Outcome: The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time.
MDSEval: A Meta-Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multimodal Dialogue Summarization (MDS) is a critical task with wide-ranging applications.
Approach: They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark for multimodal dialogue summarization based on image-sharing dialogues, corresponding summaries and human judgments .
Outcome: The proposed framework is the first to identify and formalize key evaluation dimensions specific to MDS.
Alignment-Enhanced Decoding: Defending Jailbreaks via Token-Level Adaptive Refining of Probability Distributions (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing defenses against jailbreaks focus on perturbing or inspecting inputs, but ignore competing objectives, the underlying cause of alignment failures.
Approach: They propose a novel defense that employs adaptive decoding to address the root causes of jailbreak issues.
Outcome: The proposed defense improves safety alignment while maintaining helpfulness.
ESGenius: Benchmarking LLMs on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Sustainability Knowledge (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: ESGenius is a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating Large Language Models on ESG and sustainability knowledge.
Approach: They introduce ESGenius, a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing ESG proficiency . they use a rigorous two-stage evaluation protocol and a repository of foundational frameworks .
Outcome: ESGenius is a benchmark for evaluating and enhancing the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) in ESG and sustainability-focused question answering.
SKD-NER: Continual Named Entity Recognition via Span-based Knowledge Distillation with Reinforcement Learning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Continual learning for named entity recognition (CL-NER) aims to enable models to continuously learn new entity types while retaining the ability to recognize previously learned ones.
Approach: They propose a model that leverages knowledge distillation to retain memory and employs reinforcement learning strategies to optimize the soft labeling and distillation losses generated by the teacher model to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets showing that it significantly improves the performance of the CL-NER task.
Beyond Code: Evaluate Thought Steps for Complex Code Generation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing efforts to generate code in C++ rely on relatively simple programming problems . large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on numerous code data have opened up new opportunities for code generation.
Approach: They propose a task that evaluates the quality of thought steps and code implementation . they construct a dataset of complex programming problems in C++ .
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates the quality of thought steps and code implementation in a C++ programming language.
Generalized Intent Discovery: Learning from Open World Dialogue System (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing intent classification models rely on a pre-defined intent set and supervised labels, which is limited in some practical scenarios.
Approach: They propose to extend an IND intent classifier to an open-world intent set including IND and OOD intents.
Outcome: The proposed task can classify IND and OOD intents while discovering new unlabeled OOD types incrementally.
MAPS: Motivation-Aware Personalized Search via LLM-Driven Consultation Alignment (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing personalized product search methods assume that users’ query fully captures their real motivation, but in practice, user's queries do not always articulate the requirements.
Approach: They propose a Motivation-Aware Personalized Search method that embeds queries and consultations into a unified semantic space via LLMs and utilizes a Mixture of Attention Experts (MoAE) to prioritize critical semantics.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on real and synthetic data show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods in retrieval and ranking tasks.
A general framework for information extraction using dynamic span graphs (N19-1)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for information extraction use a pipeline approach to identify entities and then use the detected entity spans for relation extraction and coreference resolution.
Approach: They propose a framework for several information extraction tasks that share span representations using dynamically constructed span graphs.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art on multiple information extraction tasks across multiple datasets reflecting different domains.
SEAD: A Surrogate-free Label-only Membership Inference Attack against Pre-trained LLMs with Semantic-Aware Density (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing membership inference attacks require access to complete logits, but such access is often unavailable in real-world deployments where only the generated text is exposed.
Approach: They propose a surrogate-free label-only MIA approach that directly estimates token probabilities through Monte Carlo sampling of the target model.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing label-only attacks and serves as a foundational density estimator in the label-exclusive setting.
Active Generalized Category Discovery with Diverse LLM Feedback (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a practical and challenging open-world task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories in unlabeled data using limited labeled data from known categories.
Approach: They propose a framework for generalized category discovery that actively learns from diverse and collaborative feedback.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves instance-level contrastive features, generates category descriptions, and aligns uncertain instances with LLM-selected category descriptions.
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy.
Approach: They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems.
Outcome: The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better.
PSSAT: A Perturbed Semantic Structure Awareness Transferring Method for Perturbation-Robust Slot Filling (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing slot filling models memorize inherent patterns of entities and contexts from training data.
Approach: They propose a perturbed semantic structure awareness transferring method for slot filling models . they use two MLM-based training strategies to learn contextual semantic structure and word distribution .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods and gains strong generalization while preventing model from memorizing inherent patterns of entities and contexts.
LongHeads: Multi-Head Attention is Secretly a Long Context Processor (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models struggle to process lengthy inputs due to limited length generalization and attention’s quadratic computational demands.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework that allows each head to attend to important context chunks instead of allowing each head a full sentence .
Outcome: The proposed framework unlocks multi-head attention's untapped potential by allowing each head to attend to important context chunks instead of the full sentence.
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings.
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG.
Approach: They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern.
Outcome: The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data.
A Global Past-Future Early Exit Method for Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to accelerate inference speed of pre-trained language models are limited to local representations of exit layer . current models are associated with large memory requirement and high computational cost, which slow down inference and further encumber the application of PLMs.
Approach: They propose a method to exit early without passing through all inference layers . they take into consideration all the linguistic information embedded in the past layers a global perspective .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods by a large margin . it uses linguistic information embedded in the past layers and future features . the proposed method is scalable and cost-effective .
Beyond the Tip of Efficiency: Uncovering the Submerged Threats of Jailbreak Attacks in Small Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Small language models (SLMs) have become increasingly prominent in the deployment on edge devices due to their high efficiency and low computational cost.
Approach: They evaluate the security performance of 13 state-of-the-art small language models under various jailbreak attacks.
Outcome: The proposed methods demonstrate that SLMs are quite susceptible to jailbreak attacks and some are even vulnerable to harmful prompts.
Natural-Language Policies to Executable Decisions: An Interpretable Large Language Model Framework (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: a production-grade pricing system for tourism is challenging due to unstructured nature of travel orders and ever-evolving pricing policies.
Approach: They propose a production-grade pricing system with a strict decision boundary . they propose to combine structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection with interpretable condition trees .
Outcome: The proposed system processed 3,960 orders in six months and reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3 . the system reduced the per-order handling time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes.
Exploiting Structured Knowledge in Text via Graph-Guided Representation Learning (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs into pre-trained language models have been poorly implemented.
Approach: They propose a self-supervised entity masking scheme that exploits relational knowledge underlying the text.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves improved performance on five benchmarks, including question answering and knowledge base completion.
Query-Driven Multimodal GraphRAG: Dynamic Local Knowledge Graph Construction for Online Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to build knowledge graphs with LLMs are constrained by static knowledge bases and ineffective multimodal data integration.
Approach: They propose a Query-Driven Multimodal GraphRAG framework that dynamically constructs local knowledge graphs tailored to query semantics.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms unsupervised competitors in cross-modal understanding of complex queries.
Rethinking-based Code Summarization with Chain of Comments (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on learning a direct mapping from pure code to summaries, overlooking the heterogeneity gap between code and summary.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses chain of comments as auxiliary intermediate information to bridge the gap between code and summaries.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and multiple code Large Language Models by a large margin.
Pretrain-KGE: Learning Knowledge Representation from Pretrained Language Models (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graph embedding models suffer from limited knowledge representation due to sparse and noisy dataset annotations.
Approach: They propose to use pretrained language models to enhance knowledge representation by leveraging world knowledge from pretrained models.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can improve results over existing models.
PE: A Poincare Explanation Method for Fast Text Hierarchy Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work on feature interactions neglects underlying linguistic information in feature representations.
Approach: They propose a method for modeling feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces using Poincare Explanation.
Outcome: The proposed method is able to model feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces in a time efficient manner.
Libra-VLA: Achieving Learning Equilibrium via Asynchronous Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Vision-Language-Action models ground high-level semantic instructions into executable physical actions.
Approach: They propose a Coarse-to-Fine Dual-System VLA architecture that decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy.
Outcome: The proposed architecture decouples learning complexity into a coarse-to-fine hierarchy while leveraging structural modularity to implement an asynchronous execution strategy.
Your Semantic-Independent Watermark is Fragile: A Semantic Perturbation Attack against EaaS Watermark (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Embedding-as-a-Service (EaaS) is a successful business pattern but faces significant challenges related to various forms of copyright infringement.
Approach: They propose a semantic-independent watermarking scheme that exploits semantic perturbation tests to bypass verification.
Outcome: The proposed watermarking schemes possess semantic-independent characteristics and exploit semantic perturbation tests to bypass verification.
Multi-Task Identification of Entities, Relations, and Coreference for Scientific Knowledge Graph Construction (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing relation extraction systems are designed for within-sentence relations, but extracting information from scientific articles requires relations across sentences.
Approach: They propose a multi-task setup for identifying entities, relations, and coreference clusters in scientific articles . they develop a unified framework called SciIE with shared span representations to solve this problem .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models without domain-specific features in scientific information extraction.
Semantic-Space Exploration and Exploitation in RLVR for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a method that balances exploration and exploitation in the hidden-state space of response trajectories.
Outcome: The proposed model yields consistent improvements across models, algorithms and reasoning benchmarks.
Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold.
SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current methods focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication.
Approach: They propose a method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves training efficiency on deduplicated datasets and improves downstream accuracy by 1.77%.
OmniTab: Pretraining with Natural and Synthetic Data for Few-shot Table-based Question Answering (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: a table-based question answering system requires complex reasoning and alignment between questions and tables.
Approach: They propose a table-based QA model that consumes both natural and synthetic data . they combine retrieval with masking to pair natural sentences with QA .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models in few-shot and full settings and on WikiTableQuestions.
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries.
Approach: They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks.
Faithful, Unfaithful or Ambiguous? Multi-Agent Debate with Initial Stance for Summary Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to evaluate faithfulness of summaries are often fooled by the fluency of the text and struggle with identifying errors.
Approach: They propose an approach to summary faithfulness evaluation where multiple LLM-based agents are assigned initial stances and forced to come up with a reason to justify belief.
Outcome: The proposed approach can identify ambiguities and have even stronger performance on non-ambiguous summaries.
TGEA: An Error-Annotated Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for TextGeneration from Pretrained Language Models (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Using pretrained language models, we propose an error-annotated dataset for text generation . we use carefully selected prompt words to guide GPT-2 to generate candidate sentences .
Approach: They propose an error-annotated dataset with multiple benchmark tasks for text generation from pretrained language models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset covers 24 types of errors according to common sense and linguistics.
CLAPSpeech: Learning Prosody from Text Context with Contrastive Language-Audio Pre-Training (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for expressive text-to-speech only implicitly learn prosody with masked token reconstruction tasks.
Approach: They propose a cross-modal contrastive pre-training framework that learns from prosody variance of the same text token under different contexts.
Outcome: The proposed framework can learn from prosody variance of a text token under different contexts.
Learning Joint Structural and Temporal Contextualized Knowledge Embeddings for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods that incorporate time information into static knowledge graph embedding ignore the contextual nature of the TKG structure.
Approach: They propose a method that employs pre-trained language models to learn joint Structural and Temporal Contextualized Knowledge Embeddings.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to existing methods that ignore the contextual nature of the TKG structure.
MicroEdit: Neuron-level Knowledge Disentanglement and Localization in Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing large language models are designed for single or limited edits, lacking the capacity to support long-term, multi-round knowledge updates.
Approach: They propose a neuron-level editing method that performs minimal interventions within large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a sparse autoencoder, MicroEdit disentangles knowledge representations and activates only a minimal set of necessary neurons for precise parameter updates.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that MicroEdit outperforms prior methods and robustly handles lifelong knowledge editing across QA and Hallucination settings on LLaM and Mistral.
OAgents: An Empirical Study of Building Effective Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a recent study shows that agent research practices are far from standard, rigorous . lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible, authors say .
Approach: They conduct an empirical study on the GAIA benchmark to investigate agent design choices . they find that lack of a standard evaluation protocol makes previous works not reproducible .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source projects.
Multimodal Neural Machine Translation: A Survey of the State of the Art (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) is a task that aims to translate text into the target language using neural networks.
Approach: They propose to integrate other modalities with textual data to enhance translation performance.
Outcome: The proposed task aims to integrate visual modality with textual data to improve translation quality.
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for speech-to-speech translation suffer from distinct degradation in noisy environments and fail to translate visual speech.
Approach: They propose a text-based audio-visual speech-to-speech translation model that integrates visual information with audio-only data to improve system robustness.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms models trained on audio-only corpus in two languages . it also improves with low-resource audio-visual data, compared with baselines .
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning when faced with factual queries.
Approach: They propose a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior.
Outcome: Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS significantly improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance.
Similarity = Value? Consultation Value-Assessment and Alignment for Personalized Search (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods rely on semantic similarity to align historical consultations with current queries due to the absence of ‘value’ labels, but this lacks exploration of needs in user consultations.
Approach: They propose a consultation value assessment framework that evaluates historical consultations from three novel perspectives: (1) Scenario Scope Value, (2) Posterior Action Value, and (3) Time Decay Value.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on public and commercial datasets on both retrieval and ranking tasks.
An Instruction Tuning-Based Contrastive Learning Framework for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction with Implicit Aspects and Opinions (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for aspect-based sentiment analysis have not explored how to effectively leverage the knowledge of pre-trained language models to handle implicit aspects and opinions.
Approach: They propose a framework leveraging Instruction Tuning and Supervised Contrastive Learning to improve aspect sentiment quad prediction for implicit aspects and opinions.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets.
Improving Entity Linking through Semantic Reinforced Entity Embeddings (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing entity embeddings are effective, but too distinctive for linking models to learn contextual commonality.
Approach: They propose a method to inject fine-grained semantic information into entity embeddings . they use word embedds of type words to generate semantic embeddngs based on existing embeddables a sample of semantic information is injected into the embedded entities .
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the distinctiveness of existing embeddings and improves performance.
Optimize Weight Rounding via Signed Gradient Descent for the Quantization of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in language-related tasks, but their deployment poses significant memory and storage requirements.
Approach: They propose a method that optimizes rounding values and weight clipping within 200 steps.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves exceptional results across 2 to 4 bits while maintaining low tuning costs and avoiding additional inference overhead.

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