Papers by Yixing Fan
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yihang Wang, Xu Huang, Bowen Tian, Yueyang Su, Lei Yu, Huaming Liao, Yixing Fan, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods for compressing context by removing redundant tokens are inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses information bottleneck theory to compress context . they propose to remove redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art . |
MDPO: Customized Direct Preference Optimization with a Metric-based Sampler for Question and Answer Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA data generation are limited by the dependence of existing evaluation metrics on ground truth labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of unsupervised evaluation metrics for QA data that enable multidimensional assessment based on the relationships among context,question and answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on public datasets and shows that it produces high-quality and domain-specific QA pairs. |
Controlling Risk of Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Counterfactual Prompting Framework (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rarely address the issue of predictive uncertainty, i.e., how likely it is that a RAG model’s prediction is incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that induces RAG models to alter latent factors and analyzes the effect on their answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies two critical factors affecting RAG models' confidence in their answers and analyzes the effect on their answers. |
Compete to Complete: Co-opetition Adversarial Learning for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce hallucination in large language models lack a robust mechanism for generating a generative model. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates retriever–generator training in RAG as a minimax game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval-augmented generation performance on seven benchmark datasets. |
From Relevance to Utility: Evidence Retrieval with Feedback for Fact Verification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence retrieval models are based on probability ranking principle . existing models do not align with retrieval-enhanced verification frameworks . |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-based evidence retriever that optimizes the evidence retrieval process by incorporating feedback from the claim verifier. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that the proposed method is superior to baseline methods. |
Prompt Tuning with Contradictory Intentions for Sarcasm Recognition (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have shown that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can achieve promising performance in many downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate prior knowledge about contradictory intentions into prompt tuning for sarcasm recognition by mimicking the actual intention by verbalizer engineering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mimics the actual intention by prompt construction and indicates whether the actual intent contradicts the literal content by verbalizer engineering. |
Stop Hardening Everything: A Training-Free Neuron-Level Defense for Neural Ranking Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for neural ranking models are data-centric and require retraining and adversarial data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-centric defense that addresses vulnerability at its architectural source without costly retraining or adversarial data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on MS MARCO and TREC 19 while maintaining strong performance on clean data. |
Learning to Control the Specificity in Neural Response Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative conversational models tend to favor general and trivial responses which appear frequently. |
| Approach: | They propose a controlled response generation mechanism to handle different utterance-response relationships in terms of specificity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models under automatic and human evaluations. |
Visual Named Entity Linking: A New Dataset and A Baseline (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tasks in Visual Entity Linking (VEL) rely on textual data to complement multi-modal linking or only link objects with general entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to link regions of images with corresponding entities in Knowledge Bases . they propose three sub-tasks, based on a human-annotated visual person dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on a human-annotated visual person linking dataset . the proposed sub-tasks are validated on the WIKIPerson dataset based upon the proposed methods . |
Bootstrapped Pre-training with Dynamic Identifier Prediction for Generative Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document retrieval rely on static document identifiers . experimental results show that generative retrieval is outperforms dense retrieval in document retrievals. |
| Approach: | They propose a bootstrapped pre-training method that dynamically adjusts document identifiers during pre-train to accommodate the continuing memorization of the corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing pre-training generative retrieval baselines and performs well even in zero-shot settings. |
RoCEL: Advancing Table Entity Linking through Distinctive Row and Column Contexts (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table entity linking ignore row and column contexts . existing methods for TEL focus on understanding sequential text contexts, making it difficult to adapt to the row and columns structure of tables. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage row and column contexts to enhance the semantics of mentions in entity disambiguation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline by 1.5% on the in-domain dataset and 3.7% on average across three out-of domain datasets. |
Pretraining Data Detection for Large Language Models: A Divergence-based Calibration Method (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect text in training corpus are limited due to their low token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to calibrate token probabilities for pretraining data detection by using a divergence-based calibration method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods on Chinese text on English-language benchmarks and patents. |