Papers by Yi Ren
A Logical Pattern Memory Pre-trained Model for Entailment Tree Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models overlook the importance of generating intermediate conclusions with logical consistency from the given facts, leading to inaccurate conclusions and undermining the overall credibility of entailment trees. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that utilizes logical entailment patterns to generate coherent explanations by leveraging logical patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces more coherent and reasonable conclusions that closely align with the underlying premises. |
Sequence Structure Aware Retriever for Procedural Document Retrieval: A New Dataset and Baseline (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods neglect the execution sequence structures inherent in procedural documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval model which integrates procedural graphs with document representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates procedural graphs with document representations to improve document retrieval. |
A Skeleton-Based Model for Promoting Coherence Among Sentences in Narrative Story Generation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for narrative story generation lack semantic dependency among sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a skeleton-based model that generates the most critical phrases and expands them to a complete sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate significantly more coherent stories according to human evaluation and automatic evaluation. |
SimulSpeech: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech to Text Translation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | SimulSpeech is an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system . conventional approaches to simultaneous speech translation divide the translation process into two stages . |
| Approach: | They develop an end-to-end simultaneous speech to text translation system which translates speech in source language to text in target language concurrently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves reasonable BLEU scores and lower delay compared to full-sentence translation model. |
Revisiting Over-Smoothness in Text to Speech (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive text to speech models ignore correlation in time and frequency domains, causing blurry results. |
| Approach: | They revisit the problem of over-smoothness in non-autoregressive text to speech models . they use methods that reduce complexity of data distributions and improve modeling methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve better voice quality and faster inference speed than autoregressive models. |
RuleEdit: Towards Rule-Level Knowledge Generalization to Mitigate Over-Editing in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on instance-level editing, which is prone to knowledge degradation and general ability deterioration due to redundant instance-specific modifications. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-level editing method that generalizes rule-derived knowledge to update rule-based instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves portability and performance over baselines for LLaMA-2-7B on RULEmix. |
A Study of Non-autoregressive Model for Sequence Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive (NAR) models generate all tokens in parallel, resulting in faster generation speed compared to autoregressive models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation and source-target alignment to bridge the gap between NAR and autoregressive models in various tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques can speed up NAR models in some tasks but not all . the proposed techniques reduce target token dependency while allowing for faster inference . |
FastDiff 2: Revisiting and Incorporating GANs and Diffusion Models in High-Fidelity Speech Synthesis (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Generative adversarial networks sacrifice sample diversity for quality and speed, while diffusion models exhibit outperformed sample quality and diversity at a high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine GANs and diffusion probabilistic models to achieve better sample quality and diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform GANs and diffusion models in speech synthesis . the proposed models enjoy an efficient 4-step sampling process and exhibit better sample diversity . |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| 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. |
Tailoring Instructions to Student’s Learning Levels Boosts Knowledge Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent success of natural language processing (NLP) is driven by the adoption of large-scale pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to determine the impact of distillation influence on student generalization ability by prioritizing samples likely to enhance the student's generalization abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 10 common knowledge distillation baselines on 6 text classification tasks in the GLUE benchmark. |
Towards Exploiting Sticker for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis in Social Media: A New Dataset and Baseline (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis in social media is challenging because of the lack of context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stickers to perform a multimodal sentiment analysis task using Chinese stickers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs best compared with other models. |
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 . |
Constructing Procedural Graphs with Multiple Dependency Relations: A New Dataset and Baseline (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to structure procedural knowledge focus on representing descriptive knowledge but ignore another commonsense knowledge-Procedural Knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate flow graphs from procedural documents by extracting sequential dependency between sentences and missing two important dependencies in procedural document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate flow graphs from unstructured documents with syntactic information and discourse structures. |
A Two-phase Prototypical Network Model for Incremental Few-shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised and distantly supervised RC models ignore the emergence of novel relations in open environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase prototypical network with prototype attention alignment and triplet loss to dynamically recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model performs better on deep learning and few-shot learning . it can recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting . |
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. |
Exploring Distributional Shifts in Large Language Models for Code Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Since the late 2000s, researchers have been reporting poor generalization of statistical learning models to new software systems, such as GitHub Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, Replit, etc. |
| Approach: | They systematically study how three large language models with code capabilities generalize to out-of-domain data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing model for code generation on multiple domains at once. |
Grounded Multimodal Procedural Entity Recognition for Procedural Documents: A New Dataset and Baseline (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract procedural knowledge from documents focus on text-only settings, which is insufficient for entity disambiguation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to detect the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in image (i.e., visual entities) it is based on a dataset of a WikiHow 1 and EHow 2 document and the results are compared with existing models. |
Beyond Text: Unveiling Privacy Vulnerabilities in Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can process text, images, and audio, but they introduce privacy vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional structured prompt attack to exploit MRAG privacy vulnerabilities . they show that LMMs can generate outputs resembling retrieved content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates outputs resembling retrieved content and exposes sensitive information. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| 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 . |
Chain-Talker: Chain Understanding and Rendering for Empathetic Conversational Speech Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current generative CSS models face interpretability limitations due to insufficient emotional perception and redundant discrete speech coding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns synthesized speech with the emotional context of user-agent interactions to achieve empathy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces more expressive speech than existing methods on three datasets. |
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. |
FluentSpeech: Stutter-Oriented Automatic Speech Editing with Context-Aware Diffusion Models (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for speech editing still suffer from over-smoothing problem and lack of robustness due to stutter. |
| Approach: | They propose a stutter-oriented automatic speech editing model that incorporates sutter information into the hidden sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on a speech recording dataset . it can improve fluency of stuttering speech in terms of objective and subjective metrics. |
CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level event extraction struggle due to two intrinsic challenges: nested arguments and multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network to solve two challenges . they map different events to multiple subspaces and then determine whether the current event exists . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two widely used DEE datasets on the Internet. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| Challenge: | Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%. |
TSDG: Content-aware Neural Response Generation with Two-stage Decoding Process (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that generative models often use a single decoder to generate a complete response at a stroke. |
| Approach: | They propose a content-aware model with two-stage decoding process to separate content words from function words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models in automatic and human evaluation on two datasets. |
A Study of Syntactic Multi-Modality in Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive translation models suffer from the multi-modality problem when a source sentence corresponds to multiple correct translations. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the syntactic multi-modality problem into short- and long-range models and evaluate them on synthesized and real datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed loss functions can handle short- and long-range syntactic multi-modalities better than existing models. |
RTCFake: Speech Deepfake Detection in Real-Time Communication (2026.findings-acl)
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Jun Xue, Zhuolin Yi, Yihuan Huang, Yanzhen Ren, Yujie Chen, Cunhang Fan, Zicheng Su, Yongcheng Zhang, Bo Cai
| Challenge: | Existing detection studies focus on offline simulations and struggle to cope with complex distortions introduced during RTC transmission. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale speech deepfake dataset tailored for RTC scenarios . the dataset is constructed by transmitting speech through multiple social media and conferencing platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is constructed by transmitting speech through multiple mainstream social media and conferencing platforms, enabling precise pairing between offline and online speech. |
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 the Beauty in Songs: Neural Singing Voice Beautifier (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for pitch correction are limited to intonation but ignore the overall aesthetic quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel time-warping approach for pitch correction to synchronize the amateur recording with the template pitch curve. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves intonation and vocal tone while keeping content and vocal timbre. |
Does Higher Order LSTM Have Better Accuracy for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data? (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models take long distance dependencies into account when predicting the tag of the current token. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to capture long distance tag dependencies and use them for dependency analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict multiple tags for the current token without taking dependencies between tags into account. |
AV-TranSpeech: Audio-Visual Robust Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Rongjie Huang, Huadai Liu, Xize Cheng, Yi Ren, Linjun Li, Zhenhui Ye, Jinzheng He, Lichao Zhang, Jinglin Liu, Xiang Yin, Zhou Zhao
| 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 . |
OneRec-Think: In-Text Reasoning for Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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Zhanyu Liu, Shiyao Wang, Xingmei Wang, Rongzhou Zhang, Jiaxin Deng, Honghui Bao, Jinghao Zhang, Wuchao Li, PengFei Zheng, Xiangyu Wu, Yifei Hu, Qigen Hu, Xinchen Luo, Lejian Ren, Zhang Zixing, Qianqian Wang, Kuo Cai, Yunfan Wu, Hongtao Cheng, Zexuan Cheng, Lu Ren, Huanjie Wang, Yi Su, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| 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. |
Beyond Dynamic Quantization: An Efficient Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Framework for Near-Lossless LLM Compression (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic quantization are hardware-unfriendly and often lead to large quantization errors in static scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a Static Hierarchical Mix-precision Quantization method which quantifies both inter-layer and intra-layer sensitivity through unified derivations involving Hessian. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 75.58% on zero-shot reasoning tasks while yielding average speedup of 2.86. |
TOREE: Evaluating Topic Relevance of Student Essays for Chinese Primary and Middle School Education (2024.findings-acl)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Hongyi Wu, Xinshu Shen, Peimin Yu, Gaowei Yi, Xinhao Chen, Tu Hu, Yang Chen, Yupei Ren, Yadong Zhang, Youqi Song, Binxuan Liu, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing research on Automatic Essay Scoring (AES) for Chinese essays has overlooked topic relevance and lacks detailed feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use TOREE to assess topic relevance in Chinese primary and middle school students’ essays to improve automatic and human evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves both automatic and human evaluations across four diverse LLMs. |
Prosody-TTS: Improving Prosody with Masked Autoencoder and Conditional Diffusion Model For Expressive Text-to-Speech (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Expressive text-to-speech aims to generate high-quality samples with rich prosody . prosodic attributes in highly dynamic voices are difficult to capture and model without intonation . |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that enhances prosody modeling and sampling by introducing a self-supervised masked autoencoder and a diffusion model to sample diverse prosodic patterns within the latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline achieves new state-of-the-art in text-to-speech with natural and expressive synthesis. |