Papers by Ying Sun
AIDA-SEAT: Towards Reliable AI Doctor Assistant via State-Evaluation-Action Tree Enhanced LLMs in Online Hospital (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
Lianxin Sun, Xiaoying Ying, Guangya Yu, Weiyan Zhang, Chenhao Guan, Hao He, Mingxi Shang, Jianhua Li, ChunMing Wang, Tong Ruan
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on large language models or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) but these methods lack the explicit logical pathways essential for multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an AIDA-SEAT framework to provide reliable clinical decision-making support by transforming and modifying medical documents and doctors' state-evaluation-action trees. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.01% higher than current state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines across five departments, including common RAG-based methods. |
OCP: Outlier-Centric Probing for Dynamic Structured Pruning of LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing structured pruning methods fail to identify outlier-triggering tokens and uniform layer-wise sparsity misaligns with heterogeneous outlier distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prioritizes capturing outlier-triggering tokens rather than reconstructing full hidden distributions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaMA2, LLama3 and OPT show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and achieves 25% perplexity reduction at 1.6 speedup. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
Navigating the Shadows: Unveiling Effective Disturbances for Modern AI Content Detectors (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research indicates that AI-text detection systems lack robustness and struggle to effectively differentiate perturbed texts. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the robustness of current detection systems by using black-box text perturbation methods and adversarial learning experiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods assess the robustness of current detection models across perturbation granularities and the impact of perturbation data augmentation on the robustity of AI-text detectors. |
Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning (AnGFT): Elevating Professional Response Quality in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant advancements in various fields, notably in Role-Playing Conversational Agents (RPCAs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Anchoring-Guidance Fine-Tuning Framework to integrate relevant expert knowledge into RPCAs' training process to mitigate this issue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves the RPCAs’ performance in handling role-specific professional queries while preserving their robust role-playing abilities. |
Clear Up Confusion: Advancing Cross-Domain Few-Shot Relation Extraction through Relation-Aware Prompt Learning (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
Ge Bai, Chenji Lu, Daichi Guo, Shilong Li, Ying Liu, Zhang Zhang, Guanting Dong, Ruifang Liu, Sun Yong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot Relation Extraction (RE) are prone to confusion when applying knowledge to a target domain with entirely new types of relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware prompt learning method with pre-training to clear confusion by decomposing relation types through an innovative label prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous sota methods and yields better results on cross-domain few-shot RE tasks. |
DiffLM: Controllable Synthetic Data Generation via Diffusion Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their knowledge and generative capabilities, leading to a surge of interest in leveraging LLMs for high-quality data synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a controllable data synthesis framework based on variational autoencoder which leverages diffusion models to reserve more information of original distribution and format structure in the learned latent distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality data with performance exceeding that of real data by 2%–7% on seven real-world datasets. |
Instance-level Randomization: Toward More Stable LLM Evaluations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluations of large language models suffer from instability, where small changes of random factors can lead to drastic fluctuations of scores and even model rankings. |
| Approach: | They propose an instance-level randomization method to reduce variance and improve fairness in evaluations by randomizing all factors that affect evaluation scores for every single instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces variance and improves fairness in model comparisons by using instance-level randomization. |
Fantastic Questions and Where to Find Them: FairytaleQA – An Authentic Dataset for Narrative Comprehension (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Xu, Dakuo Wang, Mo Yu, Daniel Ritchie, Bingsheng Yao, Tongshuang Wu, Zheng Zhang, Toby Li, Nora Bradford, Branda Sun, Tran Hoang, Yisi Sang, Yufang Hou, Xiaojuan Ma, Diyi Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhou Yu, Mark Warschauer
| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets rarely distinguish fine-grained reading skills, such as the understanding of varying narrative elements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use FairytaleQA to generate 10,580 questions based on 278 children-friendly stories to assess model's fine-grained learning skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 10,580 questions derived from 278 children-friendly stories, covering seven types of narrative elements or relations. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
REAP: Towards Effective Training-Free Chemical Reasoning with Explicit Atomic Priors (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to instill explicit priors into LLMs often suffer from an information bottleneck . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that equips LLMs with an external knowledge base, enabling them to reason over retrieved chemical priors dynamically. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that REAP outperforms current reasoning methods and rivals state-of-the-art training-based models. |
Fantastic Semantics and Where to Find Them: Investigating Which Layers of Generative LLMs Reflect Lexical Semantics (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research suggests that contextual representations of large language models exhibit subpar performance in downstream tasks, struggling to fully capture the semantic nuances of words. |
| Approach: | They investigate the bottom-up evolution of lexical semantics for a popular LLM . they probing its hidden states at the end of each layer using a contextualized word identification task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to encode lexical semantics in lower layers while achieving weaker induction in higher layers. |
RAIDEN Benchmark: Evaluating Role-playing Conversational Agents with Measurement-Driven Custom Dialogues (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for RPCA evaluation are lacking for dialogues . authors introduce specialized judging LLM for automatic RPca evaluation . compelling role-playing agent is expected to lead to more in-depth conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the effectiveness of RPCA interactions using dialogues . they introduce a specialized judging LLM tailored for automatic RPca evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark focuses on assessing particular dimensions at different stages of a conversation, facilitated through interactions conducted by annotators. |
Punctuation-Steered Representation Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PeFT) are limited due to their prohibitive size and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes punctuation representations to achieve performance improvements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by altering the representation space alone . but it results in suboptimal performance due to the effects of the method on the output . |
LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using advanced Large Language Models, instructors can improve training of smaller models by analyzing their own model's errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages advanced Large Language Models to enhance training of smaller target models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ChatGPT on multiple benchmarks and shows that it improves on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. |
WebUncertainty: Dual-Level Uncertainty Driven Planning and Reasoning For Autonomous Web Agent (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web agents struggle with complex tasks due to rigid planning strategies and hallucination-prone reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-uncertainty-driven Adaptive Planning Mechanism that adaptively selects planning modes to navigate unknown environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better on the WebArena and WebVoyager benchmarks than existing frameworks. |
A Top-down Graph-based Tool for Modeling Classical Semantic Maps: A Case Study of Supplementary Adverbs (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Semantic map models (SMMs) construct a network-like conceptual space from cross-linguistic instances or forms based on the connectivity hypothesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based algorithm that automatically generates conceptual spaces and SMMs in a top-down manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with human annotations and other automated methods on cross-linguistic supplementary adverbs. |
EDU-CIRCUIT-HW: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models on Real-World University-Level STEM Student Handwritten Solutions (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are a promising tool for traditional education but lack authentic and domain-specific benchmarks to accurately interpret student handwritten solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MLLMs to interpret unconstrained STEM student handwritten solutions with intertwined mathematical formulas, diagrams, and textual reasoning to bridge this gap. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect and rectify recognition errors with minimal human intervention on unseen student solutions. |
MMLU-CF: A Contamination-free Multi-task Language Understanding Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qihao Zhao, Yangyu Huang, Tengchao Lv, Lei Cui, Qinzheng Sun, Shaoguang Mao, Xin Zhang, Ying Xin, Qiufeng Yin, Scarlett Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question datasets like Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) have inevitably led to benchmark contamination, resulting in unreliable evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a contamination-free MCQ benchmark called MMLU-CF which reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed MMLU-CF reassesses LLMs’ understanding of world knowledge by averting both unintentional and malicious data contamination. |
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Mengshi Chen, Yuxiang Sun, Tengchao Li, Jianwei Wang, Kai Wang, Xuemin Lin, Ying Zhang, Wenjie Zhang
| Challenge: | Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved. |
From Shijing to English and German: Resources and Evaluation for LLM Translation of Early Chinese Poetry (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) show promise in literary translation, but their performance in poetry remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates knowledge-driven, rule-based, and LLM-as-judge metrics into a Shijing corpus . their code, lexical KB, and corpus reconstruction protocols are available at https://github.com/ML-KULeuven/ShijingLLMTrans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves higher human correlation than traditional metrics and high statistical stability. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in text generation tasks, but their utilization carries inherent risks, including plagiarism and the dissemination of fake news. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to construct an AI-generated student essay that employs a range of text perturbation methods to evade detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods evade detection and maintain quality of the generated essays while avoiding plagiarism and fake news. |
Humanizing Machine-Generated Content: Evading AI-Text Detection through Adversarial Attack (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the development of large language models, there are still significant challenges in detecting whether text is generated by a machine. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a broader class of adversarial attacks to perform minor perturbations in machine-generated content to evade detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be compromised in as little as 10 seconds, and improves over iterative adversarial learning. |
LLMs Can Simulate Standardized Patients via Agent Coevolution (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuoyun Du, LujieZheng LujieZheng, Renjun Hu, Yuyang Xu, Xiawei Li, Ying Sun, Wei Chen, Jian Wu, Haolei Cai, Haochao Ying
| Challenge: | Training medical personnel using standardized patients (SPs) remains a complex challenge, necessitating extensive domain expertise and role-specific practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulated patient framework that allows patient agents to simulate diagnostic process through multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over existing reasoning methods by more than 10% in requirement alignment and better human preference after evolving over 200 cases for 10 hours with excellent generalizability. |
Fusion Makes Perfection: An Efficient Multi-Grained Matching Approach for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction (2024.naacl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract unseen relations require laborious manual annotation . a new approach uses fine-grained matching to reduce manual annotation cost . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multi-grained matching approach that uses virtual entity matching to reduce manual annotation cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and achieves inference efficiency and accuracy in zero-shot relation extraction tasks. |
Cross-Utterance Conditioned VAE for Non-Autoregressive Text-to-Speech (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-utterance conditional VAE to estimate posterior probability distribution of latent prosody features for each phoneme by conditioning on acoustic features, speaker information, and text features from past and future sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves naturalness and prosody diversity with clear margins. |
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhen Yang, Wei Du, Jie Wang, Wenze Zhou, Xiangfeng Meng, Zhengyang Wang, Suping Sun, Ziwei Du, Haodong Zou, Jie Chen, Yongbin Liu, Shicheng Tan, Jiahao Ying, Shu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions. |
Equal Truth: Rumor Detection with Invariant Group Fairness (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods rarely consider fairness issues inherent in the model . this can lead to biased predictions across stakeholder groups, undermining their detection effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to address fairness issues inherent in rumor detection models . they perform unsupervised partitioning to dynamically identify potential unfair data patterns . then, they apply invariant learning to these partitions to extract fair and informative feature representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong baselines regarding detection and fairness performance . it also shows robust performance on out-of-distribution samples . |
CFinBench: A Comprehensive Chinese Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ying Nie, Binwei Yan, Tianyu Guo, Hao Liu, Haoyu Wang, Wei He, Binfan Zheng, Weihao Wang, Qiang Li, Weijian Sun, Yunhe Wang, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks, yet their potential in more challenging task like finance, has not been fully explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the financial knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in China. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is the most comprehensive evaluation benchmark to date for LLMs in finance. |
Latent-Condensed Transformer for Efficient Long Context Modeling (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches address these bottlenecks separately: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) reduces the KV cache by projecting tokens into a low-dimensional latent space, while sparse attention reduces computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Latent-Condensed Attention mechanism that performs structured context condensation directly within MLA's latent space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces KV cache size and attention cost without adding parameters. |