Papers by Yuncheng Hua
SCAR: Data Selection via Style Consistency-Aware Response Ranking for Efficient Instruction-Tuning of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that manually ensuring a consistent response style and maintaining high data quality can significantly improve the performance of fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They introduce a style-aware response ranking system that prioritizes instruction-response pairs based on their stylistic consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses models trained on the entire dataset in coding and open-ended question-answering benchmarks. |
SOCIA-EVO: Automated Simulator Construction via Dual-Anchored Bi-Level Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong capabilities in translating natural language into code, but applying them to this domain remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-anchored evolutionary framework that combines a static blueprint and a bi-level optimization to decouple structural refinement from parameter calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies two failure modes in long-horizon LLM agents: contextual drift and optimization instability arising from conflating structural and parametric errors. |
RENOVI: A Benchmark Towards Remediating Norm Violations in Socio-Cultural Conversations (2024.findings-naacl)
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Haolan Zhan, Zhuang Li, Xiaoxi Kang, Tao Feng, Yuncheng Hua, Lizhen Qu, Yi Ying, Mei Rianto Chandra, Kelly Rosalin, Jureynolds Jureynolds, Suraj Sharma, Shilin Qu, Linhao Luo, Ingrid Zukerman, Lay-Ki Soon, Zhaleh Semnani Azad, Reza Haf
| Challenge: | Norm violations occur when individuals fail to conform to culturally accepted behaviors, which may lead to potential conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large corpus of 9,258 multi-turn dialogues annotated with social norms to equip AI systems with a remediation ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can understand and remediate norm violations step by step. |
IMO: Greedy Layer-Wise Sparse Representation Learning for Out-of-Distribution Text Classification with Pre-trained Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | IMO is a machine learning model that learns invariant features from unseen domains. |
| Approach: | They propose IMO: Invariant features Masks for Out-of-Distribution text classification to achieve OOD generalization by learning invariant feature masks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in various evaluation metrics and settings. |
CoTKR: Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge rewriting methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question’s semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a new rewriting method CoTKR for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewrite. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting and bridges the preference gap between the knowledge reactor and the question answering (QA) model. |
ACCESS : A Benchmark for Abstract Causal Event Discovery and Reasoning (2025.naacl-long)
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Vy Vo, Lizhen Qu, Tao Feng, Yuncheng Hua, Xiaoxi Kang, Songhai Fan, Tim Dwyer, Lay-Ki Soon, Gholamreza Haffari
| Challenge: | Existing methods for identifying event causality in NLP are limited in their scale and rely on lexical cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for identifying abstract causality from a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be leveraged for enhancing QA reasoning performance in LLMs. |
Causal Discovery Inspired Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yuncheng Hua, Yujin Huang, Shuo Huang, Tao Feng, Lizhen Qu, Christopher Bain, Richard Bassed, Reza Haf
| Challenge: | Emotion-cause pair extraction is a task that aims to extract emotions and the events causing such emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep latent model which captures the underlying latent structures of data and utilizes the easily transferable knowledge of emotions as the bridge to link the distributions of events in different domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the strongest baseline by approximately 11.05% on a Chinese benchmark and 2.45% on an English benchmark in terms of weighted-average F1 score. |
Beyond Words: Integrating Theory of Mind into Conversational Agents for Human-Like Belief, Desire, and Intention Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations of LLaMA-3 models demonstrate that ToM-informed alignment improves response quality, achieving win rates of 63% and 67%, respectively. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether open-source LLaMA models can represent and retain ToM-related constructs and whether they can be used to generate more aligned responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can represent and retain ToM-related constructs and improve response quality. |
Few-Shot Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering via Meta Reinforcement Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to complex question-answering (CQA) exhibit uneven performance when questions have different types, harboring inherently different characteristics, e.g., difficulty level. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-reinforcement learning approach to program induction in CQA to tackle the potential distributional bias in questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the CQA dataset while using only five trial trajectories for the top-5 retrieved questions in each support set. |
Let’s Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems (2024.findings-eacl)
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Haolan Zhan, Yufei Wang, Zhuang Li, Tao Feng, Yuncheng Hua, Suraj Sharma, Lizhen Qu, Zhaleh Semnani Azad, Ingrid Zukerman, Reza Haf
| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on negotiation dialogue systems, but no systematic review of this task has been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a systematic review of negotiation dialogue systems and to provide an overview of current research. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems are based on the literature and are compared against existing systems. |
Assistive Large Language Model Agents for Socially-Aware Negotiation Dialogues (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that virtual agents can help humans achieve task and social goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free and label-free method to identify high-quality ICL exemplars for the remediator agent and propose measurable criteria to measure the quality of the negotiation outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to improve negotiation outcomes across three negotiation topics. |