Papers by Yuqing Wang
Multilingual Speech Translation from Efficient Finetuning of Pretrained Models (2021.acl-long)
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Xian Li, Changhan Wang, Yun Tang, Chau Tran, Yuqing Tang, Juan Pino, Alexei Baevski, Alexis Conneau, Michael Auli
| Challenge: | Recent advances in text pretraining and finetuning have improved multitasking applications significantly. |
| Approach: | They propose a minimalistic LNA finetuning approach to build multilingual speech-to-text translation using a pretrained speech encoder and text decoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses the cascaded ST benchmark for 36 translation directions on the large-scale multilingual ST benchmark CoVoST 2. |
TRAM: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in natural language processing, temporal reasoning is still a challenge . despite advancements in NLP, current language models have yet to reach human level in this domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal reasoning benchmark that measures time-related temporal aspects of events . they evaluate popular LLMs like GPT-4 and Llama2 in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human models in a few-shot and zero-shot scenarios . the best-performing model lags significantly behind human models, the authors say . |
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets. |
Rectified Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutao Sun, Tianzhu Ye, Li Dong, Yuqing Xia, Jian Chen, Yizhao Gao, Shijie Cao, Jianyong Wang, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent sparse decoding methods improve efficiency but suffer from KV cache misalignment, resulting in performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines block-sparse attention with periodic dense rectification to bound error accumulation and preserve alignment with the pretraining distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math reasoning, language modeling, and retrieval tasks show that ReSA achieves near-lossless generation quality with significantly improved efficiency. |
Token-Aware Editing of Internal Activations for Large Language Model Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize the behavior of large language models neglect misalignment discrepancies among tokens, resulting in deviant alignment direction and inflexible editing strength. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-aware editing approach to exploit the misalignment discrepancy among tokens to enhance activation probing and facilitate intervention. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three alignment capabilities demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach surpassing baseline by 25.8% on the primary metric of truthfulness with minimal cost. |
Metacognitive Prompting Improves Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompting have enhanced reasoning in logic-intensive tasks for LLMs, yet the nuanced understanding abilities of these models remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy inspired by human introspective reasoning processes to enhance LLMs' understanding abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms chain-of-thought prompting and its advanced versions on ten natural language understanding (NLU) datasets. |
Inducing Argument Facets for Faithful Opinion Summarization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Faithful opinion summarization task involves generating a summary that covers the majority and minority opinions in documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a facets-guided opinion summarization method that induces facets and partitions documents into multiple facet-specific sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods and multiple LLMs on two representative datasets and shows it can be used in specialty domains. |
Adaptive Contrastive Knowledge Distillation for BERT Compression (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods for BERT implicitly learn discriminative student features by mimicking the teacher features. |
| Approach: | They propose a new knowledge distillation approach called adaptive contrastive knowledge distilling for BERT compression using hidden state features in BERT as explicit supervision to learn discriminative student features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on multiple natural language processing tasks. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
Lexical Diversity-aware Relevance Assessment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, yielding a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a Lexical Diversity-aware RAG method to address the biases in relevant information retrieval and utilization induced by lexical diversity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks show the proposed method yields a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA. |
Putting words into the system’s mouth: A targeted attack on neural machine translation using monolingual data poisoning (2021.findings-acl)
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Jun Wang, Chang Xu, Francisco Guzmán, Ahmed El-Kishky, Yuqing Tang, Benjamin Rubinstein, Trevor Cohn
| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems are known to be vulnerable to adversarial test inputs, however, they are also vulnerable to training attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a poisoning attack in which a malicious adversary inserts a small poisoned sample of monolingual text into a training set of a system trained using back-translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is based on two methods that can be used to craft poisoned examples. |
LeanK: Learnable K Cache Channel Pruning for Efficient Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to optimize the key-value (KV) cache include: (1) Eviction, which discards cache of less important tokens; (2) Selection, which retains the full KV cache but selectively reads relevant entries. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based method that prunes unimportant key (K) cache channels by leveraging static channel sparsity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LeanK reduces GPU memory and accelerates decoding without sacrificing accuracy. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Position Engineering: Boosting Large Language Models through Positional Information Manipulation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant strides towards achieving artificial general intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique termed position engineering which alters the positional information in the prompt without modifying the text itself. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique significantly improves on the baseline in retrieval-augmented generation and in-context learning scenarios. |
When LLMs Read Tables Carelessly: Measuring and Reducing Data Referencing Errors (2026.acl-long)
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Yuqing Yang, Qi Zhu, Zhen Han, Boran Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on table tasks, but they still make data referencing errors (DREs) prior studies have only offered limited, small-scale analyses. |
| Approach: | They propose inference-time strategies and lightweight critics to mitigate data referencing errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average F1 score of 78.2% in detecting both in-distribution and out-of-difference DREs and assists inference for larger models. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
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. |
PROMINET: Prototype-based Multi-View Network for Interpretable Email Response Prediction (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | a new study examines email marketing performance by considering email content and metadata. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that incorporates semantic and structural information from email data to generate latent exemplars for email response prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on two real-world email datasets . it provides interpretability through prototypes at different granularity levels while maintaining comparable performance to non-interpretable models. |
InfoGain-RAG: Boosting Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Document Information Gain-based Reranking and Filtering (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zihan Wang, Zihan Liang, Zhou Shao, Yufei Ma, Huangyu Dai, Ben Chen, Lingtao Mao, Chenyi Lei, Yuqing Ding, Han Li
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-related metric to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches on both single and multiple retrieval paradigms. |
TokenShapley: Token Level Context Attribution with Shapley Value (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in in-context learning, but verifying the correctness of their generated responses remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level attribution method that combines Shapley value-based data attribution with KNN-based retrieval techniques to improve attribution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | TokenShapley outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks . it achieves an 11–23% improvement in accuracy on the benchmarks. |
SEARCH-R: Structured Entity-Aware Retrieval with Chain-of-Reasoning Navigator for Multi-hop Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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FU Yuqing, Yimin Deng, Wanyu Wang, Yuhao Wang, Yejing Wang, Hongshi Liu, Yiqi Wang, Xiao Han, Maolin Wang, Guoshuai Zhao, Yi Chang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering lack effective control over reasoning paths, leading to astray results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-hop question answering that trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework trains an end-to-end reasoning path navigator . it is able to provide a powerful sub-question decomposer by fine-tuning the Llama3.1-8B model . |