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Heyan Huang

65 accepted papers

2026

Do Retrieval Augmented Language Models Know When They Don’t Know?

AAAI 2026technical

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) and refusal post-training. However, current research predom

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Identifying and Analyzing Performance-Critical Tokens in Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as an effective solution for few-shot learning with large language models (LLMs). However, how LLMs leverage demonstrations to specify a task and learn a corresponding computational function through ICL is underexplored. Drawing from the way humans learn from c

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Incorporating Self-Rewriting into Large Language Model Reasoning Reinforcement

AAAI 2026technical

Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) with scaled inference computation have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks. However, the one-sided reward, focused solely on final correctness, limits its ability to provide de

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Simulated Rewards, Skewed Strategies: Tracing the Acquired Preference Bias in LLM-Based Dialogue Planners

AAAI 2026technical

Large language models have enabled sophisticated dialogue planning policy, but their reliance on LLM-generated simulation and feedback for policy optimization may introduce systematic preference bias. We present the first comprehensive analysis of preference bias in LLM-based dialogue planners, eval

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Understanding Temporal Logic Consistency in Video-Language Models through Cross-Modal Attention Discriminability

CVPR 2026

Large language models (LLMs) often generate self-contradictory outputs, which severely impacts their reliability and hinders their adoption in practical applications. In video-language models (Video-LLMs), this phenomenon recently draws the attention of researchers. Specifically, these models fail t

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Persona-Aware LLM-Enhanced Framework for Multi-Session Personalized Dialogue Generation

ACL 2025finding

Multi-session personalized dialogue generation is one of the most important topics in open-domain dialogue. It aims to generate responses consistent with the dialogue history and personality information across multiple sessions to engage users’ interest in the dialogue. Recent approaches focusing on…

2025

Automatic Evaluation for Text-to-image Generation: Task-decomposed Framework, Distilled Training, and Meta-evaluation Benchmark

ACL 2025long

Driven by the remarkable progress in diffusion models, text-to-image generation has achieved substantial advancements, underscoring the urgent need for robust automatic quality assessment. This task is inherently complex, requiring evaluations that range from object presence and attribute correctnes…

2025

CAMI: A Counselor Agent Supporting Motivational Interviewing through State Inference and Topic Exploration

ACL 2025long

Conversational counselor agents have become essential tools for addressing the rising demand for scalable and accessible mental health support. This paper introduces CAMI, a novel automated counselor agent grounded in Motivational Interviewing (MI) – a client-centered counseling approach designed to…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Consistent Client Simulation for Motivational Interviewing-based Counseling

ACL 2025long

Simulating human clients in mental health counseling is crucial for training and evaluating counselors (both human or simulated) in a scalable manner. Nevertheless, past research on client simulation did not focus on complex conversation tasks such as mental health counseling. In these tasks, the ch…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Debate, Reflect, and Distill: Multi-Agent Feedback with Tree-Structured Preference Optimization for Efficient Language Model Enhancement

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to set new standards in knowledge-intensive and complex reasoning tasks, yet their high computational demands limit widespread adoption. While distilling large models into smaller ones offers a sustainable solution, current techniques—such as static knowledge di…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FlashBack: Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling for Fast Inference

ACL 2025finding

Retrieval-Augmented Language Modeling (RALM) by integrating large language models (LLM) with relevant documents from an external corpus is a proven methodology for enabling the LLM to generate information beyond the scope of its pre-training corpus. Previous work by retrieving a set of tokens iterat…

2025

Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step math reasoning problems, but little is known about how these computations are implemented internally. Many recent studies have investigated the mechanisms of LLMs on simple arithmetic tasks (e.g., a+b, a× b), but how LLMs solve mixed arithmet…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

PRIM: Towards Practical In-Image Multilingual Machine Translation

EMNLP 2025

In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) aims to translate images containing texts from one language to another. Current research of end-to-end IIMT mainly conducts on synthetic data, with simple background, single font, fixed text position, and bilingual translation, which can not fully reflect real wor

2025

ReFF: Reinforcing Format Faithfulness in Language Models Across Varied Tasks

AAAI 2025technical

Following formatting instructions to generate well-structured content is a fundamental yet often unmet capability for large language models (LLMs). To study this capability, which we refer to as format faithfulness, we present FormatBench, a comprehensive format-related benchmark. Compared to previo…

2025

SEOE: A Scalable and Reliable Semantic Evaluation Framework for Open Domain Event Detection

ACL 2025long

Automatic evaluation for Open Domain Event Detection (ODED) is a highly challenging task, because ODED is characterized by a vast diversity of un-constrained output labels from various domains. Nearly all existing evaluation methods for ODED usually first construct evaluation benchmarks with limited…

2025

SQLWOZ: A Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset with SQL-Based Dialogue State Representation for Complex User Requirements

EMNLP 2025

High-quality datasets are essential for building effective task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. The existing TOD datasets often present overly simplified interactions, where users incrementally express straightforward requests that can be managed with basic slot-value style dialogue states, such as

2025

Training Language Models to Critique With Multi-agent Feedback

EMNLP 2025

Critique ability, a meta-cognitive capability of humans, presents significant challenges for LLMs to improve. While utilizing human annotation can enhance critique ability effectively, most recent works primarily rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) using critiques generated by a single LLM like GPT

2025

Zero-Shot Detection of LLM-Generated Text via Implicit Reward Model

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various tasks. However, their ability to generate human-like text has raised concerns about potential misuse. This underscores the need for reliable and effective methods to detect LLM-generated text. In this paper, we pr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

An Effective Span-based Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Consistent Cross-Modal Alignment

COLING 2024main

With the increasing availability of multimodal content on social media, consisting primarily of text and images, multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) has gained a wide-spread attention. A fundamental challenge of MNER lies in effectively aligning different modalities. However, the majority of…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

CItruS: Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction for Long Sequence Modeling

EMNLP 2024main

Long sequence modeling has gained broad interest as large language models (LLMs) continue to advance. Recent research has identified that a large portion of hidden states within the key-value caches of Transformer models can be discarded (also termed evicted) withoutaffecting the perplexity performa…

2024

CriticEval: Evaluating Large-scale Language Model as Critic

NeurIPS 2024poster

Critique ability, i.e., the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and rectify flaws in responses, is crucial for their applications in self-improvement and scalable oversight. While numerous studies have been proposed to evaluate critique ability of LLMs, their comprehensiveness and…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Deterministic Reversible Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2024findings

Data augmentation is an effective way to diversify corpora in machine translation, but previous methods may introduce semantic inconsistency between original and augmented data because of irreversible operations and random subword sampling procedures. To generate both symbolically diverse and semant…

2024

Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey

ACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant value in domain-specific applications, benefiting from their fundamental capabilities. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which fundamental capabilities contribute to success in specific domains. Moreover, the existing benchmark-based evaluation ca…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

How Far Can In-Context Alignment Go? Exploring the State of In-Context Alignment

EMNLP 2024finding

Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICL), through the use of specific demonstrations, can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences known as In-Context Alignment (ICA), indicating that models can comprehend human instructions without requiring parameter adjustm…

2024

ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training

ACL 2024long

We propose ProtLLM, a versatile cross-modal large language model (LLM) for both protein-centric and protein-language tasks. ProtLLM features a unique dynamic protein mounting mechanism, enabling it to handle complex inputs where the natural language text is interspersed with an arbitrary number of p…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

QRMeM: Unleash the Length Limitation through Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism

EMNLP 2024finding

While LLMs have made notable advancements in natural language processing, they continue to struggle with processing extensive text. Memory mechanisms offer a flexible solution for managing long contexts, utilizing techniques such as compression, summarization, and structuring to facilitate nuanced a…

2024

Rethinking Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems: From Complex Modularity to Zero-Shot Autonomous Agent

ACL 2024long

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are predominantly designed to be composed of several functional modules (e.g. dialogue state tracker, dialogue policy, natural language generation) whether they are pipeline or end-to-end architectures. However, this modular design not only heavily relies on mass…

2024

SciMRC: Multi-perspective Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension

COLING 2024main

Scientific Machine Reading Comprehension (SMRC) aims to facilitate the understanding of scientific texts through human-machine interactions. While existing dataset has significantly contributed to this field, it predominantly focus on single-perspective question-answer pairs, thereby overlooking the…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Span Graph Transformer for Document-Level Named Entity Recognition

AAAI 2024technical

Named Entity Recognition (NER), which aims to identify the span and category of entities within text, is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent NER approaches have featured pre-trained transformer-based models (e.g., BERT) as a crucial encoding component to achieve state-of-the…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Span-based Unified Named Entity Recognition Framework via Contrastive Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

Traditional Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are typically designed for domain-specific datasets and limited to fixed predefined types, resulting in difficulty generalizing to new domains. Recently, prompt-based generative methods attempt to mitigate this constraint by training models jointly…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

Speaker Verification in Agent-generated Conversations

ACL 2024long

The recent success of large language models (LLMs) has attracted widespread interest to develop role-playing conversational agents personalized to the characteristics and styles of different speakers to enhance their abilities to perform both general and special purpose dialogue tasks. However, the…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Teaching Large Language Models to Translate on Low-resource Languages with Textbook Prompting

COLING 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved impressive results in Machine Translation by simply following instructions, even without training on parallel data. However, LLMs still face challenges on low-resource languages due to the lack of pre-training data. In real-world situations, humans can beco…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2024

Word Matters: What Influences Domain Adaptation in Summarization?

ACL 2024long

Domain adaptation aims to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generalize domain datasets unseen effectively during the training phase. However, factors such as the size of the model parameters and the scale of training data are general influencers and do not reflect the nuances of domain adaptati…

2023

AttenWalker: Unsupervised Long-Document Question Answering via Attention-based Graph Walking

ACL 2023findings

Annotating long-document question answering (long-document QA) pairs is time-consuming and expensive. To alleviate the problem, it might be possible to generate long-document QA pairs via unsupervised question answering (UQA) methods. However, existing UQA tasks are based on short documents, and can…

2023

Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation

ACL 2023findings

Event extraction aims to recognize pre-defined event triggers and arguments from texts, which suffer from the lack of high-quality annotations. In most NLP applications, involving a large scale of synthetic training data is a practical and effective approach to alleviate the problem of data scarcity…

2023

Bridging The Gap: Entailment Fused-T5 for Open-retrieval Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

ACL 2023long

Open-retrieval conversational machine reading comprehension (OCMRC) simulates real-life conversational interaction scenes. Machines are required to make a decision of “Yes/No/Inquire” or generate a follow-up question when the decision is “Inquire” based on retrieved rule texts, user scenario, user q…

2023

Can Cross-Lingual Transferability of Multilingual Transformers Be Activated Without End-Task Data?

ACL 2023findings

Pretrained multilingual Transformers have achieved great success in cross-lingual transfer learning. Current methods typically activate the cross-lingual transferability of multilingual Transformers by fine-tuning them on end-task data. However, the methods cannot perform cross-lingual transfer when…

2023

Discriminative Reasoning with Sparse Event Representation for Document-level Event-Event Relation Extraction

ACL 2023long

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to extract causal relations between events in a document. It challenges conventional sentence-level task (SECI) with difficult long-text understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel DECI model (SENDIR) for better document-level reasoning.…

2023

Graph vs. Sequence: An Empirical Study on Knowledge Forms for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue

EMNLP 2023long main

Knowledge-grounded dialogue is a task of gener- ating an informative response based on both the dialogue history and external knowledge source. In general, there are two forms of knowledge: manu- ally annotated knowledge graphs and knowledge text from website. From various evaluation viewpoints, eac…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

TemplateGEC: Improving Grammatical Error Correction with Detection Template

ACL 2023long

Grammatical error correction (GEC) can be divided into sequence-to-edit (Seq2Edit) and sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) frameworks, both of which have their pros and cons. To utilize the strengths and make up for the shortcomings of these frameworks, this paper proposes a novel method, TemplateGEC, wh…

2022

Capturing Global Structural Information in Long Document Question Answering with Compressive Graph Selector Network

EMNLP 2022main

Long document question answering is a challenging task due to its demands for complex reasoning over long text. Previous works usually take long documents as non-structured flat texts or only consider the local structure in long documents. However, these methods usually ignore the global structure o…

2022

ET5: A Novel End-to-end Framework for Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

COLING 2022main

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically require three steps: (1) decision making based on entailment reas…

2022

On the Representation Collapse of Sparse Mixture of Experts

NeurIPS 2022accept

Sparse mixture of experts provides larger model capacity while requiring a constant computational overhead. It employs the routing mechanism to distribute input tokens to the best-matched experts according to their hidden representations. However, learning such a routing mechanism encourages token c…

2022

OneRel: Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with One Module in One Step

AAAI 2022technical

Joint entity and relation extraction is an essential task in natural language processing and knowledge graph construction. Existing approaches usually decompose the joint extraction task into several basic modules or processing steps to make it easy to conduct. However, such a paradigm ignores the f…

Cited by 185SourcePDFScholar
2022

PSP: Pre-trained Soft Prompts for Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization

COLING 2022main

Few-shot abstractive summarization has become a challenging task in natural language generation. To support it, we developed a novel soft prompts architecture coupled with a prompt pre-training plus prompt fine-tuning paradigm, which is effective and tunes only extremely light parameters. To meet th…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2022

Revisiting Grammatical Error Correction Evaluation and Beyond

EMNLP 2022main

Pretraining-based (PT-based) automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., BERTScore and BARTScore) have been widely used in several sentence generation tasks (e.g., machine translation and text summarization) due to their better correlation with human judgments over traditional overlap-based methods. Althoug…

2022

Unsupervised Question Answering via Answer Diversifying

COLING 2022main

Unsupervised question answering is an attractive task due to its independence on labeled data. Previous works usually make use of heuristic rules as well as pre-trained models to construct data and train QA models. However, most of these works regard named entity (NE) as the only answer type, which…

2022

Wlinker: Modeling Relational Triplet Extraction As Word Linking

ICASSP 2022accepted

Relational triplet extraction (RTE) is a fundamental task for automatically extracting information from unstructured text, which has attracted growing interest in recent years. However, it remains challenging due to the difficulty in extracting the overlapping relational triplets. Existing approache…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

XLM-E: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training via ELECTRA

ACL 2022long

In this paper, we introduce ELECTRA-style tasks to cross-lingual language model pre-training. Specifically, we present two pre-training tasks, namely multilingual replaced token detection, and translation replaced token detection. Besides, we pretrain the model, named as XLM-E, on both multilingual…

2021

A Supervised Multi-Head Self-Attention Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition

AAAI 2021technical

In recent years, researchers have shown an increased interest in recognizing the overlapping entities that have nested structures. However, most existing models ignore the semantic correlation between words under different entity types. Considering words in sentence play different roles under differ…

2021

Comprehensive Study: How the Context Information of Different Granularity Affects Dialogue State Tracking?

ACL 2021long

Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays a key role in task-oriented dialogue systems to monitor the user’s goal. In general, there are two strategies to track a dialogue state: predicting it from scratch and updating it from previous state. The scratch-based strategy obtains each slot value by inquiring…

2021

Enlivening Redundant Heads in Multi-head Self-attention for Machine Translation

EMNLP 2021main

Multi-head self-attention recently attracts enormous interest owing to its specialized functions, significant parallelizable computation, and flexible extensibility. However, very recent empirical studies show that some self-attention heads make little contribution and can be pruned as redundant hea…

2021

Exploring Explainable Selection to Control Abstractive Summarization

AAAI 2021technical

Like humans, document summarization models can interpret a document’s contents in a number of ways. Unfortunately, the neural models of today are largely black boxes that provide little explanation of how or why they generated a summary in the way they did. Therefore, to begin prying open the black…

2021

Improving Pretrained Cross-Lingual Language Models via Self-Labeled Word Alignment

ACL 2021long

The cross-lingual language models are typically pretrained with masked language modeling on multilingual text or parallel sentences. In this paper, we introduce denoising word alignment as a new cross-lingual pre-training task. Specifically, the model first self-label word alignments for parallel se…

2021

InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training

NAACL 2021long

In this work, we present an information-theoretic framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. The unified view helps us to better understand the existing methods for learning cross-lingual represen…

Cited by 371SourcePDFScholar
2021

Self-supervised Bilingual Syntactic Alignment for Neural Machine Translation

AAAI 2021technical

While various neural machine translation (NMT) methods have integrated mono-lingual syntax knowledge into the linguistic representation of sequence-to-sequence, no research is available on aligning the syntactic structures of target language with the corresponding source language syntactic structure…

2021

mT6: Multilingual Pretrained Text-to-Text Transformer with Translation Pairs

EMNLP 2021main

Multilingual T5 pretrains a sequence-to-sequence model on massive monolingual texts, which has shown promising results on many cross-lingual tasks. In this paper, we improve multilingual text-to-text transfer Transformer with translation pairs (mT6). Specifically, we explore three cross-lingual text…