Papers by Yunlong Liang
Continual Learning with Semi-supervised Contrastive Distillation for Incremental Neural Machine Translation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-domain learning is a good solution for solving domain tasks but it requires retraining when adding a new domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit unlabeled data from the same distributions of the older domains to avoid catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits unlabeled data from the same distributions of the older domains to avoid catastrophic forgetting. |
Towards Making the Most of Dialogue Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural Chat Translation (NCT) models that use dialogue characteristics of chat are often incoherent and speakerirrelevant. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce the modeling of dialogue characteristics into the NCT model by capturing the inherent dialogue characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate conversational text between speakers of different languages. |
Towards Understanding and Improving Knowledge Distillation for Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation techniques for neural machine translation lack special treatment on the top-1 information, which is limiting the potential of KD. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to distill knowledge from top-1 predictions of teachers and a technique to infuse more additional knowledge by distilling on the data without ground-truth targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla word-level KD and outperfies the existing methods on three different students with different capacity gaps. |
A Novel Aspect-Guided Deep Transition Model for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models use aspect-independent encoders for sentence representation generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an aspect-guided deep transition model which guides the sentence encoding from scratch with a specially-designed deep transition architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on multiple datasets on aspect-category sentiment analysis and aspectterm sentiment analysis without additional features. |
A Variational Hierarchical Model for Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on cross-lingual summarization focus on pipeline methods or jointly training an end-to-end model through an auxiliary MT or MS objective. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical model for the cross-lingual summarization task . the model is based on the conditional variational auto-encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates better cross-lingual summaries than comparison models in the few-shot setting. |
D2TV: Dual Knowledge Distillation and Target-oriented Vision Modeling for Many-to-Many Multimodal Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on improving MMS models by filtering summary-unrelated visual features with implicit learning or explicitly complex training objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal multimodal summarization task that aims to generate summaries in any language with document inputs in any languages and the corresponding image sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can generate summaries in any language with document inputs in any languages and the corresponding image sequence. |
THOR-MoE: Hierarchical Task-Guided and Context-Responsive Routing for Neural Machine Translation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) solutions may lead to sub-optimal performance . thor-moe uses domain/linguistics-specific knowledge, but lacks context-responsive routing policies . |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) solution which uses task knowledge of NMT into MoE and provides hierarchical task-guided and context-responsive routing policies. |
| Outcome: | thor-MoE can achieve an average improvement of 0.75 BLEU with less than 22% activated parameters on multi-domain translation tasks. |
MSCTD: A Multimodal Sentiment Chat Translation Dataset (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal machine translation and textual chat translation have received considerable attention . however, little research has been devoted to multimodal machine translator in conversations . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate more accurate translations with the help of dialogue history and visual context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can generate more accurate translations with the help of dialogue history and visual context. |
Cross-Lingual Knowledge Editing in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge editing is a promising technique to adapt large language models to new knowledge without retraining from scratch. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to translate a large-scale cross-lingual synthetic dataset from English to Chinese and then to evaluate their performance in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can change model performance on several special cases without retraining from scratch. |
Modeling Bilingual Conversational Characteristics for Neural Chat Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural chat translation aims to translate bilingual conversational text due to its inherent characteristics such as role preference, dialogue coherence, and translation consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the translation quality of conversational text by learning distributions of bilingual conversational characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline models and is widely available. |
CM-Align: Consistency-based Multilingual Alignment for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current large language models (LLMs) show a significant performance gap in alignment between English and other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a consistency-based method to construct high-quality multilingual preference data for improving multilingual alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on three LLMs and three common tasks and shows that it performs better than current methods. |
Towards Unifying Multi-Lingual and Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on multilingual summarization and cross-lingual summmarization has been limited due to their different definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e. many-to-many summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the zero-shot directions. |
Multilingual Knowledge Editing with Language-Agnostic Factual Neurons (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update factual knowledge overlook connections of same knowledge between different languages, resulting in knowledge conflicts and limited edit performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to edit multilingual knowledge simultaneously that avoids knowledge conflicts and improves edit performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids knowledge conflicts and improves edit performance on bi-ZsRE and MzsRE benchmarks. |
A Quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever for Syntactically-Controlled Paraphrase Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing syntactically-controlled paraphrase generation models perform well with human-annotated or well-chosen syntaktic templates. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-based Syntactic Template Retriever to retrieve templates based on the quality of the to-be-generated paraphrases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can generate high-quality paraphrases without sacrificing quality. |
Think Natively: Unlocking Multilingual Reasoning with Consistency-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Xue Zhang, Yunlong Liang, Fandong Meng, Songming Zhang, Kaiyu Huang, Yufeng Chen, Xu Jinan, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Current Large Reasoning Models exhibit two critical limitations when processing non-English languages: (1) They struggle to maintain input-output language consistency; (2) They generally perform poorly with wrong reasoning paths and lower answer accuracy compared to English. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-consistency reward and a cross-lingual thinking alignment reward to improve the model's interpretability and accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves nearly 100% language consistency and superior performance on two multilingual benchmarks (MMATH and PolyMath). |
An Empirical Study of Many-to-Many Summarization with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Zengkui Sun, Yunlong Liang, Yuxuan Cao, Jiarong Xu, Haoxiang Shi, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) have strong multilingual abilities, giving them the potential to perform M2MS in real applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use many-to-many summarization (M2MS) to generate a brief summary in any language given a document also in any other language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms zero-shot LLMs in terms of automatic evaluations. |
Summary-Oriented Vision Modeling for Multimodal Abstractive Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multimodal abstractive summarization focus on how to use extracted visual features to produce a concise summary given the multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the visual quality of the multimodal abstractive summarization model by capturing summary-oriented visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art under 44 languages and is highly effective on high-resource English datasets. |
Less, but Better: Efficient Multilingual Expansion for LLMs via Layer-wise Mixture-of-Experts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) have remarkable ability in high-resource languages, but their performance in multilingual scenarios is still limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise expert allocation algorithm to determine the appropriate number of new experts for each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with 60% fewer experts in the single-expansion setting and 33.3% fewer in the lifelong-expanding setting. |
An Iterative Multi-Knowledge Transfer Network for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Aspect-based sentiment analysis do not exploit the interactive relations among subtasks and do not utilize document-level labeled domain/sentiment knowledge, which restricts their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative multi-knowledge transfer network for end-to-end ABSA that leverages the inter-task interaction between subtasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on three benchmark datasets. |
A Survey on Cross-Lingual Summarization (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization is a task of generating a summary in one language for a given document in a different language. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of the literature on cross-lingual summarization . they summarize previous efforts and compare them with each other . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with previous approaches and summarizes them to provide a deeper analysis. |
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets involve translation, but translationese is distinguished from original text . previous studies have shown that translationeses in CLS are not a problem in training sets . |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual summarization to generate a concise summary in a target language from a document in . existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation, but the translated text is distinguished from the original written in that language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method systematically investigates how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. |
Scheduled Multi-task Learning for Neural Chat Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve chat translation focus on modeling bilingual dialogue characteristics . however, there is insufficient data and simple joint training methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a scheduled multi-task learning framework to incorporate large-scale chat translation data into training by adding a second pre-training stage between the original pre- training and fine-tuning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation tasks on four language directions. |
DRT: Deep Reasoning Translation via Long Chain-of-Thought (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of long chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning tasks such as math and coding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Qwen2.5 and LLama-3.1 as backbones to train long thought models to bring the success of long chain-of-thought (CoT) to neural machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla LLMs and LLM models which are fine-tuning on paired sentences without long thought and outperformed vanilla LRMs. |
RC3: Regularized Contrastive Cross-lingual Cross-modal Pre-training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing V&L pre-training methods rely on strictly-aligned multilingual image-text pairs generated from English-centric datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a regularized cross-lingual visual contrastive learning objective that constrains representation proximity of weakly-aligned multilingual image-text pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competing models with weak zero-shot capability on 5 multi-modal tasks across 6 languages. |