← Search

Lei Hou

69 accepted papers

2026

StoryAlign: Evaluating and Training Reward Models for Story Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Story generation aims to automatically produce coherent, structured, and engaging narratives. Although large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced text generation, stories generated by LLMs still diverge from human-authored works regarding complex narrative structure and human-aligned p…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

WebSeer: Training Deeper Search Agents through Reinforcement Learning with Self-Reflection

ICLR 2026poster

Search agents have achieved significant advancements in enabling intelligent information retrieval and decision-making within interactive environments. Although reinforcement learning has been employed to train agentic models capable of more dynamic interactive retrieval, existing methods are limite…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AGENTIF: Benchmarking Large Language Models Instruction Following Ability in Agentic Scenarios

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated advanced capabilities in real-world agentic applications. Growing research efforts aim to develop LLM-based agents to address practical demands, introducing a new challenge: agentic scenarios often involve lengthy instructions with complex constraints,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Agentic Reward Modeling: Integrating Human Preferences with Verifiable Correctness Signals for Reliable Reward Systems

ACL 2025long

Reward models (RMs) are crucial for the training and inference-time scaling up of large language models (LLMs). However, existing reward models primarily focus on human preferences, neglecting verifiable correctness signals which have shown strong potential in training LLMs. In this paper, we propos…

2025

CogCoM: A Visual Language Model with Chain-of-Manipulations Reasoning

ICLR 2025poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown broad effectiveness due to extensive training that aligns visual inputs with corresponding language responses. However, this conclusive alignment training causes models to overlook essential visual reasoning, leading to failures in handling detailed visual ta…

2025

Establishing Trustworthy LLM Evaluation via Shortcut Neuron Analysis

ACL 2025long

The development of large language models (LLMs) depends on **trustworthy evaluation**. However, most current evaluations rely on public benchmarks, which are prone to data contamination issues that significantly compromise fairness. Previous researches have focused on constructing dynamic benchmarks…

2025

EventSum: A Large-Scale Event-Centric Summarization Dataset for Chinese Multi-News Documents

AAAI 2025technical

In real life, many dynamic events, such as major disasters and large-scale sports events, evolve continuously over time. Obtaining an overview of these events can help people quickly understand the situation and respond more effectively. This is challenging because the key information of the event i…

2025

How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Recent work suggests that large language models (LLMs) can perform multi-hop reasoning implicitly---producing correct answers without explicitly verbalizing intermediate steps---but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this paper, we study how such implicit reasoning emerges by tra…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LinguaLens: Towards Interpreting Linguistic Mechanisms of Large Language Models via Sparse Auto-Encoder

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their internal mechanisms for processing and representing linguistic

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks

ACL 2025long

This paper introduces LongBench v2, a benchmark designed to assess the ability of LLMs to handle long-context problems requiring deep understanding and reasoning across real-world multitasks. LongBench v2 consists of 503 challenging multiple-choice questions, with contexts ranging from 8k to 2M word…

2025

LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA

ACL 2025finding

Though current long-context large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capacities in answering various questions based on extensive text, the lack of citations in their responses makes user verification difficult, leading to concerns about their trustworthiness due to the potential ha…

2025

LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback

ACL 2025long

Though significant advancements have been achieved in developing long-context large language models (LLMs), the compromised quality of LLM-synthesized data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) often affects the long-context performance of SFT models and leads to inherent limitations. In principle, reinf…

2025

LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Current long context large language models (LLMs) can process inputs up to 100,000 tokens, yet struggle to generate outputs exceeding even a modest length of 2,000 words. Through controlled experiments, we find that the model's effective generation length is inherently bounded by the sample it has s…

2025

Pre-training Distillation for Large Language Models: A Design Space Exploration

ACL 2025long

Knowledge distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. Previous work applying KD in the field of large language models (LLMs) typically focused on the post-training phase, where the student LLM learns directly from instructions and corresponding…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

RM-Bench: Benchmarking Reward Models of Language Models with Subtlety and Style

ICLR 2025oral

Reward models are critical in techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Inference Scaling Laws, where they guide language model alignment and select optimal responses. Despite their importance, existing reward model benchmarks often evaluate models by asking them to dist…

2025

SeaKR: Self-aware Knowledge Retrieval for Adaptive Retrieval Augmented Generation

ACL 2025long

Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective strategy to alleviate hallucination of large language models (LLMs). It dynamically determines whether LLMs need external knowledge for generation and invokes retrieval accordingly. This paper introduces Self-aware Knowledge Retrieval (Se…

2025

Simulating Classroom Education with LLM-Empowered Agents

NAACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have been applied across various intelligent educational tasks to assist teaching. While preliminary studies have focused on task-specific, independent LLM-empowered agents, the potential of LLMs within a multi-agent collaborative framework for classroom simulation with…

2025

Towards Understanding Safety Alignment: A Mechanistic Perspective from Safety Neurons

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various capabilities but pose safety risks such as generating harmful content and misinformation, even after safety alignment. In this paper, we explore the inner mechanisms of safety alignment through the lens of mechanistic interpretability, focusing on identi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

VerIF: Verification Engineering for Reinforcement Learning in Instruction Following

EMNLP 2025

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs), with verification engineering playing a central role. However, best practices for RL in instruction following remain underexplored. In this work, we explore the verification c

2024

A Cause-Effect Look at Alleviating Hallucination of Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Generation

COLING 2024main

Empowered by the large-scale pretrained language models, existing dialogue systems have demonstrated impressive performance conducting fluent and natural-sounding conversations. However, they are still plagued by the <b>hallucination</b> problem, causing unpredictable factual errors in the generated…

2024

DocEE-zh: A Fine-grained Benchmark for Chinese Document-level Event Extraction

EMNLP 2024finding

Event extraction aims to identify events and then extract the arguments involved in those events. In recent years, there has been a gradual shift from sentence-level event extraction to document-level event extraction research. Despite the significant success achieved in English domain event extract…

2024

Evaluating Generative Language Models in Information Extraction as Subjective Question Correction

COLING 2024main

Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable prowess in various tasks necessitating sophisticated cognitive behaviors. Nevertheless, a paradoxical performance discrepancy is observed, where these models underperform in seemingly elementary tasks like relation extraction and event ex…

2024

How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answering

ACL 2024findings

Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) aims to answer natural language questions based on facts in knowledge bases. A typical approach to KBQA is semantic parsing, which translates a question into an executable logical form in a formal language. Recent works leverage the capabilities of large lang…

2024

KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases

EMNLP 2024main

Program induction (PI) has become a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models (LLMs) answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. Nonetheless, PI typically relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs to make the LLM aware of the schema of a giv…

2024

KoLA: Carefully Benchmarking World Knowledge of Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

The unprecedented performance of large language models (LLMs) necessitates improvements in evaluations. Rather than merely exploring the breadth of LLM abilities, we believe meticulous and thoughtful designs are essential to thorough, unbiased, and applicable evaluations. Given the importance of wor…

2024

LC4EE: LLMs as Good Corrector for Event Extraction

ACL 2024findings

Event extraction (EE) is a critical task in natural language processing, yet deploying a practical EE system remains challenging. On one hand, powerful large language models (LLMs) currently show poor performance because EE task is more complex than other tasks. On the other hand, state-of-the-art (…

2024

LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign—a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instructi…

2024

LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding

ACL 2024long

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance for many language tasks, most of them can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. Recent works have proposed methods to improve…

2024

MAVEN-ARG: Completing the Puzzle of All-in-One Event Understanding Dataset with Event Argument Annotation

ACL 2024long

Understanding events in texts is a core objective of natural language understanding, which requires detecting event occurrences, extracting event arguments, and analyzing inter-event relationships. However, due to the annotation challenges brought by task complexity, a large-scale dataset covering t…

2024

MAVEN-FACT: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset

EMNLP 2024finding

Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, ev…

2024

MM-MATH: Advancing Multimodal Math Evaluation with Process Evaluation and Fine-grained Classification

EMNLP 2024finding

To advance the evaluation of multimodal math reasoning in large multimodal models (LMMs), this paper introduces a novel benchmark, MM-MATH. MM-MATH consists of 5,929 open-ended middle school math problems with visual contexts, with fine-grained classification across difficulty, grade level, and know…

2024

TacoERE: Cluster-aware Compression for Event Relation Extraction

COLING 2024main

Event relation extraction (ERE) is a critical and fundamental challenge for natural language processing. Existing work mainly focuses on directly modeling the entire document, which cannot effectively handle long-range dependencies and information redundancy. To address these issues, we propose a cl…

2024

Untangle the KNOT: Interweaving Conflicting Knowledge and Reasoning Skills in Large Language Models

COLING 2024main

Providing knowledge documents for large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising solution to update the static knowledge inherent in their parameters. However, knowledge in the document may conflict with the memory of LLMs due to outdated or incorrect knowledge in the LLMs’ parameters. This…

2024

WaterBench: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Watermarks for Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

To mitigate the potential misuse of large language models (LLMs), recent research has developed watermarking algorithms, which restrict the generation process to leave an invisible trace for watermark detection. Due to the two-stage nature of the task, most studies evaluate the generation and detect…

2023

Answering Complex Logical Queries on Knowledge Graphs via Query Computation Tree Optimization

ICML 2023poster

Answering complex logical queries on incomplete knowledge graphs is a challenging task, and has been widely studied. Embedding-based methods require training on complex queries and may not generalize well to out-of-distribution query structures. Recent work frames this task as an end-to-end optimiza…

2023

Benchmarking Foundation Models with Language-Model-as-an-Examiner

NeurIPS 2023poster

Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model's ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans. Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets,…

Cited by 141SourcePDFScholar
2023

Distantly Supervised Course Concept Extraction in MOOCs with Academic Discipline

ACL 2023long

With the rapid growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), it is expensive and time-consuming to extract high-quality knowledgeable concepts taught in the course by human effort to help learners grasp the essence of the course. In this paper, we propose to automatically extract course concepts us…

2023

Exploring the Cognitive Knowledge Structure of Large Language Models: An Educational Diagnostic Assessment Approach

EMNLP 2023short findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have not only exhibited exceptional performance across various tasks, but also demonstrated sparks of intelligence. Recent studies have focused on assessing their capabilities on human exams and revealed their impressive competence in different domains. However, cognitiv…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

KoRC: Knowledge Oriented Reading Comprehension Benchmark for Deep Text Understanding

ACL 2023findings

Deep text understanding, which requires the connections between a given document and prior knowledge beyond its text, has been highlighted by many benchmarks in recent years. However, these benchmarks have encountered two major limitations. On the one hand, most of them require human annotation of k…

2023

Learn to Not Link: Exploring NIL Prediction in Entity Linking

ACL 2023findings

Entity linking models have achieved significant success via utilizing pretrained language models to capture semantic features. However, the NIL prediction problem, which aims to identify mentions without a corresponding entity in the knowledge base, has received insufficient attention. We categorize…

2023

Preserving Knowledge Invariance: Rethinking Robustness Evaluation of Open Information Extraction

EMNLP 2023long main

The robustness to distribution changes ensures that NLP models can be successfully applied in the realistic world, especially for information extraction tasks. However, most prior evaluation benchmarks have been devoted to validating pairwise matching correctness, ignoring the crucial validation of…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to generate factually incorrect reasoning steps when the required knowledge is not available or up-to-date in models' parameters. Recent works turn to…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering

ACL 2023long

Explainable question answering (XQA) aims to answer a given question and provide an explanation why the answer is selected. Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. However, integrating information from heterog…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

The Devil is in the Details: On the Pitfalls of Event Extraction Evaluation

ACL 2023findings

Event extraction (EE) is a crucial task aiming at extracting events from texts, which includes two subtasks: event detection (ED) and event argument extraction (EAE). In this paper, we check the reliability of EE evaluations and identify three major pitfalls: (1) The data preprocessing discrepancy m…

2023

Unveiling the Black Box of PLMs with Semantic Anchors: Towards Interpretable Neural Semantic Parsing

AAAI 2023technical

The recent prevalence of pretrained language models (PLMs) has dramatically shifted the paradigm of semantic parsing, where the mapping from natural language utterances to structured logical forms is now formulated as a Seq2Seq task. Despite the promising performance, previous PLM-based approaches o…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2022

COPEN: Probing Conceptual Knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Conceptual knowledge is fundamental to human cognition and knowledge bases. However, existing knowledge probing works only focus on evaluating factual knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and ignore conceptual knowledge. Since conceptual knowledge often appears as implicit commonsense beh…

2022

Dependency Parsing via Sequence Generation

EMNLP 2022finding

Dependency parsing aims to extract syntactic dependency structure or semantic dependency structure for sentences.Existing methods for dependency parsing include transition-based method, graph-based method and sequence-to-sequence method.These methods obtain excellent performance and we notice them b…

2022

Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach

ACL 2022findings

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to capture factual knowledge from massive texts, which encourages the proposal of PLM-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) models. However, these models are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance. In this w…

2022

DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Event extraction aims to identify an event and then extract the arguments participating in the event. Despite the great success in sentence-level event extraction, events are more naturally presented in the form of documents, with event arguments scattered in multiple sentences. However, a major bar…

2022

Finding Skill Neurons in Pre-trained Transformer-based Language Models

EMNLP 2022main

Transformer-based pre-trained language models have demonstrated superior performance on various natural language processing tasks. However, it remains unclear how the skills required to handle these tasks distribute among model parameters. In this paper, we find that after prompt tuning for specific…

2022

GraphQ IR: Unifying the Semantic Parsing of Graph Query Languages with One Intermediate Representation

EMNLP 2022main

Subject to the huge semantic gap between natural and formal languages, neural semantic parsing is typically bottlenecked by its complexity of dealing with both input semantics and output syntax. Recent works have proposed several forms of supplementary supervision but none is generalized across mult…

2022

How Can Cross-lingual Knowledge Contribute Better to Fine-Grained Entity Typing?

ACL 2022findings

Cross-lingual Entity Typing (CLET) aims at improving the quality of entity type prediction by transferring semantic knowledge learned from rich-resourced languages to low-resourced languages. In this paper, by utilizing multilingual transfer learning via the mixture-of-experts approach, our model dy…

2022

KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base

ACL 2022long

Complex question answering over knowledge base (Complex KBQA) is challenging because it requires various compositional reasoning capabilities, such as multi-hop inference, attribute comparison, set operation, etc. Existing benchmarks have some shortcomings that limit the development of Complex KBQA:…

2022

LEVEN: A Large-Scale Chinese Legal Event Detection Dataset

ACL 2022findings

Recognizing facts is the most fundamental step in making judgments, hence detecting events in the legal documents is important to legal case analysis tasks. However, existing Legal Event Detection (LED) datasets only concern incomprehensive event types and have limited annotated data, which restrict…

2022

MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction

EMNLP 2022main

The diverse relationships among real-world events, including coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are fundamental to understanding natural languages. However, two drawbacks of existing datasets limit event relation extraction (ERE) tasks: (1) Small scale. Due to the annotation comp…

2022

On Transferability of Prompt Tuning for Natural Language Processing

NAACL 2022long

Prompt tuning (PT) is a promising parameter-efficient method to utilize extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs), which can achieve comparable performance to full-parameter fine-tuning by only tuning a few soft prompts. However, PT requires much more training time than fine-tuning. Intuiti…

2022

ParaMac: A General Unsupervised Paraphrase Generation Framework Leveraging Semantic Constraints and Diversifying Mechanisms

EMNLP 2022finding

Paraphrase generation reflects the ability to understand the meaning from the language surface form and rephrase it to other expressions. Recent paraphrase generation works have paid attention to unsupervised approaches based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to avoid heavy reliance on parallel…

2022

Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases

ACL 2022long

Program induction for answering complex questions over knowledge bases (KBs) aims to decompose a question into a multi-step program, whose execution against the KB produces the final answer. Learning to induce programs relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB. How…

2022

SQUIRE: A Sequence-to-sequence Framework for Multi-hop Knowledge Graph Reasoning

EMNLP 2022main

Multi-hop knowledge graph (KG) reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to provide interpretable predictions on missing links with evidential paths. Most previous works use reinforcement learning (RL) based methods that learn to navigate the path towards the target entity. However, these me…

2022

Syntactically Robust Training on Partially-Observed Data for Open Information Extraction

EMNLP 2022finding

Open Information Extraction models have shown promising results with sufficient supervision. However, these models face a fundamental challenge that the syntactic distribution of training data is partially observable in comparison to the real world. In this paper, we propose a syntactically robust t…

2022

UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor

COLING 2022main

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) commonly employs the 2-stage extract-then-abstract paradigm, which first extracts a relatively short meta-document, then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. Previous work usually takes the ROUGE score as the label for training a scoring…

2021

CLEVE: Contrastive Pre-training for Event Extraction

ACL 2021long

Event extraction (EE) has considerably benefited from pre-trained language models (PLMs) by fine-tuning. However, existing pre-training methods have not involved modeling event characteristics, resulting in the developed EE models cannot take full advantage of large-scale unsupervised data. To this…

2021

Interpretable and Low-Resource Entity Matching via Decoupling Feature Learning from Decision Making

ACL 2021long

Entity Matching (EM) aims at recognizing entity records that denote the same real-world object. Neural EM models learn vector representation of entity descriptions and match entities end-to-end. Though robust, these methods require many annotated resources for training, and lack of interpretability.…

2021

Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability

EMNLP 2021main

Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to obtain more interpretable link prediction. However, we find in experiments that many paths given by these models are actually unreasonable, while little work has been done on interpretability evaluation for them. In this paper, we propos…

2021

Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2021long

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) exploits only a handful of annotations to iden- tify and classify named entity mentions. Pro- totypical network shows superior performance on few-shot NER. However, existing prototyp- ical methods fail to differentiate rich seman- tics in other-class words, wh…

2021

TWAG: A Topic-Guided Wikipedia Abstract Generator

ACL 2021long

Wikipedia abstract generation aims to distill a Wikipedia abstract from web sources and has met significant success by adopting multi-document summarization techniques. However, previous works generally view the abstract as plain text, ignoring the fact that it is a description of a certain entity a…

2021

TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph

EMNLP 2021main

Multi-hop Question Answering (QA) is a challenging task because it requires precise reasoning with entity relations at every step towards the answer. The relations can be represented in terms of labels in knowledge graph (e.g., spouse) or text in text corpus (e.g., they have been married for 26 year…