Papers by Yichen Jiang
Closed-Book Training to Improve Summarization Encoder Memory (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Extractive summarization models pick words, phrases, and sentences from the source text to form a summary, while abstractive models generate (samples) words from a fixed-size vocabulary instead of copying from text directly. |
| Approach: | They propose to add an additional ‘closed-book’ decoder without attention and pointer mechanisms to the model to improve its memorization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model on the CNN/Daily Mail dataset in terms of ROUGE and METEOR metrics, and achieves higher scores in a test-only setup. |
Learning and Analyzing Generation Order for Undirected Sequence Models (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Undirected neural sequence models generate monotonically from left to right in machine translation tasks. |
| Approach: | They train a policy that learns the generation order for a pre-trained, undirected translation model via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed policy outperforms heuristic generation orders on three out of four language pairs. |
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems with opaque architectures are limiting deep search capabilities for web-augmented large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transparent and modular multi-agent framework to democratize deep search for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source systems in deep reasoning tasks. |
Data Factors for Better Compositional Generalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent diagnostic datasets on compositional generalization expose severe problems . state-of-the-art models trained on larger and more general datasets show better generalization ability . |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical analysis by training Transformer models on a variety of training sets with different data factors including dataset scale, pattern complexity, example difficulty, etc. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model training on larger datasets improves on compositional generalization tasks. |
M2PO: Multi-Perspective Multi-Pair Preference Optimization for Machine Translation (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wang, Linlong Xu, Heng Liu, Yangyang Liu, Xiaohu Zhao, Bo Zeng, Liangying Shao, Yichen Dong, Xinwei Wu, Jiang Zhou, Tianyu Dong, Xiangxiang Zeng, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo
| Challenge: | prevailing methods for machine translation are often hindered by misleading reward signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that aligns large language models to human preferences . they propose 'M2PO' to correct the bias towards partial errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source models and achieves parity with proprietary models. |
Explore, Propose, and Assemble: An Interpretable Model for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-hop reading comprehension only require a single-hop reasoning, meaning that the evidence needed to answer the question is scattered in a set of supporting documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable 3-module system called Explore-Propose-Assemble reader (EPAr) that explores and connects relevant information from multiple documents in order to answer a question about the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model approximates coarse-to-fine-grained comprehension behavior of human readers when facing multiple long documents. |
Self-Assembling Modular Networks for Interpretable Multi-Hop Reasoning (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-hop question answering require multiple pieces of evidence scattered in a given context. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable, controller-based self-assembling Neural Modular Network for multi-hop reasoning . their model can softly decompose a multi-step question into multiple single-hop sub-questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the static, single-hop model on regular and adversarial evaluations. |
Enriching Transformers with Structured Tensor-Product Representations for Abstractive Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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Yichen Jiang, Asli Celikyilmaz, Paul Smolensky, Paul Soulos, Sudha Rao, Hamid Palangi, Roland Fernandez, Caitlin Smith, Mohit Bansal, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is the task of generating a concise summary of input documents . a middle-aged man and a young girl died after they were unable to avoid the plane . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that enriches the original Transformer with a Tensor Product Representation for abstractive summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the Transformer and the original TP-Transformer significantly on several datasets. |
Avoiding Reasoning Shortcuts: Adversarial Evaluation, Training, and Model Development for Multi-Hop QA (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | In multi-hop question answering, models need to connect multiple pieces of evidence scattered in a long context to answer the question. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a control unit that dynamically attends to the question at different reasoning hops to guide the model's multi-hop reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models but is limited on adversarial test. |
BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence suggests that LLMs are not able to detect scientifically unsound work from malicious or poorly designed research agents. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to 18% . the framework shows only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. |
Inducing Transformer’s Compositional Generalization Ability via Auxiliary Sequence Prediction Tasks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models lack systematic compositionality in learning symbolic structures . existing models lack this ability in learning symbols, despite being able to understand complex structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use auxiliary sequence prediction tasks to train a Transformer model to understand compositional symbolic structures of input data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the SCAN compositionality challenge, with only 418 (5%) training instances, and achieves 97.8% accuracy on the MCD1 split. |
HoVer: A Dataset for Many-Hop Fact Extraction And Claim Verification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a dataset for many-hop evidence extraction and fact verification challenges models to reason with information from multiple Wikipedia articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for many-hop evidence extraction and fact verification . they challenge models to extract facts from Wikipedia articles relevant to a claim . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that state-of-the-art models degrade as the number of reasoning hops increases. |
Inducing Systematicity in Transformers by Attending to Structurally Quantized Embeddings (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirically, we show SQ-Transformer achieves stronger compositional generalization than the vanilla Transformer on low-complexity datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer that explicitly encourages systematicity in the embeddings and attention layers even with low-complexity data. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed model achieves stronger compositional generalization than the vanilla Transformer on low-complexity datasets. |
Hierarchical and Dynamic Prompt Compression for Efficient Zero-shot API Usage (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Long prompts present a significant challenge for LLM-based systems that learn to use unseen APIs directly in-context from their documentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns to compress a prompt into a few "gist token" activations during finetuning but is ineffective in compressing API documentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model keeps the simplicity, efficiency, and large compression factor (20x on SGD) of the gist token approach while achieving significantly better accuracy. |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
Mutual Exclusivity Training and Primitive Augmentation to Induce Compositionality (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent datasets expose the lack of systematic generalization ability in standard sequence-to-sequence models. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to address the lack of systematic generalization ability in standard sequence-to-sequence models by mutual exclusivity training and prim2primX data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve on two widely-used compositionality datasets. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |