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Rui Mao

49 accepted papers

2026

Are Language Models Any Good at Density Modeling?

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) surprised the world with their ability to mimic humans in writing and are starting to be used as simulations of human writers for various kinds of linguistic analyses. However, these analyses rest on the belief that LLMs are good density models that accurately capture th

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Bayes-inspired Integration of Pretrained Priors and Few-Shot Evidence for Few-Shot Classification

ICML 2026poster

Few-shot classification aims to adapt a pretrained model to novel classes with limited examples. While current methods often heuristically combine pretrained knowledge and few-shot evidence, we seek a more principled understanding of their relationship. In this paper, we propose a Bayesian-inspired …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

CLER: Improving Multimodal Financial Reasoning by Cross-MLLM Error Reflection

AAAI 2026technical

Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled joint reasoning over financial textual and visual inputs. However, they still struggle with financial terminology, logical consistency, and numerical computations. Moreover, while commercial large models perform well on reasoni

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Human Behavior Atlas: Benchmarking Unified Psychological And Social Behavior Understanding

ICLR 2026poster

Using intelligent systems to perceive psychological and social behaviors, that is, the underlying affective, cognitive, and pathological states that are manifested through observable behaviors and social interactions, remains a challenge due to their complex, multifaceted, and personalized nature. E…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

LLMdoctor: Token-Level Flow-Guided Preference Optimization for Efficient Test-Time Alignment of Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences is critical, yet traditional fine-tuning methods are computationally expensive and inflexible. While test-time alignment offers a promising alternative, existing approaches often rely on distorted trajectory-level signals or inefficient sa

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

LOREAL: Mitigating Low-Resolution Challenges in Vision-Language Models with Attribute-driven Prompt Self-Distillation

CVPR 2026

Prompt Learning (PL) has emerged as a parameter-efficient technique for adapting Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. However, almost all existing PL methods are primarily designed and evaluated on well-curated datasets, overlooking a critical post-deployment phenomenon, i.e., the intr

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MAPS: Multi-Agent Personality Shaping for Collaborative Reasoning

AAAI 2026technical

Collaborative reasoning with multiple agents offers the potential for more robust and diverse problem-solving. However, existing approaches often suffer from homogeneous agent behaviors and lack of reflective and rethinking capabilities. We propose Multi-Agent Personality Shaping ((MAPS), a novel fr

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

ICML 2026poster

To develop socially intelligent AI, existing approaches typically model behavioral dimensions (e.g., affective, cognitive, or social attributes) in isolation. Although useful, this task-specific modeling increases training costs and limits generalization across behavioral settings. Recent reasoning …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

RefleXNet: Targeted Self-Reflection for Accurate Chest X-ray Reporting

AAAI 2026technical

Automated interpretation and reporting of chest X-rays (CXRs) hold significant promise in reducing diagnostic errors and supporting radiologists under heavy clinical workloads. However, existing methods typically rely on global visual features and token-level supervision, limiting their sensitivity

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

See, Think, Act: Teaching Multimodal Agents to Effectively Interact with GUI by Identifying Toggles

CVPR 2026

The advent of multimodal agents facilitates effective interaction within graphical user interface (GUI), especially in ubiquitous GUI control. However, their inability to reliably execute toggle control instructions remains a key bottleneck. To investigate this, we construct a state control benchmar

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Selection-as-Nonlinearity: Bridging Attention and Activation via a Joint Game-Decision Lens for Interpretable, Discriminative Visual Representations

CVPR 2026

Self-attention with separate pre- and post-projections can be a universal approximator (on compact domains) under mild conditions. Yet we observe a striking gap: an attention-only Transformer (w/o FFN layers) exhibits a marked accuracy drop relative to its standard interleaved attention--FFN baselin

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AntiLeakBench: Preventing Data Contamination by Automatically Constructing Benchmarks with Updated Real-World Knowledge

ACL 2025long

Data contamination hinders fair LLM evaluation by introducing test data into newer models’ training sets. Existing studies solve this challenge by updating benchmarks with newly collected data. However, they fail to guarantee contamination-free evaluation as the newly collected data may contain pre-…

2025

Deciphering the Extremes: A Novel Approach for Pathological Long-tailed Recognition in Scientific Discovery

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Scientific discovery across diverse fields increasingly grapples with datasets exhibiting pathological long-tailed distributions: a few common phenomena overshadow a multitude of rare yet scientifically critical instances. Unlike standard benchmarks, these scientific datasets often feature extreme i…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Deduction with Induction: Combining Knowledge Discovery and Reasoning for Interpretable Deep Reinforcement Learning

IJCAI 2025

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved remarkable success in dynamic decision-making tasks. However, its inherent opacity and cold start problem hinder transparency and training efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose HRL-ID, a neural-symbolic framework that combines automated ru

2025

Deriving Strategic Market Insights with Large Language Models: A Benchmark for Forward Counterfactual Generation

EMNLP 2025

Counterfactual reasoning typically involves considering alternatives to actual events. While often applied to understand past events, a distinct form—forward counterfactual reasoning—focuses on anticipating plausible future developments. This type of reasoning is invaluable in dynamic financial mark

2025

Effective Heterogeneous Point Cloud-Based Place Recognition and Relative Localization for Ground and Aerial Vehicles

ICRA 2025

Place recognition and relative localization are crucial for realizing the potential of collaboration in ground and aerial robot teams. Many existing works focus only on ground robots and are not well-suited for heterogeneous robot systems in large-scale environments. In this paper, we propose a nove

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Efficient Data Labeling by Hierarchical Crowdsourcing with Large Language Models

COLING 2025main

Large language models (LLMs) have received lots of attention for their impressive performance in in-context dialogues and their potential to revolutionize service industries with a new business model, Model-as-a-Service (MaaS). Automated data labeling is a natural and promising service. However, lab…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

F2TEval: Human-Aligned Multi-Dimensional Evaluation for Figure-to-Text Task

EMNLP 2025

Figure-to-Text (F2T) tasks aim to convert structured figure information into natural language text, serving as a bridge between visual perception and language understanding.However, existing evaluation methods remain limited: 1) Reference-based methods can only capture shallow semantic similarities

2025

Hierarchical Reward Modeling for Fault Localization in Large Code Repositories

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant potential in complex software engineering tasks, however, their fault localization capabilities within repository are constrained by inherent limitations in max context length. Although Test-Time Scaling (TTS) can generate multiple candidate solutions

2025

MMPerspective: Do MLLMs Understand Perspective? A Comprehensive Benchmark for Perspective Perception, Reasoning, and Robustness

NeurIPS 2025poster

Understanding perspective is fundamental to human visual perception, yet the extent to which multimodal large language models (MLLMs) internalize perspective geometry remains unclear. We introduce MMPerspective, the first benchmark specifically designed to systematically evaluate MLLMs' understandin…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

QAEval: Mixture of Evaluators for Question-Answering Task Evaluation

ACL 2025long

Question answering (QA) tasks serve as a key benchmark for evaluating generation systems. Traditional rule-based metrics, such as accuracy and relaxed-accuracy, struggle with open-ended and unstructured responses. LLM-based evaluation methods offer greater flexibility but suffer from sensitivity to…

2025

R-CHAR: A Metacognition-Driven Framework for Role-Playing in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Role-playing capabilities in large language models (LLMs) often lack cognitive consistency in complex scenarios that require deep understanding and coherent reasoning. While recent reasoning models excel in math and coding tasks, they show limited effectiveness in open-ended role-playing scenarios.

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Seamless Transition Control in Spring-Legged Quadrotors: A Hybrid Dynamics Perspective with Guaranteed Feasibility

IROS 2025

Legged aerial-terrestrial robots have garnered significant research attention in recent years due to their enhanced environmental adaptability through combined aerial and terrestrial locomotion. However, existing passive spring-legged aerial robots exhibit limited motion versatility, demonstrating s

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Towards Robust ESG Analysis Against Greenwashing Risks: Aspect-Action Analysis with Cross-Category Generalization

ACL 2025long

Sustainability reports are key for evaluating companies’ environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance. To analyze these reports, NLP approaches can efficiently extract ESG insights at scale. However, even the most advanced NLP methods lack robustness against ESG content that is greenwashed…

2025

VidComposition: Can MLLMs Analyze Compositions in Compiled Videos?

CVPR 2025poster

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled significant progress in multimodal understanding, expanding their capacity to analyze video content. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for MLLMs primarily focus on abstract video comprehension, lacking a detailed assessmen…

2025

VideoRFT: Incentivizing Video Reasoning Capability in MLLMs via Reinforced Fine-Tuning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) has shown great promise in achieving humanlevel reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), and has recently been extended to MLLMs. Nevertheless, reasoning about videos, which is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence, remains a persistent challenge d…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2024

ColAG: A Collaborative Air-Ground Framework for Perception-Limited UGVs’ Navigation

ICRA 2024poster

Perception is necessary for autonomous navigation in an unknown area crowded with obstacles. It’s challenging for a robot to navigate safely without any sensors that can sense the environment, resulting in a blind robot, and becomes more difficult when comes to a group of robots. However, it could b…

Cited by 8SourcecodeScholar
2024

GPTEval: A Survey on Assessments of ChatGPT and GPT-4

COLING 2024main

The emergence of ChatGPT has generated much speculation in the press about its potential to disrupt social and economic systems. Its astonishing language ability has aroused strong curiosity among scholars about its performance in different domains. There have been many studies evaluating the abilit…

Cited by 125SourcePDFScholar
2024

MetaPro 2.0: Computational Metaphor Processing on the Effectiveness of Anomalous Language Modeling

ACL 2024findings

Metaphor interpretation is a difficult task in natural language understanding. The development of relevant techniques in this domain is slow, mostly because of the lack of large annotated datasets and effective pre-trained language models (PLMs) for metaphor learning. Thus, we propose a large annota…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2024

Modeling Personalized Retweeting Behaviors for Multi-Stage Cascade Popularity Prediction

IJCAI 2024poster

Predicting the size of message cascades is critical in various applications, such as online advertising and early detection of rumors. However, most existing deep learning approaches rely on cascade observation, which hinders accurate cascade prediction before message posting. Besides, these approac…

2024

Motif-oriented influence maximization for viral marketing in large-scale social networks

NeurIPS 2024poster

The influence maximization (IM) problem aims to identify a budgeted set of nodes with the highest potential to influence the largest number of users in a cascade model, a key challenge in viral marketing. Traditional \emph{IM} approaches consider each user/node independently as a potential target cu…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

SarcNet: A Multilingual Multimodal Sarcasm Detection Dataset

COLING 2024main

Sarcasm poses a challenge in linguistic analysis due to its implicit nature, involving an intended meaning that contradicts the literal expression. The advent of social networks has propelled the utilization of multimodal data to enhance sarcasm detection performance. In prior multimodal sarcasm det…

2024

SenticVec: Toward Robust and Human-Centric Neurosymbolic Sentiment Analysis

ACL 2024findings

The success of state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems heavily depends on deep neural networks, which excel in various tasks through strong data fitting and latent feature modeling abilities. However, certain challenges linked to deep neural networks and supervised deep learning d…

2024

Understanding Public Perception Towards Weather Disasters Through the Lens of Metaphor

IJCAI 2024poster

Extreme weather can lead to weather-induced disasters. These have a profound impact on communities worldwide, causing loss of life, damage to properties and infrastructure, and disruption of daily activities. In alignment with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, addressing the increasi…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2024

Vanessa: Visual Connotation and Aesthetic Attributes Understanding Network for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

EMNLP 2024finding

Prevailing research concentrates on superficial features or descriptions of images, revealing a significant gap in the systematic exploration of their connotative and aesthetic attributes. Furthermore, the use of cross-modal relation detection modules to eliminate noise from comprehensive image repr…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

Finding the Pillars of Strength for Multi-Head Attention

ACL 2023long

Recent studies have revealed some issues of Multi-Head Attention (MHA), e.g., redundancy and over-parameterization. Specifically, the heads of MHA were originally designed to attend to information from different representation subspaces, whereas prior studies found that some attention heads likely l…

2023

Lightweight Real-Time Detection Model for Multi-Sheep Abnormal Behaviour Based on Yolov7-Tiny

IROS 2023poster

Animal behaviour can reflect the health and physiological stage of the animal. Animal behaviour recognition is a vital part of automated farming systems. Although image-based deep learning algorithms can accurately identify animal behaviour, the lack of data on animal abnormal behaviour makes the pr…

Cited by 2SourceScholar
2023

Neuro-Symbolic Sentiment Analysis with Dynamic Word Sense Disambiguation

EMNLP 2023long findings

Sentiment analysis is a task that highly depends on the understanding of word senses. Traditional neural network models are black boxes that represent word senses as vectors that are uninterpretable for humans. On the other hand, the application of Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) systems in downstre…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

PAED: Zero-Shot Persona Attribute Extraction in Dialogues

ACL 2023long

Persona attribute extraction is critical for personalized human-computer interaction. Dialogue is an important medium that communicates and delivers persona information. Although there is a public dataset for triplet-based persona attribute extraction from conversations, its automatically generated…

2023

SKIER: A Symbolic Knowledge Integrated Model for Conversational Emotion Recognition

AAAI 2023technical

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has received increasing attention from the research community. However, the ERC task is challenging, largely due to the complex and unstructured properties of multi-party conversations. Besides, the majority of daily dialogues take place in a specific contex…

2023

TECHS: Temporal Logical Graph Networks for Explainable Extrapolation Reasoning

ACL 2023long

Extrapolation reasoning on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) aims to forecast future facts based on past counterparts. There are two main challenges: (1) incorporating the complex information, including structural dependencies, temporal dynamics, and hidden logical rules; (2) implementing differentia…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2022

A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation

EMNLP 2022main

The bloom of the Internet and the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques open a new door to AI for E-commence, with a trend of evolving from using a few financial factors such as liquidity and profitability to using more advanced AI techniques to process complex and multi-modal data. In th…

2022

COPNER: Contrastive Learning with Prompt Guiding for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

COLING 2022main

Distance metric learning has become a popular solution for few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER). The typical setup aims to learn a similarity metric for measuring the semantic similarity between test samples and referents, where each referent represents an entity class. The effect of this setup m…

2022

Hierarchical Attention Network for Explainable Depression Detection on Twitter Aided by Metaphor Concept Mappings

COLING 2022main

Automatic depression detection on Twitter can help individuals privately and conveniently understand their mental health status in the early stages before seeing mental health professionals. Most existing black-box-like deep learning methods for depression detection largely focused on improving clas…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2021

Bridging Towers of Multi-task Learning with a Gating Mechanism for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis and Sequential Metaphor Identification

AAAI 2021technical

Multi-task learning (MTL) has been widely applied in Natural Language Processing. A major task and its associated auxiliary tasks share the same encoder; hence, an MTL encoder can learn the sharing abstract information between the major and auxiliary tasks. Task-specific towers are then employed upo…

Cited by 116SourcePDFScholar