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Fengyu Cai

8 accepted papers

2026

ElicitR: Unlocking Latent Reasoning in Dense Retrievers via Generative Regularization

ICML 2026poster

Reasoning-intensive retrieval is increasingly important for downstream applications, requiring more than lexical overlap or coarse semantic matching. While prior work mainly relies on Language Models (LMs) to synthesize reasoning-oriented supervision, we posit that it is already latent in LM-based r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Epistemic Gain, Aleatoric Cost: Uncertainty Decomposition in Multi-Agent Debate for Math Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) has shown promise in leveraging collective intelligence to improve reasoning and reduce hallucinations, yet it remains unclear how information exchange shapes the underlying ability. Empirically, MAD exhibits paradoxical phenomena, such as accuracy improvement accompanied by…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Revela: Dense Retriever Learning via Language Modeling

ICLR 2026oral

Dense retrievers play a vital role in accessing external and specialized knowledge to augment language models (LMs). Training dense retrievers typically requires annotated query-document pairs, which are costly to create and scarce in specialized domains (e.g., code) or in complex settings (e.g., re…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MoR: Better Handling Diverse Queries with a Mixture of Sparse, Dense, and Human Retrievers

EMNLP 2025

Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) is powerful, but its effectiveness hinges on which retrievers we use and how. Different retrievers offer distinct, often complementary signals: BM25 captures lexical matches; dense retrievers, semantic similarity. Yet in practice, we typically fix a single retrie

2024

A Survey of Confidence Estimation and Calibration in Large Language Models

NAACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks in various domains. Despite their impressive performance, they can be unreliable due to factual errors in their generations. Assessing their confidence and calibrating them across different tasks can…

2022

Slim: Explicit Slot-Intent Mapping with Bert for Joint Multi-Intent Detection and Slot Filling

ICASSP 2022accepted

Utterance-level intent detection and token-level slot filling are two key tasks for spoken language understanding (SLU) in task-oriented systems. Most existing approaches assume that only a single intent exists in an utterance. However, there are often multiple intents within an utterance in real-li…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Self-training Improves Pre-training for Few-shot Learning in Task-oriented Dialog Systems

EMNLP 2021main

As the labeling cost for different modules in task-oriented dialog (ToD) systems is expensive, a major challenge is to train different modules with the least amount of labeled data. Recently, large-scale pre-trained language models, have shown promising results for few-shot learning in ToD. In this…