Papers by Yun Zhu
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Li, Xiaoran Shang, Qizhi Pei, Yun Zhu, Xin Gao, Honglin Lin, Zhanping Zhong, Zhuoshi Pan, Zheng Liu, Xiaoyang Wang, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Feng Zhao, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | High-quality post-training data is the primary engine driving LLM capabilities . datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking their true developmental context . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development using data lineage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework characterizes domain-specific structural patterns in Math-oriented datasets and general-domain corpora. |
LIFTED: Multimodal Clinical Trial Outcome Prediction via Large Language Models and Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Clinical trials are costly and pivotal processes that require substantial expenses . a new approach to integrate multimodal data for clinical outcome prediction is needed . |
| Approach: | a proposed framework transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions . a sparse Mixture-of-Experts mechanism then identifies shared patterns across modalities . |
| Outcome: | a proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in predicting clinical trial outcomes . it transforms modality-specific data into natural language descriptions, encoded via unified encoders . |
Tag-Instruct: Controlled Instruction Complexity Enhancement through Structure-based Augmentation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | High-quality instruction data is crucial for developing large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches struggle to effectively control instruction complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses instructions into a compact tag space and enhances complexity through RL-guided tag expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in the evaluation of instruction complexity augmentation and semantic compression of text into a compact tag space. |
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)
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Zheng Liu, Honglin Lin, Xiaoyang Wang, Xin Gao, Yu Li, Mengzhang Cai, Yun Zhu, Zhanping Zhong, Qizhi Pei, Zhuoshi Pan, Xiaoran Shang, Conghui He, Bin Cui, Wentao Zhang, Lijun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on combining different information levels but overlook interconnections, i.e., contextual textual information among nodes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while reducing tokens significantly. |
Meta-Reflection: A Feedback-Free Reflection Learning Framework (2025.acl-long)
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Yaoke Wang, Yun Zhu, XintongBao XintongBao, Wenqiao Zhang, Suyang Dai, Kehan Chen, Wenqiang Li, Gang Huang, Siliang Tang, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve large language models' ability to understand and reason are limited by external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-free reflection mechanism that requires only a single inference pass without external feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on an industrial e-commerce benchmark and public datasets. |
Chinese Lexical Substitution: Dataset and Method (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for lexical substitution (LS) are limited and limited in coverage . despite extensive research on Lexical Substitution in various languages, there is limited evidence for LS in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and machine collaboration to construct a Chinese LS dataset . they combine four unsupervised LS methods to generate candidate substitutes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks on the Chinese lexical substitution task. |
Infusing Disease Knowledge into BERT for Health Question Answering, Medical Inference and Disease Name Recognition (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to augment pre-trained language models with disease knowledge are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to augment BERT-like pre-trained language models with disease knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a suite of BERT models over three tasks. |
SERM: Self-Evolving Relevance Model with Agent-Driven Learning from Massive Query Streams (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenglong Wang, Canjia Li, Xingzhao Zhu, Yifu Huo, Huiyu Wang, Weixiong Lin, Yun Yang, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate relevance judgments are limited due to dynamic nature of query distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evolving relevance model approach to generalize queries to practical search scenarios . they use a multi-agent sample miner and a relevance annotator to generate reliable labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve significant performance gains on a large-scale industrial platform, validated by offline multilingual evaluations and online testing. |
ScreenQA: Large-Scale Question-Answer Pairs Over Mobile App Screenshots (2025.naacl-long)
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Yu-Chung Hsiao, Fedir Zubach, Gilles Baechler, Srinivas Sunkara, Victor Carbune, Jason Lin, Maria Wang, Yun Zhu, Jindong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing screen datasets focus on low-level structural and component understanding or on a much higher-level composite task such as navigation and task completion for autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate 86k question-answer pairs over the RICO dataset to benchmark screen content understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset covers full answers, short answer phrases, and corresponding UI contents with bounding boxes, enabling four subtasks to address various application scenarios. |
An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build parallel sentence simplification corpora are limited . SS is used to rephrase sentences into simpler forms for those with cognitive disabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpors using a parallel approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiLarge and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
M³GQA: A Multi-Entity Multi-Hop Multi-Setting Graph Question Answering Benchmark (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | GraphRAG systems have achieved remarkable progress in enhancing performance and reliability of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a GraphRAG benchmark focusing on multi-entity queries with six settings for comprehensive evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can construct diverse data with semantically correct ground-truth reasoning paths. |
PILOT: Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models lack the capacity to formulate global strategies due to latency and availability constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance by synthesizing a query-conditioned Latent Guide. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on mathematical and coding benchmarks with negligible inference latency. |
Towards an On-device Agent for Text Rewriting (2024.findings-naacl)
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Yun Zhu, Yinxiao Liu, Felix Stahlberg, Shankar Kumar, Yu-Hui Chen, Liangchen Luo, Lei Shu, Renjie Liu, Jindong Chen, Lei Meng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities for text rewriting, however creating a smaller yet potent language model presents two formidable challenges: costly data collection and absence of emergent capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new instruction tuning method to develop a mo-bile text rewriting model that leverages LLM-generated data and heuristic reinforcement learning, eliminating the need for human data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the current state-of-the-art LLMs in text rewriting while maintaining a significantly reduced model size using public benchmark EditEval and our new benchmark. |
HIT: Nested Named Entity Recognition via Head-Tail Pair and Token Interaction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing due to the nature of the named entity. |
| Approach: | They propose a nested NER model that leverages two key properties pertaining to the named entity, including explicit boundary tokens and tight internal connection between tokens within the boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on three public NER datasets. |
Composition-based Heterogeneous Graph Multi-channel Attention Network for Multi-aspect Multi-sentiment Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focus on aspect terms with the same sentiment polarity . current methods focus on sentences with only one aspect term or multiple aspect terms . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to model inter-aspect relationships and aspect-context relationships simultaneously using a heterogeneous graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict sentiments towards the given aspect term in a sentence . it can provide more detailed predictions compared with sentence-level sentiment analysis. |
R3Mem: Bridging Memory Retention and Retrieval via Reversible Compression (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory solutions that store information via parameters struggle with reliable retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory network that optimizes both information Retention and Retrieval through Reversible context compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed memory network outperforms conventional memory modules in long-horizon interaction tasks like conversational agents and achieves state-of-the-art performance in language modeling and retrieval-augmented generation tasks. |
RULE: Reliable Multimodal RAG for Factuality in Medical Vision Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing medical large vision language models often generate inaccurate and irrelevant answers that do not align with established medical facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy for controlling factuality risk through calibrated selection of the number of retrieved contexts and a preference dataset to fine-tune the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 20.8% on three medical VQA datasets. |
ParaLS: Lexical Substitution via Pretrained Paraphraser (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lexical substitution (LS) is an extremely powerful technology that can be used as a backbone of various NLP applications such as writing assistance. |
| Approach: | They propose two simple decoding strategies that focus on the variations of the target word during decoding to generate substitutes from a paraphraser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art LS methods based on pre-trained language models on three benchmarks. |
PromptAttack: Probing Dialogue State Trackers with Adversarial Prompts (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Toward building more robust and reliable conversational systems, we introduce a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based learning approach to automatically generate effective adversarial examples to probe DST models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leads to the greatest reduction in accuracy and the best attack success rate while maintaining good fluency and a low perturbation ratio. |
FACT: Examining the Effectiveness of Iterative Context Rewriting for Multi-fact Retrieval (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, but struggle with tasks requiring simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that refines context through successive rounds of rewriting to address this problem by finding all Crucial Texts (FACT) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multi-fact retrieval performance across tasks, though improvements are less notable in general-purpose QA scenarios. |
CLeVeR: Multi-modal Contrastive Learning for Vulnerability Code Representation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting code capture the overall semantics of the code rather than its intrinsic vulnerability-specific semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that leverages contrastive learning to generate precise vulnerability code representations under the supervision of vulnerability descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods in vulnerability detection tasks by 11.85% and 13.61%. |
Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations: A Survey of Methods, Trends, Challenges and Prospects (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (MERC) is a new way to enhance human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | This survey offers a systematic overview of Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations . it examines motivations, core tasks, representative methods, and evaluation strategies . |
| Outcome: | The survey examines the effectiveness of MERC and its evaluation strategies. |
Scaling Down, Serving Fast: Compressing and Deploying Efficient LLMs for Recommendation Systems (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Kayhan Behdin, Ata Fatahibaarzi, Qingquan Song, Yun Dai, Aman Gupta, Zhipeng Wang, Hejian Sang, Shao Tang, Gregory Dexter, Sirou Zhu, Siyu Zhu, Tejas Dharamsi, Vignesh Kothapalli, Zhoutong Fu, Yihan Cao, Pin-Lun Hsu, Fedor Borisyuk, Natesh S. Pillai, Luke Simon, Rahul Mazumder
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques for training and deploying small language models that deliver high performance for a variety of industry use cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques retain much of the quality of larger models while reducing training/serving costs and latency. |
Astra: Activation-Space Tail-Eigenvector Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained models are limited due to suboptimal activation subspaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages tail eigenvectors of model output activations to construct low-rank adapters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods across 16 benchmarks and surpasses full fine-tuning in certain scenarios. |
Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Chinese idioms are hard to understand by children and non-native speakers due to their non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to rephrase idiom-containing sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence’s meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has better performance than baselines based on the established dataset. |
Fusion-Eval: Integrating Assistant Evaluators with LLMs (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have employed large language models (LLMs) as reference-free metrics for NLG evaluation, enhancing adaptability to new tasks tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to integrate insights from various assistant evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a 0.962 system-level Kendall-Tau correlation with humans on SummEval and a 0.7444 turn-level Spearman correlation on TopicalChat, which is significantly higher than baseline methods. |
InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Contrastive Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods suffer from severe domain specificity . existing methods for general instruction-following fail on reasoning tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes contrastive entropy as a domain-adaptive selection criterion through warmup calibration, bi-directional NLL filtering, and entropic-based ranking. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that InstructDiff outperforms baseline training on reasoning tasks while using only 10% of the data. |
MedVerse: Efficient and Reliable Medical Reasoning via DAG-Structured Parallel Execution (2026.acl-long)
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Jianwen Chen, Xinyu Yang, Peng Xia, Arian Azarang, Yueh Z Lee, Gang Li, Hongtu Zhu, Yun Li, Beidi Chen, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large reasoning models have broadened the capabilities of medical artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph process based on Petri Net theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning framework improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9%. |
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies explore approaches to synthesize instruction data with open-sourced LLMs but require high-quality human-crafted seed data. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end framework to synthesize high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data. |
An Efficient Conversational Smart Compose System (2023.acl-demo)
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Yun Zhu, Xiayu Chen, Lei Shu, Bowen Tan, Xinying Song, Lijuan Liu, Maria Wang, Jindong Chen, Ning Ruan
| Challenge: | a cloud-based smart compose system is designed to improve human-to-human conversation efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a cloud-based smart compose system to improve conversation efficiency . they propose heuristics to achieve the best trade-off between quality and latency . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces latency without losing composing quality further. |
COSMOS: Connectivity-Oriented Submodular Maximization for Optimal Subgraph Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms treat facts independently or employ myopic search, failing to optimize collective subgraph utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formalizes evidence retrieval as a constrained submodular maximization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the trade-off between information relevance and structural complexity. |
Collaborative Document Simplification Using Multi-Agent Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document simplification requires complex factors such as technical terminology, metaphors, and overall coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for document simplification based on large language models that emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents, addressing the intricate demands of document simplification. |
MCLE-Mol: Empowering LLM with Molecular Comprehension and Low-Cost Continual Evolution for Interpretable Property Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhili Pu, Lantian Zhang, Hao Duan, Zhixing Zhang, Keyun Zhu, Yongqi Fan, Ruihui Hou, Tong Ruan, Yun Tang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) offer a new paradigm for molecular property prediction (MPP), yet a semantic gap between natural language and molecul representations limits their ability to capture structure–activity relationships (SAR). |
| Approach: | They propose an ML–LLM–Rule collaborative framework for MPP that injects ML-derived substructure attribution values into LLMs and calibrates them under specific chemical contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple benchmark datasets and is highly interpretable. |
Post-Hoc Watermarking for Robust Detection in Text Generated by Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document simplification address complex factors such as technical terminology, metaphors, and overall coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework AgentSimp for document simplification based on large language models that simulates collaboration among agents through roles played by multiple agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces simplified documents that are more thoroughly simplified and more coherent across various articles and styles. |
SportQA: A Benchmark for Sports Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Haotian Xia, Zhengbang Yang, Yuqing Wang, Rhys Tracy, Yun Zhao, Dongdong Huang, Zezhi Chen, Yan Zhu, Yuan-fang Wang, Weining Shen
| Challenge: | SportQA is a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) sports knowledge is characterized by its fast pace, variety of types, abundance of strategies, and rich player narratives . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed for evaluating Large Language Models in the context of sports understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to bridge the gap between existing and specialized benchmarks in sports understanding. |
RedCoast: A Lightweight Tool to Automate Distributed Training of LLMs on Any GPU/TPUs (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine learning (ML) are attributed to large language models (LLMs), but their escalating memory requirements require developers to partition a large model to distribute it across multiple GPUs or TPUs. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and user-friendly tool to automate distributed training and inference for LLMs and to simplify ML pipeline development. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool automates distributed training and inference for LLMs, and simplifies ML pipeline development. |
Toward Fully Exploiting Heterogeneous Corpus:A Decoupled Named Entity Recognition Model with Two-stage Training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental and widely used task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled NER model with two-stage training to take advantage of heterogeneous corpus, including dictionaries, distantly supervised instances, and human-annotated instances. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model improves against baselines and can be scaled to a large extent. |
LayAlign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are pretrained on multilingual corpora but exhibit suboptimal performance on low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates representations from all encoder layers and an adaptive fusion-enhanced attention mechanism to enable layer-wise interaction between the LLM and the multilingual encoder. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multilingual reasoning tasks show that the proposed framework outperforms baselines. |
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Zhaowei Liu, Hanyang Cao, Zhi Yang, Zhiqiang Liu, Sizhe Wang, Jinyi Niu, Chuqi Wang, Yanhui Wang, Xiaolong Liang, Xiaoming Huang, Bing Zhu, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Chen, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning with Dense Rewards from Language Model Critic (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences, but the sparsity of these signals can lead to inefficient and unstable learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes the critique capability of Large Language Models to produce intermediate-step rewards during RL training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves sample efficiency and the overall performance of the policy model, supported by both automatic and human evaluation. |
Proofread: Fixes All Errors with One Tap (2024.acl-demos)
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Renjie Liu, Yanxiang Zhang, Yun Zhu, Haicheng Sun, Yuanbo Zhang, Michael Huang, Shanqing Cai, Lei Meng, Shumin Zhai
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on a human-labeled golden set showed our tuned PaLM2-XS model achieved 85.56% good ratio. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage tuning approach to acquire the dedicated Large Language Model for the feature, followed by a reinforcement learning approach for targeted refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 85.56% good quality on Rewrite and proofread tasks on human-labeled golden sets. |