Papers by Yu Lan
CoCo: Coherence-Enhanced Machine-Generated Text Detection Under Low Resource With Contrastive Learning (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent proposed methods fail to consider the linguistic structure of texts and lack the ability to handle the low-resource problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a coherence-based contrastive learning model named CoCo to detect MGTs under low-resource scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two datasets and two self-constructed datasets. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
Know Your Place: Diagnosing Implicit Social Adaptation Failures in Chinese Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest that failures of large language models in social contexts are not due to limited linguistic competence, but to inappropriate recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conduct controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes social adaptation into three orthogonal dimensions and conducts controlled comparisons across multiple Chinese LLMs under implicit and explicit conditions. |
Reason in Chains, Learn in Trees: Self-Rectification and Grafting for Multi-turn Agent Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning for Large Language Models treat trajectories as independent chains and ignore critical steps that may disproportionally impact reasoning outcome. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories by identifying and merging functionally similar steps/nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework recovers latent correlated reward structure across seemingly independent trajectories. |
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jianxiang Yu, Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to review scientific papers are limited by their content or quality . SEA is a framework for automated scientific review, but its contents are generic or partial. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated scientific review using large language models . they propose to use a standardized review dataset to fine-tune an LLM to generate high-quality reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate high-quality reviews from standardized datasets and improves on the existing feedback mechanisms. |
OpenWebVoyager: Building Multimodal Web Agents via Iterative Real-World Exploration, Feedback and Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Hongliang He, Wenlin Yao, Kaixin Ma, Wenhao Yu, Hongming Zhang, Tianqing Fang, Zhenzhong Lan, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on building text-only agents in synthetic environments where the reward signals are clearly defined. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal web agent that can autonomously conduct real-world exploration and improve itself after each iteration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves itself after each iteration, demonstrating strong performance across multiple test sets. |
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangyang Zhong, Yanmei Gu, Zhengqing Zang, Xiaomeng Li, Yuqi Ding, Xibei Jia, Yuting Shen, Zhenzhong Lan, Liwang Zhu, Weiping Liu, Junlin Zhou, Haisheng Liu, Zhong Xin Yu, Pengxin Luo, Donglian Qi, Yunfeng Yan, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding. |
| Approach: | They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss. |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiang Hu, Hongyu Fu, Jinge Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhikun Li, Renjun Xu, Yu Lu, Yaochu Jin, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate research ideas rely on retrieval or prompt engineering to generate ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses iterative planning and search to boost creative potential of LLMs by integrating external knowledge with broader and deeper insights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in generating 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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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 . |
WebVoyager: Building an End-to-End Web Agent with Large Multimodal Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing web agents only handle one input modality and are evaluated only in simplified web simulators or static web snapshots, greatly limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a large multimodal model-powered web agent that can complete user instructions end-to-end by interacting with real-world websites. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves 59.1% task success rate, surpassing both GPT-4 and WebVoyager setups. |
Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Convolutional Networks (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align multilingual knowledge graphs with counterparts in different languages are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach for cross-lingual KG alignment via graph convolutional networks . they train GCNs to embed entities of each language into a unified vector space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach gets the best performance on real multilingual KGs compared with other embedding-based approaches. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
Do Large Language Models Truly Grasp Addition? A Rule-Focused Diagnostic Using Two-Integer Arithmetic (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex math but fail on basic addition, raising the question of whether they grasp rules or are merely reproducing patterns. |
| Approach: | They systematically probe LLMs’ understanding of two-integer addition by testing three crucial properties: commutativity (A+B=B+A), representation invariance via symbolic remapping and consistent accuracy scaling with operand length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve high numeric accuracy but fail basic addition tasks. |
Memformer: A Memory-Augmented Transformer for Sequence Modeling (2022.findings-aacl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Memformer uses 8.1x less memory space and 3.2x faster on inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient neural network that utilizes an external dynamic memory to encode and retrieve past information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance against baselines with 8.1x less memory space and 3.2x faster on inference. |
Can Reasoning Path still be Effective as Input? Bridging Post-Reasoning to Chain-of-Thought Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Chengzhengxu Li, Xiaoming Liu, Zhaohan Zhang, Shengchao Liu, Guoxin Ma, Yu Lan, Cong Wang, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing work on reducing CoT generation in reasoning impairs the necessary information for deriving the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning paradigm that takes CoT as a part of context to simplify the reasoning task for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the generation length of LLMs, but its effectiveness hinges on the efficiency and reliability of the contextual CoT generation. |
Does DetectGPT Fully Utilize Perturbation? Bridging Selective Perturbation to Fine-tuned Contrastive Learning Detector would be Better (2024.acl-long)
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Shengchao Liu, Xiaoming Liu, Yichen Wang, Zehua Cheng, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Yu Lan, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect MGT from human-written texts are inadequate . existing methods are fine-tuned and zero-shot metric-based, but they can be more accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuned detector that can detect MGT from human-written texts by contrastive learning on selective perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.20% on four public datasets. |
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current studies on text image translation face bottlenecks due to lack of a publicly available dataset and poor optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a text image translation model with a multimodal codebook and an OCR dataset for Chinese-English translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. |
Born Pragmatic, Trained to Hallucinate? Quantifying the Origins of Contextual Bias in LLMs via the PaCE Benchmark (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel at capturing communicative intent, but they have a side effect: pragmatic hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to quantify the impact of pragmatic hallucination on large language models . they propose RLHF and SFT to induce a strong tendency for pragmatic over-attribution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in predicting pragmatic hallucinations . the evaluations show that current alignment paradigms lack precise control over pragmatic boundaries . |
Uni-Encoder: A Fast and Accurate Response Selection Paradigm for Generation-Based Dialogue Systems (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to decode a given context-candidate pair are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that keeps full attention over each pair while only encoding the context once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves new state-of-the-art results on four benchmark datasets with high computational efficiency. |
Understanding the Therapeutic Relationship between Counselors and Clients in Online Text-based Counseling using LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In traditional face-to-face therapy, the assessment of therapeutic alliance is not directly translated to text-based settings. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic approach to understand the development of therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling by using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach demonstrates that the framework is effective in identifying the therapeutic alliance in text-based counseling. |
Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent discrete latent variable models have received a surge of interest in both NLP and CV . they are comparable to the continuous counterparts in representation learning, but are more interpretable in their predictions. |
| Approach: | They develop a topic-informed discrete latent variable model for semantic textual similarity . they inject the quantized representation into a transformer-based language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in semantic textual similarity tasks. |
StablePT : Towards Stable Prompting for Few-shot Learning via Input Separation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt tuning have shown that language models can be effective few-shot learners with prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose to treat the hard prompt and soft prompt as separate inputs to mitigate noise brought by prompt initialization. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.97% in accuracy and reduces the standard deviation by 1.92 on average. |
RAISE: Reinforced Adaptive Instruction Selection For Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Qingsong Lv, Yangning Li, Zihua Lan, Zishan Xu, Jiwei Tang, Tingwei Lu, Yinghui Li, Wenhao Jiang, Hong-Gee Kim, Hai-Tao Zheng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing selection methods rely on static, heuristic quality scores and are executed only once before training. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic selection framework that integrates selection into every training step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates selection into every training step. |
Hyperlink-induced Pre-training for Passage Retrieval in Open-domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Jiawei Zhou, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Lan Luo, Ke Zhan, Enrui Hu, Xinyu Zhang, Hao Jiang, Zhao Cao, Fan Yu, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Lei Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train dense passage retrieval have a large data gap between upstream and downstream relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to pre-train the dense retriever with the text relevance induced by hyperlinks within Web documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods under different scenarios and in the open-domain question answering domain. |
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. |