Papers by Yu Ran
SumSurvey: An Abstractive Dataset of Scientific Survey Papers for Long Document Summarization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a growing need for long document summarization datasets with 16k input is causing problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset to analyze salient information in long document summarizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing models and LLMs in the distribution form of salient information and the distribution of salinal information is an indicator of quality. |
MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved generation and reasoning capabilities compared to traditional BERT-sized models due to massive number of parameters and extensive pre-training on vast textual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of large language models . they propose to fine-tune only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter improves performance on four biomedical tasks without requiring computational resources or sharing data with third parties. |
BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ran Xu, Wenqi Shi, Yue Yu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yanqiao Zhu, May Dongmei Wang, Joyce Ho, Chao Zhang, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedically tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedic data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedically corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets confirm the performance of the retrieval model on various biomedically demanding tasks. |
RoseRAG: Robust Retrieval-augmented Generation with Small-scale LLMs via Margin-aware Preference Optimization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but face high computational costs and latency, limiting their deployment in resource-constrained settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust RAG framework for large language models via Margin-aware Preference Optimization to enhance the accuracy and reliability of SLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks on three open-domain question answering tasks. |
EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Shi, Ran Xu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Jieyu Zhang, Hang Wu, Yuanda Zhu, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | EHRAgent enables clinicians to interact with EHRs using natural language . reliance on rule-based conversion systems often necessitates additional training or effort from data engineers. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model agent that generates and executes code in natural language to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate on three real-world EHR datasets. |
Retrieval-augmented GUI Agents with Generative Guidelines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | GUI agents powered by vision-language models struggle with real-world tasks due to their complex nature and limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight vision-language model that leverages web tutorials at inferencetime to synthesize GUI agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline GUI agents and surpasses other inference baselines by 2.6% to 13.3% across two model sizes. |
Cold-Start Data Selection for Better Few-shot Language Model Fine-tuning: A Prompt-based Uncertainty Propagation Approach (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved competitive performance with limited labeled data for many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based data selection method for pre-trained language models fine-tuning under cold-start scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the strongest cold-start data selection baselines on six text classification datasets with 128 labels. |
Layer-aware Dual-directional Modulation for Low-resource Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in Machine Translation (MT) however, a performance gap persists between high-resource and low-resourced languages due to imbalanced pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise metric to quantify the activation divergence between high- and low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard LoRA fine-tuning on Chinese-to-seven low-resource language translations. |
LongAttn: Selecting Long-context Training Data via Token-level Attention (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select long-context data often rely on sentence-level analysis, which can be greatly optimized in both performance and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level framework which quantifies long-range dependencies for LLMs by calculating token-based dependency strength and distribution uniformity of token scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies long-range dependencies, enabling more accurate and efficient data selection. |
Towards Provably Secure Generative AI: Reliable Consensus Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Sicheng Pan, Zhuoyu Sun, Yifei Liu, Yuhong Nie, Bo Ran, Baohan Huang, Xufeng Zhang, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo, Licheng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on generative AI security is driven by mutually reinforcing attack and defense methodologies grounded in empirical experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that uses a random sampling algorithm to control risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves robustness and utility while maintaining latency comparable to existing algorithms. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
Multilingual Generative Retrieval via Cross-lingual Semantic Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual retrieval still face cross-lingual identifier misalignment and identifiere inflation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies semantically equivalent multilingual keywords into shared atoms to align semantics and compresses the identifier space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual alignment and reduces redundancy. |
Self-Supervised Sentence Polishing by Adding Engaging Modifiers (2023.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | a typical way to polish sentences is to add engaging modifiers, which enhance the meaning of the sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a task that requires polishing sentences while maintaining fluency . they remove engaging modifiers from public resources and fine-tune LongLM to reconstruct original sentences from corrupted ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more engaging sentences with suitable modifiers than strong baselines while keeping fluency. |
Decoupling Mixture-of-Graphs: Unseen Relational Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion by Fusing Ontology and Textual Experts (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) fail in unseen relation representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use three kinds of graphs to obtain unseen relation representations . they propose to decouple mixture-of-graph experts (DMoG) for unseened relations learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on unseen relation representations. |
Does Large Language Model Contain Task-Specific Neurons? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST) this method identifies task- specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can locate task-specific neurons across eight public tasks. |
Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | despite their extensive context window, long-context language models fail in some basic cases . a recent study shows that long-cot methods are not necessary for long-constituency tasks . |
| Approach: | a new study evaluates long-context language models with a large context window . the authors propose a method that can be well addressed with arbitrary reasoning steps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. |
JointGT: Graph-Text Joint Representation Learning for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained models for knowledgegraph-to-text generation ignore graph structure during encoding and lack elaborate pre-training tasks to explicitly model graph-text alignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-text joint representation learning model called JointGT which incorporates a structure-aware semantic aggregation module into each Transformer layer to preserve the graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on various KG-to-text datasets. |
Breaking Consensus Bias: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RL approaches for MT face fixed references or the production of homogeneous references leading to mode collapse in unsupervised settings. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-Driven Unsupervised RL framework for machine translation that leverages entropy for supervision construction and self-evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised and unsupervised baselines in multiple language pairs. |
GRPO-Guided Modality Selection Enhanced LoRA-Tuned LLMs for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to identify speakers’ emotional states by utilizing text, audio, and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive modality selection framework for multimodal emotion recognition in conversation that integrates all available modalities into one . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multimodal dialogue datasets and is available at https://github.com/youflyaway/Modality-Selection-Enhanced-LoRA-Tuned-LLMs. |
ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation (2025.naacl-long)
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Yanzhou Pan, Huawei Lin, Yide Ran, Jiamin Chen, Xiaodong Yu, Weijie Zhao, Denghui Zhang, Zhaozhuo Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a third-party data valuation approach that assesses the value of individual data samples and proposes a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, showing significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase. |
Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Ran Xu, Hejie Cui, Yue Yu, Xuan Kan, Wenqi Shi, Yuchen Zhuang, May Dongmei Wang, Wei Jin, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Clinical natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield that requires the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of unstructured clinical text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which infuses knowledge into clinical text generation with LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across 8 clinical NLP tasks and 18 datasets by 7.7%-8.7% on average. |
RAM-EHR: Retrieval Augmentation Meets Clinical Predictions on Electronic Health Records (2024.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for EHRs rely on knowledge from a single source and do not capture the semantic information for medical codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval AugMentation pipeline to augment clinical prediction on EHRs . they use multiple knowledge sources to convert them into text and use consistency regularization to capture complementary information from patient visits and summarized knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two EHR datasets show that RAM-EHR improves clinical prediction tasks. |
Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Signal Amplification in Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Math Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a framework to mitigate spurious optimization signals is proposed for test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is an effective paradigm for improving large language models on structured challenging reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate spurious optimization signals from label noise . they propose to use a frequency-based sampling strategy to exclude ambiguous samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing TTRL baselines on three large language models across multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks. |
OpenRubrics: Towards Scalable Synthetic Rubric Generation for Reward Modeling and LLM Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture multifaceted nature of human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a rubric-based reward model that uses a large collection of prompt, rubric pairs to generate a scalar score or preference label for each response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4% across multiple benchmarks. |
RAG in the Wild: On the (In)effectiveness of LLMs with Mixture-of-Knowledge Retrieval Augmentation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. |
| Approach: | They evaluate RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. |
When and Who? Conversation Transition Based on Bot-Agent Symbiosis Learning Network (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a bot-agent symbiosis is a method for transparent conversation transition in online customer service applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a bot-agent symbiosis approach to solve conversation transition problems . they provide user feedback and develop deep neural networks to predict the NPS . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-time data generated from an online service support platform. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion from Pretrained Language Models with Knowledge Constraints (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual knowledge graph completion do not align with mKGC tasks because of their English-centric bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pretrained language models to solve queries in different languages by reasoning a tail entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous SOTA on Hits@1 and Hits @10 by 12.32% and 16.03% on public datasets. |
Accelerate Parallelizable Reasoning via Parallel Decoding within One Sequence (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parallelizable reasoning tasks are inefficient, says a new study . generating lengthy reasoning sequences is computationally expensive and time-consuming, says the study authors . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decodes multiple tokens per forward pass using a tree-like attention mask . their method achieves nearly 100% speedup in decoding while basically maintaining the answer quality . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the method achieves nearly 100% speedup in decoding while maintaining the answer quality. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion via Efficient Multilingual Knowledge Sharing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing MKGC research ignores the shareability of cross-lingual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual knowledge Graph Completion framework that leverages multilingual shared knowledge to significantly enhance performance through two components: Knowledge-level Grouped Mixture of Experts (KL-GMoE) and Iterative Entity Reranking (IER). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves improvements of 5.47%, 3.27%, and 1.01% in the Hits@1, Hits @3, and Hits_10 metrics, respectively, compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MKGC method. |