Papers by Zhilin Yang
Neural Models for Reasoning over Multiple Mentions Using Coreference (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) layers are biased towards short-term dependencies and hence not suited to such tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a recurrent layer which is instead biased towards coreferent dependencies and uses coreference annotations extracted from an external system to connect entity mentions belonging to the same cluster. |
| Outcome: | The proposed layer improves performance on Wikihop, LAMBADA and the bAbi AI datasets with large gains when training data is scarce. |
GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing pretraining frameworks do not perform well for all tasks of three main categories, such as natural language understanding (NLU), unconditional generation, and conditional generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a general language model based on autoregressive blank infilling to address this challenge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms BERT, T5, and GPT on a wide range of tasks across NLU, conditional and unconditional generation tasks. |
Just Like a Human Would, Direct Access to Sarcasm Augmented with Potential Result and Reaction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | sarcasm is a form of irony conveying mockery and contempt . social media has become increasingly popular for identifying sarcasm . |
| Approach: | They develop a method to detect sarcasm from social media using augmented potentials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on benchmark datasets. |
HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering (D18-1)
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Zhilin Yang, Peng Qi, Saizheng Zhang, Yoshua Bengio, William Cohen, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Christopher D. Manning
| Challenge: | Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) the questions provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning; and (4) a type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems’ ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset has 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs and four key features that make it challenging for the latest QA systems. |
Prompt-Based Metric Learning for Few-Shot NER (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing metric learning methods do not fully incorporate label semantics into modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to largely improve metric learning for few-shot named entity recognition (NER) a pre-defined category is a key natural language understanding task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) method with 16 of 18 settings outperformed previous methods by 9.12% and 34.51% . |
FewNLU: Benchmarking State-of-the-Art Methods for Few-Shot Natural Language Understanding (2022.acl-long)
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Yanan Zheng, Jing Zhou, Yujie Qian, Ming Ding, Chonghua Liao, Li Jian, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Jie Tang, Sebastian Ruder, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation protocols for few-shot natural language understanding (NLU) tasks are inconsistent and hinder fair comparison and measuring progress. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that improves previous evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., test performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evaluation procedures in three key aspects, i.e., performance, dev-test correlation, and stability. |
Learning to Detect Noisy Labels Using Model-Based Features (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Zhihao Wang, Zongyu Lin, Junjie Wen, Xianxin Chen, Peiqi Liu, Guidong Zheng, Yujun Chen, Zhilin Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce label noise rely on heuristics and sample losses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that transfers the noise distribution to a clean set and trains a model to distinguish noisy labels from clean ones using model-based features. |
| Outcome: | Empirically, the proposed approach improves over strong baselines on a wide range of tasks including text classification and speech recognition. |
Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models beyond a Fixed-Length Context (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Term memory networks (RNNs) are difficult to optimize due to gradient vanishing and explosion. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture Transformer-XL that enables learning dependency beyond a fixed length without disrupting temporal coherence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art performance on short and long sequences and generates coherent, novel text articles with thousands of tokens. |
MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild (2024.acl-long)
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Yafu Li, Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Zhilin Wang, Longyue Wang, Linyi Yang, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on evaluating detection methods for specific domains or language models. |
| Approach: | They build a testbed to detect texts from diverse human writings and LLMs using different detection methods. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the top performing detector can identify 84.12% out-of-domain texts generated by a new LLM, indicating the feasibility for application scenarios. |
Neural Cross-Lingual Named Entity Recognition with Minimal Resources (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Named-entity recognition (NER) models are highly dependent on large amounts of labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that finds translations based on bilingual word embeddings . they also propose 'self-attention' which allows for a degree of flexibility with respect to word order . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on common languages with lower resource requirements than previous approaches. |
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are often finetuned for downstream tasks, which has been shown to improve performance over non-pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for few-shot learning with pretrained language models by gradient-free algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse datasets show that the proposed method outperforms manual prompts by 2.6 points. |
P-Tuning: Prompt Tuning Can Be Comparable to Fine-tuning Across Scales and Tasks (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of prompt tuning cannot handle hard sequence labeling tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize prompt tuning to tune continuous prompts with a frozen language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches finetuning with prompt tuning while having only 0.1%-3% tuned parameters. |
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Parallel and Sequential Inference Scaling via Aggregation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models achieve substantial gains with test-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They introduce a supervised fine-tuning paradigm where models synthesize multiple draft responses into a single, refined answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models outperform baseline models while eliminating external guidance. |
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization . they focus on task scaling and zero-shooting to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot generalization efficiency by 30 times with task scaling. |
Partial Order-centered Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Few-shot Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot relation extraction are limited to labeled instances and rely on data labeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a partial order-centered hyperbolic representation learning framework which imposes constraints on relations on instances by modeling partial order in hyperbolical space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on three benchmark datasets on 1-shot settings lacking relation descriptions. |
FlipDA: Effective and Robust Data Augmentation for Few-Shot Learning (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text data augmentation are limited to simple tasks and weak baselines. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method FlipDA that uses a generative model and a classifier to generate label-flipped data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves many tasks while not negatively affecting the others. |
A Universal Discriminator for Zero-Shot Generalization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative modeling has been the dominant approach for large-scale pretraining and zeroshot generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminator that predicts whether a text sample comes from the true data distribution and which option has the highest probability of coming from the real data distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed discriminative approach outperforms GANs on a number of NLP tasks by 16.0%, 7.8%, and 11.5% respectively. |