Papers by Yi Lu

47 papers
Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Language models are sensitive to the way that prompts are given, indicating that they are not reasoning in a robust manner.
Approach: They propose to fine tune language models on in-context input-label pairs where natural language labels are replaced with arbitrary symbols.
Outcome: The proposed model is much stronger at reasoning tasks and more robust to underspecified prompts than the standard model.
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely.
Approach: They propose a privacy-preserving inference framework called MixPi which aims to obfuscate a user's private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods on token and sentence classification tasks.
DynaMaR: Dynamic Prompt with Mask Token Representation (2022.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Recent research shows that large language models pretrained using unsupervised approaches can achieve significant performance improvement on many downstream tasks.
Approach: They propose an unsupervised approach to fine-tuning large language models using unsupervised approaches to many downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on four e-commerce applications and can achieve an average improvement of 10% in few-shot settings and 3.7% in data-rich settings over the standard approach.
Weakly-supervised Text Classification Based on Keyword Graph (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text classification ignore keyword correlation, thus ignoring it . existing methods treat keywords independently, thus not exploiting correlation between them .
Approach: They propose a framework to explore keyword-keyword correlation on keyword graph by GNN . they use a self-supervised task to pretrain annotators and fine-tune them .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on long- and short-text datasets.
Demystifying Small Language Models for Edge Deployment (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things.
Approach: They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible.
Outcome: The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential.
EPiDA: An Easy Plug-in Data Augmentation Framework for High Performance Text Classification (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for data augmentation do not fully exploit the potential of DA in NLP.
Approach: They propose an easy and plug-in framework for data augmentation to support effective text classification.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in most cases, but not using agent networks or pre-trained generation networks.
HELENE: Hessian Layer-wise Clipping and Gradient Annealing for Accelerating Fine-tuning LLM with Zeroth-order Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) face memory challenges due to the high cost of backpropagation.
Approach: They propose a zeroth-order (ZO) optimization that matches memory usage to inference . they propose scalable and memory-efficient zeroth order (ZE) optimizer that integrates annealed A-GNB gradients with diagonal Hessian estimation and layer-wise clipping as a second-order pre-conditioner.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods with an average speedup of 20 over MeZO on RoBERTa-large and OPT-1.3B.
Representation Potentials of Foundation Models for Multimodal Alignment: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: foundation models learn highly transferable representations through large-scale pretraining on diverse data.
Approach: They examine the representation potentials of foundation models by examining their latent capacity to capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modalities.
Outcome: The foundation models exhibit remarkable similarities across architectures and modalities, the authors show . the models can capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modality.
CogToM: A Comprehensive Theory of Mind Benchmark inspired by Human Cognition for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited to false belief tasks, highlighting bottlenecks in specific dimensions.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models' Theory of Mind capabilities . they evaluate 8000 bilingual instances across 46 paradigms and validated by 49 human annotators .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark reveals performance heterogeneities and bottlenecks in 22 representative models.
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)

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Challenge: Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply .
Approach: They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks.
MKQA: A Linguistically Diverse Benchmark for Multilingual Open Domain Question Answering (2021.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing multilingual QA datasets lack linguistic diversity and comparable evaluation between languages.
Approach: They propose a multilingual question-answer evaluation set with 10k English queries and human translations of them into 25 additional languages and dialects.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on a multilingual knowledge questions and answers evaluation set with 26 languages.
HetGCoT: Heterogeneous Graph-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought LLM Reasoning for Academic Question Answering (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: graph neural networks capture structured graph information, but lack integration at the reasoning level.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages graph structural information to reason interpretable academic QA results.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms sota baselines on OpenAlex and DBLP datasets.
Compound AI Systems Optimization: A Survey of Methods, Challenges, and Future Directions (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and AI systems have led to a paradigm shift in the design and optimization of complex workflows.
Approach: They propose a systematic review of recent progress in optimizing compound AI systems . they formalize the notion of compound AI system optimization and classify existing methods along several key dimensions .
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform existing methods in the field of compound AI and highlight open research challenges and future directions.
An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to build parallel sentence simplification corpora are limited . SS is used to rephrase sentences into simpler forms for those with cognitive disabilities .
Approach: They propose to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpors using a parallel approach.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiLarge and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Cross-Lingual Dependency Parsing by POS-Guided Word Reordering (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to cross-lingual dependency parsing rely on large corpus size and cost.
Approach: They propose a cross-lingual dependency parsing approach based on word reordering . they propose to train a model that transfers knowledge learned in one or multiple languages to target languages .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the baseline approach in Hindi and Latin by 15.3% and 6.7%.
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.
RSVP: Reasoning Segmentation via Visual Prompting and Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in multi-modal learning have enhanced MLLMs' ability to reason about visual content.
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies multi-step multimodal reasoning with grounded visual understanding.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods by +6.5 gIoU and +9.2 cIou on ReasonSeg and achieves 49.7 mAP on SegInW under zero-shot settings.
On the Transferability of Minimal Prediction Preserving Inputs in Question Answering (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent work establishes the presence of short, uninterpretable input fragments that yield high confidence and accuracy in neural models.
Approach: They investigate competing hypotheses for the existence of MPPIs in question answering . they discover a perplexing invariance of MPIs to random training seed, model architecture, pretraining, and training domain.
Outcome: The proposed model performance is higher than comparable short queries.
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores.
Approach: They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values.
An Exploration of Data Augmentation and Sampling Techniques for Domain-Agnostic Question Answering (D19-58)

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Challenge: XLNet model is domain-agnostic for the MRQA 2019 Shared Task . a negative sampling technique is particularly effective for datasets that include unanswerable questions .
Approach: They develop a domain-agnostic question answering model for the MRQA 2019 Shared Task . they use large pre-trained language models, various data sampling strategies and query and context paraphrases generated by back-translation .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves second best Exact Match and F1 in the MRQA leaderboard competition.
SWE-QA-Pro: A Representative Benchmark and Scalable Training Recipe for Repository-Level Code Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for agentic repository-level code understanding overlook long tail topics and rely on memorized knowledge.
Approach: They propose a repository-level agentic code understanding benchmark that uses long-tail repositories with executable environments to enforce topical balance.
Outcome: Empirically, a Qwen3-8B model trained with the proposed benchmark outperforms GPT-4o by 2.3 points.
TempCompass: Do Video LLMs Really Understand Videos? (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks on video large language models lack a comprehensive feedback on temporal perception ability . current models cannot distinguish between different temporal aspects and are limited in task formats .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate temporal perception ability of video large language models . they construct conflicting videos that share the same static content but differ in a specific temporal aspect .
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that video large language models exhibit poor temporal perception ability.
Evidence-Aligned Entity Verification for Hallucination Detection in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination detection depend on internal signals like uncertainty and self-consistency checks to identify unreliable outputs.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method to enhance hallucination detection by addressing information updating challenges.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on existing methods with strong generalization capabilities.
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment.
Approach: They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling .
Outcome: The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines.
Improved Knowledge Distillation for Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies on knowledge distillation have shown that not all knowledge is necessary for learning a good student model.
Approach: They propose an actor-critic approach to selecting appropriate knowledge to transfer during the process of knowledge distillation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms several strong knowledge distillation baselines significantly on the GLUE datasets.
From Query to Counsel: Structured Reasoning with a Multi-Agent Framework and Dataset for Legal Consultation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Legal consultation question answering presents unique challenges compared to traditional legal QA tasks .
Approach: They propose a framework that converts queries into a legal element graph . jurisMA supports dynamic routing, statutory grounding, and stylistic optimization .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms general-purpose and legal-domain LLMs across multiple lexical and semantic metrics.
CoGR-MoE: Concept-Guided Expert Routing with Consistent Selection and Flexible Reasoning for Visual Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work has begun to address routing instability in VQA models by grouping similar concepts or routing based on examples.
Approach: They propose a Concept-Guided Routing framework which incorporates semantics of the answer options to guide expert selection in the training phase.
Outcome: The proposed framework delivers strong performance across multiple VQA tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.
Bidirectional Hierarchical Attention Networks based on Document-level Context for Emotion Cause Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Emotion cause extraction (ECE) aims to extract the causes behind certain emotion in text.
Approach: They propose a bidirectional hierarchical attention network corresponding to the specified candidate cause clause to capture document-level context in a structured and dynamic manner.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves competitive performances on two public datasets in Chinese and English.
Negating Negatives: Alignment with Human Negative Samples via Distributional Dispreference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to steer LLMs towards human preference suffer from noisy positive-negative training pairs.
Approach: They propose a distributional preference optimization method which maximizes discrepancy between dispreferred responses and generated non-negative ones.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves comparable generation quality and surpasses the latest strong baselines in producing less harmful and more informative responses with better training stability and faster convergence.
Shoes-ACOSI: A Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis with Implicit Opinion Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior work in ABSA has investigated opinion extraction as an important subtask, but these works only label concise, *explicitly*-stated opinion spans.
Approach: They propose a new ABSA dataset with implicit opinion span annotations . they use paragraph-length inputs and prompted-LLM baselines to evaluate the dataset .
Outcome: The proposed dataset presents significant challenges for fully-supervised models and LLMs.
Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that dual encoders outperform sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly.
Approach: They challenge belief that bottleneck layer is too limited for out-of-domain generalization . they scale up the model while keeping bottleneck as a single dot-product with a fixed size .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly.
X-Boundary: Establishing Exact Safety Boundary to Shield LLMs from Jailbreak Attacks without Compromising Usability (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing LLM security compromise usability, study finds . boundary-safe representations close to harmful representations are disrupted, resulting in usability decline .
Approach: They propose a method to push harmful representations away from boundary-safe representations and obtain an exact distinction boundary.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces over-refusal rate and maintains general capability . it pushes harmful representations away from boundary-safe representations, thereby reducing usability.
UniMSE: Towards Unified Multimodal Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies study sentiment and emotion separately and do not fully exploit the complementary knowledge behind the two.
Approach: They propose a multimodal sentiment knowledge-sharing framework that unifies MSA and ERC tasks from features, labels, and models.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves consistent improvements on four public benchmark datasets on MOSI, MOSEI, MELD, and IEMOCAP.
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.
Nonparametric Decoding for Generative Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing text retrieval models depend on the information encoded in its parameters without external memory, its information capacity is limited and fixed.
Approach: They propose a nonparametric decoding approach which uses external memory instead of vanilla vocab embeddings as decoder voka embedds.
Outcome: The proposed model can utilize parametric and nonparametric space.
AIGT: AI Generative Table Based on Prompt (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Tabular data is an essential resource for many fields, but current methods do not fully utilize the rich information available in tables.
Approach: They propose a method that utilizes metadata information to generate tabular data . they propose long-token partitioning algorithms that enable AIGT to model tables of any scale .
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on 14 out of 20 public datasets and two real industry datasets within the Alipay risk control system.
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.
Making Harmful Behaviors Unlearnable for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are often customized by fine-tuning for the requirements of different domains.
Approach: They propose a controllable training framework to make undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process.
Outcome: The proposed framework makes undesired behaviors unlearnable during the fine-tuning process while preserving the ability to learn other information.
Exploring and Distilling Multi-Dimensional Clues for Interpretable Social Bot Detection (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing research on social bot detection results directly without corresponding supportive explanations, making it difficult to assess the extent to which such predictions are trustworthy.
Approach: They propose a four-dimensional clue framework that uses outcome-reward reinforcement learning to train inspectors to generate faithful, grounded clues from user information, semantic features, interactive situation, and behavioral pattern.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in detection performance and significantly improves the performance of large language models.
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations.
Approach: They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures.
Asynchronous Convergence in Multi-Task Learning via Knowledge Distillation from Converged Tasks (2022.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to solve multiple tasks by sharing a base representation among them.
Approach: They propose an approach that allows for "asynchronous" convergence among the tasks where each task can converge on its own schedule.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in two 5-task MTL setups.
OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing generative models lack the capacity for explicit and controllable reasoning, a key advantage of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates dialogue, reasoning, and personalized recommendation.
Outcome: Experiments across public benchmarks show state-of-the-art performance.
ED2LM: Encoder-Decoder to Language Model for Faster Document Re-ranking Inference (2022.findings-acl)

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Challenge: State-of-the-art neural models typically encode document-query pairs using cross-attention for re-ranking.
Approach: They propose to fine tune a pretrained encoder-decoder model using document to query generation.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable results to more expensive approaches while being 6.8X faster.
ReviewGrounder: Improving Review Substantiveness with Rubric-Guided, Tool-Integrated Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Rapid rise in AI conference submissions has driven increasing exploration of large language models (LLMs) for peer review support.
Approach: They propose a peer review benchmarking tool based on paper-specific rubrics and a rubric-guided framework that decomposes reviewing into drafting and grounding stages.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines with stronger/larger backbones in both alignment with human judgments and rubric-based review quality across 8 dimensions.
TextObfuscator: Making Pre-trained Language Model a Privacy Protector via Obfuscating Word Representations (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing inference services are plagued by privacy concerns, such as sharing sensitive data with service providers.
Approach: They propose a framework for protecting inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations.
Outcome: The proposed framework protects inference privacy by applying random perturbations to clustered representations.

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