Papers by Yi Lu
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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%. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |