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Houfeng Wang

37 accepted papers

2026

Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation

ICML 2026poster

Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation (RCG) synthesizes reasoning traces from query-answer pairs, but runs the risk of producing post-hoc rationalizations: when models can see the answer during generation, the answer serves as a cognitive anchor that shapes the entire explanation. We formalize this ph…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

StableToken: A Noise-Robust Semantic Speech Tokenizer for Resilient SpeechLLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Prevalent semantic speech tokenizers, designed to capture linguistic content, are surprisingly fragile. We find they are not robust to meaning-irrelevant acoustic perturbations; even at high Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs) where speech is perfectly intelligible, their output token sequences can change…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Encode Errors: Representational Retrieval of In-Context Demonstrations for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

ACL 2025finding

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) involves detecting and correcting the wrong usage of grammar. While large language models (LLMs) with in-context learning (ICL) capabilities have shown significant progress on various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, their few-shot performance on GEC remain…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Explanation based In-Context Demonstrations Retrieval for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction

NAACL 2025long

Grammatical error correction (GEC) aims to correct grammatical, spelling, and semantic errors in natural language text. With the growing of large language models (LLMs), direct text generation has gradually become the focus of the GEC methods, and few-shot in-context learning presents a cost-effecti…

2025

FEA-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Repository-Level Code Generation for Feature Implementation

ACL 2025long

Implementing new features in repository-level codebases is a crucial application of code generation models. However, current benchmarks lack a dedicated evaluation framework for this capability. To fill this gap, we introduce FEA-Bench, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of large language mo…

2025

Instantly Learning Preference Alignment via In-context DPO

NAACL 2025long

Human Preference Alignment (HPA) can assist large language models (LLMs) to generate safe content. Due to the heavy cost of fine-tuning, tuning-free methods have emerged, typically modifying LLM decoding via post-processing. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective approach for HPA in a tunin…

2025

Investigating the (De)Composition Capabilities of Large Language Models in Natural-to-Formal Language Conversion

NAACL 2025long

Humans have strong capabilities of decomposition and composition in natural-to-formal language conversion (N2F) when faced with an unfamiliar formal language, and can easily cope with compositional gaps and counter-intuitive symbolic names. To investigate whether large language models (LLMs) have th…

2025

Learn to Memorize: Scalable Continual Learning in Semiparametric Models with Mixture-of-Neighbors Induction Memory

ACL 2025long

Semiparametric language models (LMs) have shown promise in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, they utilize non-parametric memory as static storage, which lacks learning capability and remains disconnected from the internal information flow of the parametric models, limiting sc…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MC2: A Minimum-Coverage and Dataset-Agnostic Framework for Compositional Generalization of LLMs on Semantic Parsing

EMNLP 2025

Compositional generalization is one of the important abilities that large language models (LLMs) need to have for semantic parsing. Previous research typically relies on dataset-specific designs or a large number of samples in demonstrations to improve the compositional generalization of LLMs on sem

2025

Odysseus Navigates the Sirens’ Song: Dynamic Focus Decoding for Factual and Diverse Open-Ended Text Generation

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly required to generate text that is both factually accurate and diverse across various open-ended applications. However, current stochastic decoding methods struggle to balance such objectives. We introduce Dynamic Focus Decoding (DFD), a novel plug-and-pl…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sheetpedia: A 300K-Spreadsheet Corpus for Spreadsheet Intelligence and LLM Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Spreadsheets are widely used for data analysis and reporting, yet their complex structure and formula logic pose significant challenges for AI systems. We introduce Sheetpedia, a large-scale corpus of over 290,000 diverse spreadsheets (from 324,000+ workbooks) compiled from enterprise email archives…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

TimE: A Multi-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interac…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Well Begun is Half Done: Low-resource Preference Alignment by Weak-to-Strong Decoding

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) require alignment with human preferences to avoid generating offensive, false, or meaningless content. Recently, low-resource methods for LLM alignment have been popular, while still facing challenges in obtaining both high-quality and aligned content. Motivated by the o…

2024

A Unified Framework for Multi-Intent Spoken Language Understanding with Prompting

ICASSP 2024accepted

ChatGPT has demonstrated impressive capabilities in building conversations. However, for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) with multiple intents, traditional approaches where Intent Detection and Slot Filling are jointly modeled with distinct formulations hinder networks from effectively extractin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

DVD: Dynamic Contrastive Decoding for Knowledge Amplification in Multi-Document Question Answering

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used in question-answering (QA) systems but often generate information with hallucinations. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) offers a potential remedy, yet the uneven retrieval quality and irrelevant contents may distract LLMs.In this work, we address thes…

2024

Detection-Correction Structure via General Language Model for Grammatical Error Correction

ACL 2024long

Grammatical error correction (GEC) is a task dedicated to rectifying texts with minimal edits, which can be decoupled into two components: detection and correction. However, previous works have predominantly focused on direct correction, with no prior efforts to integrate both into a single model. M…

2024

Preference Ranking Optimization for Human Alignment

AAAI 2024technical

Large language models (LLMs) often contain misleading content, emphasizing the need to align them with human values to ensure secure AI systems. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has been employed to achieve this alignment. However, it encompasses two main drawbacks: (1) RLHF exhibit…

2024

SPOR: A Comprehensive and Practical Evaluation Method for Compositional Generalization in Data-to-Text Generation

ACL 2024long

Compositional generalization is an important ability of language models and has many different manifestations. For data-to-text generation, previous research on this ability is limited to a single manifestation called Systematicity and lacks consideration of large language models (LLMs), which canno…

2024

Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment

COLING 2024main

Alignment with human preference prevents large language models (LLMs) from generating misleading or toxic content while requiring high-cost human feedback. Assuming resources of human annotation are limited, there are two different ways of allocating considered: more diverse PROMPTS or more diverse…

2024

Select High-quality Synthetic QA Pairs to Augment Training Data in MRC under the Reward Guidance of Generative Language Models

COLING 2024main

Synthesizing QA pairs via question generator (QG) for data augmentation is widely used in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC), especially in data-scarce scenarios like limited labeled data or domain adaptation. However, the quality of generated QA pairs varies, and it is necessary to select the ones…

2024

Utilizing Local Hierarchy with Adversarial Training for Hierarchical Text Classification

COLING 2024main

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex taxonomic structure. Nearly all recent HTC works focus on how the labels are structured but ignore the sub-structure of ground-truth labels according to each input text which contains fru…

2022

A Question-Oriented Propagation Network for News Reading Comprehension

ICASSP 2022accepted

Machine reading comprehension of news articles remains to be a challenging task since the lengths of its context documents are long. Such reading comprehension task usually requires document-level language understanding while state-of-the-art, pretrained question answering models can only encode seq…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

A Unified Strategy for Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction with Pre-trained Cross-Lingual Language Model

IJCAI 2022poster

Synthetic data construction of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) for non-English languages relies heavily on human-designed and language-specific rules, which produce limited error-corrected patterns. In this paper, we propose a generic and language-independent strategy for multilingual GEC, which…

2022

Adjusting the Precision-Recall Trade-Off with Align-and-Predict Decoding for Grammatical Error Correction

ACL 2022short

Modern writing assistance applications are always equipped with a Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) model to correct errors in user-entered sentences. Different scenarios have varying requirements for correction behavior, e.g., performing more precise corrections (high precision) or providing more…

2022

Confidence Calibration for Intent Detection via Hyperspherical Space and Rebalanced Accuracy-Uncertainty Loss

AAAI 2022technical

Data-driven methods have achieved notable performance on intent detection, which is a task to comprehend user queries. Nonetheless, they are controversial for over-confident predictions. In some scenarios, users do not only care about the accuracy but also the confidence of model. Unfortunately, mai…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy.Recently, the pretrained language models (PLM)have been widely adopted in HTC through a fine-tuning paradigm. However, in this paradigm, there exists a huge gap between th…

2022

Incorporating Hierarchy into Text Encoder: a Contrastive Learning Approach for Hierarchical Text Classification

ACL 2022long

Hierarchical text classification is a challenging subtask of multi-label classification due to its complex label hierarchy. Existing methods encode text and label hierarchy separately and mix their representations for classification, where the hierarchy remains unchanged for all input text. Instead…

2022

Learning Invariant Representation Improves Robustness for MRC Models

EMNLP 2022finding

The prosperity of Pretrained Language Models(PLM) has greatly promoted the development of Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). However, these models are vulnerable and not robust to adversarial examples. In this paper, we propose Stable and Contrastive Question Answering (SCQA) to improve invariance…

2022

M3: A Multi-View Fusion and Multi-Decoding Network for Multi-Document Reading Comprehension

EMNLP 2022main

Multi-document reading comprehension task requires collecting evidences from different documents for answering questions. Previous research works either use the extractive modeling method to naively integrate the scores from different documents on the encoder side or use the generative modeling meth…

2022

Original Content Is All You Need! an Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task

COLING 2022main

Answer selection task requires finding appropriate answers to questions from informative but crowdsourced candidates. A key factor impeding its solution by current answer selection approaches is the redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. Recently, Deng et al. (2020) constructed a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2022

Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer of Prompt-based Tuning with a Unified Multilingual Prompt

EMNLP 2022main

Prompt-based tuning has been proven effective for pretrained language models (PLMs). While most of the existing work focuses on the monolingual prompts, we study the multilingual prompts for multilingual PLMs, especially in the zero-shot cross-lingual setting. To alleviate the effort of designing di…

2021

Instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction with Shallow Aggressive Decoding

ACL 2021long

In this paper, we propose Shallow Aggressive Decoding (SAD) to improve the online inference efficiency of the Transformer for instantaneous Grammatical Error Correction (GEC). SAD optimizes the online inference efficiency for GEC by two innovations: 1) it aggressively decodes as many tokens as possi…

2021

Towards Semantics-Enhanced Pre-Training: Can Lexicon Definitions Help Learning Sentence Meanings?

AAAI 2021technical

Self-supervised pre-training techniques, albeit relying on large amounts of text, have enabled rapid growth in learning language representations for natural language understanding. However, as radically empirical models on sentences, they are subject to the input data distribution, inevitably incorp…

2020

Syntax-Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification

COLING 2020main

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims to distinguish the sentiment polarities over aspect terms in a sentence. Existing approaches mostly focus on modeling the relationship between the given aspect words and their contexts with attention, and ignore the use of more elaborate knowledge implicit…

2017

meProp: Sparsified Back Propagation for Accelerated Deep Learning with Reduced Overfitting

ICML 2017poster

We propose a simple yet effective technique for neural network learning. The forward propagation is computed as usual. In back propagation, only a small subset of the full gradient is computed to update the model parameters. The gradient vectors are sparsified in such a way that only the top-$k$ ele…

Cited by 203SourcePDFScholar