Papers by Yiming Xu
Predicting Performance for Natural Language Processing Tasks (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Natural language processing (NLP) is a vast field, with a wide variety of tasks, languages, and domains. |
| Approach: | They build regression models to predict evaluation score of an NLP experiment . they find that their models can produce meaningful predictions over unseen languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and human experts on 9 different tasks. |
Open-Ended Visual Question Answering by Multi-Modal Domain Adaptation (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to visual question answering (VQA) are not suitable for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised multi-modal domain adaptation method for visual question answering in images that exploits supervised domain adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark VQA 2.0 and VizWiz datasets. |
JiraiBench: A Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models’ Detection of Human risky health behavior Content in Jirai Community (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yunze Xiao, Tingyu He, Lionel Z. Wang, Yiming Ma, Xingyu Song, Xiaohang Xu, Mona T. Diab, Irene Li, Ka Chung Ng
| Challenge: | a cross-lingual dataset captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . risky health behaviors (RHB) are often linked to complex mental health conditions . |
| Approach: | They present the first cross-lingual dataset that captures a transnational cultural phenomenon . their dataset of more than 15,000 annotated social media posts forms the core of JiraiBench . |
| Outcome: | The study shows that cultural context can be more influential than linguistic similarity . the study also shows that the Japanese prompts better handle Chinese content . |
LLM-Driven Knowledge Injection Advances Zero-Shot and Cross-Target Stance Detection (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection focus on background information and not on the accompanying input texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to prompt Large Language Models to explicitly extract the relationship between paired text and unseen target as contextual knowledge and inject it into a generation model BART to exploit the rich contexts and semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to detect stance labels in zero-shot and cross-target scenarios. |
IDOL: Indicator-oriented Logic Pre-training for Logical Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing systems for logical reasoning have surpassed the average performance of humans in many tasks like SQuAD but there is still a long way to go when it comes to logical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an InDicator-Oriented Logic Pre-training task which logically strengthens pre-trained models with the help of 6 types of logical indicators and a logicalally rich dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task achieves state-of-the-art on ReClor and LogiQA, the two most representative benchmarks in logical reasoning MRC. |
SARA: Salience-Aware Reinforced Adaptive Decoding for Large Language Models in Abstractive Summarization (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies neglect the explicit use of salient contextual information and rely on static hyperparameters to fix the balance between contextual and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a salience-aware reinforced adaptive decoding (SARA) which incorporates salient contextual information and allows the model to determine reliance on source document's context, salient context, and model's prior knowledge based on pointwise mutual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the quality and faithfulness of summaries across LLMs without modifying their weights. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | PromptSculptor automates the iterative prompt optimization process for Text-to-Image models . previous work focused on generating detailed, high-quality prompts based on user feedback . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes a task into four specialized agents . they use Chain-of-Thought reasoning to transform a short, vague user prompt into a comprehensive, refined prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves output quality and reduces iterations needed for user satisfaction. |
CINO: A Chinese Minority Pre-trained Language Model (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual pre-trained language models do not perform well on some low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual pre-trained language model for Chinese minority languages . they collect documents from Wikipedia and construct two classification datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various classification tasks. |
M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Taowen Wang, Yiyang Liu, James Liang, Junhan Zhao, Yiming Cui, Yuning Mao, Shaoliang Nie, Jiahao Liu, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Qifan Wang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit remarkable performance across a wide range of domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal prompt tuning approach for efficient instruction tuning of MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows superior performance on multimodal evaluation datasets compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Low-resource Cross-lingual Event Type Detection via Distant Supervision with Minimal Effort (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Currently, few or no language processing tools or resources exist for most languages . a problem is that there is not enough available training data even in resource-rich languages if the task is complex. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bilingual dictionary to train machine learning in a resource-poor language . they also explore adversarial training of bilingual word representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach gives similar performance in event-type detection tasks. |
Understanding the Dark Side of LLMs’ Intrinsic Self-Correction (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qingjie Zhang, Di Wang, Haoting Qian, Yiming Li, Tianwei Zhang, Minlie Huang, Ke Xu, Hewu Li, Liu Yan, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction fails without oracle labels as feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to use one simple task and three complex tasks with state-of-the-art LLMs like ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek to interpret LLM's intrinsic self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reveal the dark side of LLMs’ intrinsic self-correction for different tasks, especially for those failure cases. |
CasEE: A Joint Learning Framework with Cascade Decoding for Overlapping Event Extraction (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that events appear in sentences without overlaps . overlapping event extraction is a challenging task in natural language understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework with cascade decoding for overlapping event extraction . they sequentially perform type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction based on the specific former prediction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on a public event extraction benchmark . it sequentially performs type detection, trigger extraction and argument extraction . |
Direct Preference Optimization of Video Large Multimodal Models from Language Model Reward (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruohong Zhang, Liangke Gui, Zhiqing Sun, Yihao Feng, Keyang Xu, Yuanhan Zhang, Di Fu, Chunyuan Li, Alexander G Hauptmann, Yonatan Bisk, Yiming Yang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have demonstrated that direct preference optimization (DPO) can be effective in generalizing large language models, but its effectiveness in video domain remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes detailed video captions as a proxy of video content to enable language models to incorporate this information as supporting evidence for scoring video Question Answering (QA) predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it can be used to align language models with video content and improves performance on open-ended video QA tasks. |
Chart2Code53: A Large-Scale Diverse and Complex Dataset for Enhancing Chart-to-Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Tianhao Niu, Yiming Cui, Baoxin Wang, Xiao Xu, Xin Yao, Qingfu Zhu, Dayong Wu, Shijin Wang, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing Chart2code-related training datasets suffer from limited scale, limited type coverage, and inadequate complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to synthesize chart2code-related training datasets using web plotting code and chart images to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset exhibits the greatest diversity and higher complexity compared to other open-source Chart2code related datasets. |
Exposing Numeracy Gaps: A Benchmark to Evaluate Fundamental Numerical Abilities in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoyang Li, Xuejia Chen, Zhanchao Xu, Darian Li, Nicole Hu, Fei Teng, Yiming Li, Luyu Qiu, Chen Jason Zhang, Li Qing, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on linguistic competence or structured mathematical problem-solving, neglecting fundamental numerical reasoning required in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate numerical capabilities for large language models . they use a dataset to assess number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates six fundamental numerical capabilities: number recognition, arithmetic operations, contextual retrieval, comparison, summary, and multi-step reasoning. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
Flexibly Utilize Memory for Long-Term Conversation via a Fragment-then-Compose Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Cai Ke, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Yifan Xiang, Lin Gui, Zhongyang Li, Baojun Wang, Yue Yu, Hui Wang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models extract useful information from conversation history to enhance the response in long-term conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fragment-then-Compose framework to optimize memory utilization for long-term open-domain conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to extract useful information from conversation history . it can be adapted to different situations and improve response generation . |
Unsupervised Cross-lingual Transfer of Word Embedding Spaces (D18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-lingual word mapping require cross-linguistic supervision, but this is not available for many low resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that learns transformation functions over corresponding word embedding spaces using a distributed distributional matching algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on bilingual lexicon induction and cross-lingual word similarity prediction datasets than other supervised and unsupervised methods. |
KG-FiD: Infusing Knowledge Graph in Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Donghan Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Xiang Ren, Yiming Yang, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) models typically include a retrieving module and a reading module. |
| Approach: | They propose a new open-domain question-answering framework that uses a knowledge-enhanced version of FiD to improve the approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on ODQA benchmark datasets with less than 40% computation cost. |
OpenRLHF: A Ray-based Easy-to-use, Scalable and High-performance RLHF Framework (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
Jian Hu, Xibin Wu, Wei Shen, Jason Klein Liu, Weixun Wang, Songlin Jiang, Haoran Wang, Hao Chen, Bin Chen, Wenkai Fang, null Xianyu, Yu Cao, Haotian Xu, Yiming Liu
| Challenge: | Existing RLHF frameworks face inference bottlenecks and complexity barriers restricting their accessibility for newcomers. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source RLHF framework that can be used to train large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior training efficiency with speedups ranging from 1.22 to 1.68 across different model sizes compared to state-of-the-art frameworks, while requiring significantly fewer lines of code for implementation. |
Tree-of-Quote Prompting Improves Factuality and Attribution in Multi-Hop and Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Justin Xu, Yiming Li, Zizheng Zhang, Augustine Yui Hei Luk, Mayank Jobanputra, Samarth Oza, Ashley Murray, Meghana Reddy Kasula, Andrew Parker, David W Eyre
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce fluent but factually incorrect outputs, a phenomenon commonly referred to as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Quote framework that decomposes complex questions into subquestions and generates quotes to support each step without retrieval. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on StrategyQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, MuSiQue, MoreHopQ, and MedQA show that ToQ improves factuality and attribution over baselines. |
Active Retrieval Augmented Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengbao Jiang, Frank Xu, Luyu Gao, Zhiqing Sun, Qian Liu, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Yiming Yang, Jamie Callan, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Generative language models (LMs) have a tendency to hallucinate and create inaccurate output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior or competitive performance on all tasks . iteratively uses a prediction of the upcoming sentence to anticipate future content . |
Retrieval-based Question Answering with Passage Expansion Using a Knowledge Graph (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in dense neural retrievers and language models have hindered performance, especially for less common entities and facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal passage retrieval model that combines entity features and textual data to improve retrieval precision for less common entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval precision on less common entities and facts on common benchmarks. |