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Shujian Huang

74 accepted papers

2026

ALIGN TO THE PIVOT: DUAL ALIGNMENT WITH SELF-FEEDBACK FOR MULTILINGUAL MATH REASONING

ICASSP 2026poster

Despite the impressive reasoning abilities demonstrated by large language models (LLMs), empirical evidence indicates that they are not language agnostic as expected, leading to performance declines in multilingual settings, especially for low-resource languages. We attribute the decline to the mode…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

DuPO: Enabling Reliable Self-Verification via Dual Preference Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

We present DuPO, a dual learning-based preference optimization framework that generates annotation-free feedback via the generalized duality. DuPO addresses two key limitations: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)’s reliance on costly labels and applicability restricted to verifiab…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Neuron-Aware Data Selection in Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Instruction Tuning (IT) has been proven to be an effective approach to unlock the powerful capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent studies indicate that excessive IT data can degrade LLMs performance, while carefully selecting a small subset of high-quality IT data can significantly en…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

The First Impression Problem: Internal Bias Triggers Overthinking in Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning models often exhibit overthinking, characterized by redundant reasoning steps. We identify \emph{internal bias} elicited by the input question as a key trigger of such behavior. Upon encountering a problem, the model immediately forms a preliminary guess about the answer, which we term an…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Towards A Generative Protein Evolution Machine with DPLM-Evo

ICML 2026poster

Proteins are shaped by gradual evolution under biophysical and functional constraints. Protein language models learn rich evolutionary constraints from large-scale sequence data, and discrete diffusion–based protein language models (e.g., DPLMs) have emerged as a promising framework for both underst…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

"I've Heard of You!": Generate Spoken Named Entity Recognition Data for Unseen Entities

ICASSP 2025accepted

Spoken named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify named entities from speech, playing an important role in speech processing. New named entities appear every day, however, annotating their Spoken NER data is costly. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing Spoken NER systems perform poorly w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Alleviating Distribution Shift in Synthetic Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

ACL 2025long

Quality Estimation (QE) models evaluate the quality of machine translations without reference translations, serving as the reward models for the translation task.Due to the data scarcity, synthetic data generation has emerged as a promising solution.However, synthetic QE data often suffers from dist…

2025

BenchMAX: A Comprehensive Multilingual Evaluation Suite for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Existing multilingual benchmarks focus primarily on language understanding tasks. There is a lack of benchmarks to measure comprehensive critical capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across diverse languages, including instruction following, reasoning, code generation, and long context under

2025

DPLM-2: A Multimodal Diffusion Protein Language Model

ICLR 2025poster

Proteins are essential macromolecules defined by their amino acid sequences, which determine their three-dimensional structures and, consequently, their functions in all living organisms. Therefore, generative protein modeling necessitates a multimodal approach to simultaneously model, understand, a…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2025

Elucidating the Design Space of Multimodal Protein Language Models

ICML 2025spotlight

Multimodal protein language models (PLMs) integrate sequence and token-based structural information, serving as a powerful foundation for protein modeling, generation, and design. However, the reliance on tokenizing 3D structures into discrete tokens causes substantial loss of fidelity about fine-g…

2025

EnAnchored-X2X: English-Anchored Optimization for Many-to-Many Translation

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong machine translation capabilities for English-centric language pairs but underperform in direct non-English (x2x) translation. This work addresses this limitation through a synthetic data generation framework that leverages models’ established Eng

2025

Investigating and Scaling up Code-Switching for Multilingual Language Model Pre-Training

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable multilingual capabilities despite the extreme language imbalance in the pre-training data. In this paper, we closely examine the reasons behind this phenomenon, focusing on the pre-training corpus. We find that the existence of code-switching, alternat…

2025

Large Language Models Are Cross-Lingual Knowledge-Free Reasoners

NAACL 2025long

Large Language Models have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities across multiple languages. However, the relationship between capabilities in different languages is less explored. In this work, we decompose the process of reasoning tasks into two separated components: knowledge retrieval an…

2025

MoE-LPR: Multilingual Extension of Large Language Models Through Mixture-of-Experts with Language Priors Routing

AAAI 2025technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) are often English-centric due to the disproportionate distribution of languages in their pre-training data. Enhancing non-English language capabilities through post-pretraining often results in catastrophic forgetting of high-resource languages. Previous methods either a…

2025

Process-based Self-Rewarding Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models have demonstrated outstanding performance across various downstream tasks and have been widely applied in multiple scenarios. Human-annotated preference data is used for training to further improve LLMs’ performance, which is constrained by the upper limit of human performance.…

2025

R-PRM: Reasoning-Driven Process Reward Modeling

EMNLP 2025

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have emerged as a promising solution to address the reasoning mistakes of large language models (LLMs). However, existing PRMs typically output evaluation scores directly, limiting both learning efficiency and evaluation accuracy. This limitation is further compounded by

2025

SDGO: Self-Discrimination-Guided Optimization for Consistent Safety in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that induce harmful content generation. In this paper, we reveal a critical safety inconsistency: LLMs can more effectively identify harmful requests as discriminators than d

2025

SLAM: Towards Efficient Multilingual Reasoning via Selective Language Alignment

COLING 2025main

Despite the significant improvements achieved by large language models (LLMs) in English reasoning tasks, these models continue to struggle with multilingual reasoning. Recent studies leverage a full-parameter and two-stage training paradigm to teach models to first understand non-English questions…

2025

Self-Evolution Knowledge Distillation for LLM-based Machine Translation

COLING 2025main

Knowledge distillation (KD) has shown great promise in transferring knowledge from larger teacher models to smaller student models. However, existing KD strategies for large language models often minimize output distributions between student and teacher models indiscriminately for each token. This o…

2025

TRANS-ZERO: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data

ACL 2025finding

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has reshaped machine translation (MT), but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), facing challenges like data scarcity for low-resource languages and catastrophic forgetting. To address these issues, we propose…

2025

Understanding LLMs’ Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From

EMNLP 2025

Cross-lingual context retrieval (extracting contextual information in one language based on requests in another) is a fundamental aspect of cross-lingual alignment, but the performance and mechanism of it for large language models (LLMs) remains unclear. In this paper, we evaluate the cross-lingual

2025

Why Not Act on What You Know? Unleashing Safety Potential of LLMs via Self-Aware Guard Enhancement

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across various tasks but remain vulnerable to meticulously crafted jailbreak attacks. In this paper, we identify a critical safety gap: while LLMs are adept at detecting jailbreak prompts, they often produce unsafe responses when direct…

2024

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Generalized Nested Jailbreak Prompts can Fool Large Language Models Easily

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, are designed to provide useful and safe responses. However, adversarial prompts known as ‘jailbreaks’ can circumvent safeguards, leading LLMs to generate potentially harmful content. Exploring jailbreak prompts can help to better reveal the we…

2024

Diffusion Language Models Are Versatile Protein Learners

ICML 2024poster

This paper introduces diffusion protein language model (DPLM), a versatile protein language model that demonstrates strong generative and predictive capabilities for protein sequences. We first pre-train scalable DPLMs from evolutionary-scale protein sequences within a generative self-supervised dis…

2024

EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering

EMNLP 2024main

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods encounter difficulties when addressing complex questions like multi-hop queries.While iterative retrieval methods improve performance by gathering additional information, current approaches often rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs).In t…

2024

Exploring the Factual Consistency in Dialogue Comprehension of Large Language Models

NAACL 2024long

LLMs (Large Language Models) usually interact with users in the form of dialogue and generate responses following their instructions, which naturally require dialogue comprehension abilities. However, dialogue comprehension is a general language ability which is hard to be evaluated directly. In thi…

2024

Formality is Favored: Unraveling the Learning Preferences of Large Language Models on Data with Conflicting Knowledge

EMNLP 2024main

Having been trained on massive pretraining data, large language models have shown excellent performance on many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, pretraining data tends to contain misleading and even conflicting information, and it is intriguing to understand how LLMs handle these noisy data durin…

2024

Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners

EMNLP 2024main

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, while most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. Multilingual alignment based on the translation parallel data is an effective method to enhance LLMs’ multilingual capabilities. In this…

2024

Large Language Models are Limited in Out-of-Context Knowledge Reasoning

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) possess extensive knowledge and strong capabilities in performing in-context reasoning. However, previous work challenges their out-of-context reasoning ability, i.e., the ability to infer information from their training data, instead of from the context or prompt. This…

2024

Lost in the Source Language: How Large Language Models Evaluate the Quality of Machine Translation

ACL 2024findings

This study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage source and reference data in machine translation evaluation task, aiming to better understand the mechanisms behind their remarkable performance in this task.We design the controlled experiments across various input modes and model ty…

2024

MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization

ACL 2024long

Intuitively, reasoning abilities are considered language-agnostic. However, existing LLMs exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages, e.g., reasoning in the dominant language like English is superior to other languages due to the imbalance of multilingual training data. To e…

2024

MT-PATCHER: Selective and Extendable Knowledge Distillation from Large Language Models for Machine Translation

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLM) have demonstrated their strong ability in the field of machine translation, yet they suffer from high computational cost and latency. Therefore, transferring translation knowledge from giant LLMs to medium-sized machine translation models is a promising research direction…

2024

Measuring Meaning Composition in the Human Brain with Composition Scores from Large Language Models

ACL 2024long

The process of meaning composition, wherein smaller units like morphemes or words combine to form the meaning of phrases and sentences, is essential for human sentence comprehension. Despite extensive neurolinguistic research into the brain regions involved in meaning composition, a computational me…

2024

MultiSQL: A Schema-Integrated Context-Dependent Text2SQL Dataset with Diverse SQL Operations

ACL 2024findings

Text2SQL is a task that translates natural language into SQL statements. Context-dependent Text2SQL offers a more natural database interaction by simulating dialogues between users and databases, with CoSQL and SparC as representative datasets. Yet, these datasets struggle to accurately replicate re…

2024

Multilingual Contrastive Decoding via Language-Agnostic Layers Skipping

EMNLP 2024finding

Decoding by contrasting layers (DoLa), is designed to improve the generation quality of large language models (LLMs) by contrasting the prediction probabilities between an early exit output (amateur logits) and the final output (expert logits).However, we find that this approach does not work well o…

2024

Multilingual Machine Translation with Large Language Models: Empirical Results and Analysis

NAACL 2024findings

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling multilingual machine translation (MMT). In this paper, we systematically investigate the advantages and challenges of LLMs for MMT by answering two questions: 1) How well do LLMs perform in translating massive languages?…

2024

Multilingual Pretraining and Instruction Tuning Improve Cross-Lingual Knowledge Alignment, But Only Shallowly

NAACL 2024long

Despite their strong ability to retrieve knowledge in English, current large language models show imbalance abilities in different languages. Two approaches are proposed to address this, i.e., multilingual pretraining and multilingual instruction tuning. However, whether and how do such methods cont…

2024

PreAlign: Boosting Cross-Lingual Transfer by Early Establishment of Multilingual Alignment

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models demonstrate reasonable multilingual abilities, despite predominantly English-centric pretraining. However, the spontaneous multilingual alignment in these models is shown to be weak, leading to unsatisfactory cross-lingual transfer and knowledge sharing. Previous works attempt…

2024

Question Translation Training for Better Multilingual Reasoning

ACL 2024findings

Large language models show compelling performance on reasoning tasks but they tend to perform much worse in languages other than English. This is unsurprising given that their training data largely consists of English text and instructions. A typical solution is to translate instruction data into al…

2023

Addressing Linguistic Bias through a Contrastive Analysis of Academic Writing in the NLP Domain

EMNLP 2023long main

It has been well documented that a reviewer’s opinion of the nativeness of expression in an academic paper affects the likelihood of it being accepted for publication. Previous works have also shone a light on the stress and anxiety authors who are non-native English speakers experience when attempt…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

BLEURT Has Universal Translations: An Analysis of Automatic Metrics by Minimum Risk Training

ACL 2023long

Automatic metrics play a crucial role in machine translation. Despite the widespread use of n-gram-based metrics, there has been a recent surge in the development of pre-trained model-based metrics that focus on measuring sentence semantics. However, these neural metrics, while achieving higher corr…

2023

CoP: Factual Inconsistency Detection by Controlling the Preference

AAAI 2023technical

Abstractive summarization is the process of generating a summary given a document as input. Although significant progress has been made, the factual inconsistency between the document and the generated summary still limits its practical applications. Previous work found that the probabilities assign…

2023

Denoising Pre-training for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Curriculum Learning

AAAI 2023technical

Quality estimation (QE) aims to assess the quality of machine translations when reference translations are unavailable. QE plays a crucial role in many real-world applications of machine translation. Because labeled QE data are usually limited in scale, recent research, such as DirectQE, pre-trains…

2023

IMTLab: An Open-Source Platform for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Interactive Machine Translation Systems

EMNLP 2023long main

We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translati…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

INK: Injecting kNN Knowledge in Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

ACL 2023long

Neural machine translation has achieved promising results on many translation tasks. However, previous studies have shown that neural models induce a non-smooth representation space, which harms its generalization results. Recently, kNN-MT has provided an effective paradigm to smooth the prediction…

2023

Improved Pseudo Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Constrained Beam Search

EMNLP 2023long main

Machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE) is a crucial task to estimate the quality of MT outputs when reference translations are unavailable. Many studies focus on generating pseudo data using large parallel corpus and achieve remarkable success in the supervised setting. However, pseudo dat…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Local Interpretation of Transformer Based on Linear Decomposition

ACL 2023long

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. However, limitations in interpretability have hindered their applications in the real world. This work proposes to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition and finds that the Re…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Roles of Scaling and Instruction Tuning in Language Perception: Model vs. Human Attention

EMNLP 2023long findings

Recent large language models (LLMs) have revealed strong abilities to understand natural language. Since most of them share the same basic structure, i.e. the transformer block, possible contributors to their success in the training process are scaling and instruction tuning. However, how these fact…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Selective Knowledge Distillation for Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation

AAAI 2023technical

Benefiting from the sequence-level knowledge distillation, the Non-Autoregressive Transformer (NAT) achieves great success in neural machine translation tasks. However, existing knowledge distillation has side effects, such as propagating errors from the teacher to NAT students, which may limit fur…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2023

What Knowledge Is Needed? Towards Explainable Memory for kNN-MT Domain Adaptation

ACL 2023findings

kNN-MT presents a new paradigm for domain adaptation by building an external datastore, which usually saves all target language token occurrences in the parallel corpus. As a result, the constructed datastore is usually large and possibly redundant. In this paper, we investigate the interpretability…

2022

Alleviating the Inequality of Attention Heads for Neural Machine Translation

COLING 2022main

Recent studies show that the attention heads in Transformer are not equal. We relate this phenomenon to the imbalance training of multi-head attention and the model dependence on specific heads. To tackle this problem, we propose a simple masking method: HeadMask, in two specific ways. Experiments s…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

Analyzing the Intensity of Complaints on Social Media

NAACL 2022findings

Complaining is a speech act that expresses a negative inconsistency between reality and human’s expectations. While prior studies mostly focus on identifying the existence or the type of complaints, in this work, we present the first study in computational linguistics of measuring the intensity of c…

2022

BiTIIMT: A Bilingual Text-infilling Method for Interactive Machine Translation

ACL 2022long

Interactive neural machine translation (INMT) is able to guarantee high-quality translations by taking human interactions into account. Existing IMT systems relying on lexical constrained decoding (LCD) enable humans to translate in a flexible translation order beyond the left-to-right. However, the…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2022

Helping the Weak Makes You Strong: Simple Multi-Task Learning Improves Non-Autoregressive Translators

EMNLP 2022main

Recently, non-autoregressive (NAR) neural machine translation models have received increasing attention due to their efficient parallel decoding.However, the probabilistic framework of NAR models necessitates conditional independence assumption on target sequences, falling short of characterizing hu…

2022

Learning from Adjective-Noun Pairs: A Knowledge-enhanced Framework for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification

COLING 2022main

Target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification (TMSC) is a new subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis, which aims to determine the sentiment polarity of the opinion target mentioned in a (sentence, image) pair. Recently, dominant works employ the attention mechanism to capture the correspon…

2022

Non-parametric Online Learning from Human Feedback for Neural Machine Translation

AAAI 2022technical

We study the problem of online learning with human feedback in the human-in-the-loop machine translation, in which the human translators revise the machine-generated translations and then the corrected translations are used to improve the neural machine translation (NMT) system. However, previous me…

2022

Probing Cross-modal Semantics Alignment Capability from the Textual Perspective

EMNLP 2022finding

In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. Aligning cross-modal semantics is claimed to be one of the essential capabilities of VLP models. However, it still remains unclear about the inner w…

2022

Rethinking Document-level Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2022findings

This paper does not aim at introducing a novel model for document-level neural machine translation. Instead, we head back to the original Transformer model and hope to answer the following question: Is the capacity of current models strong enough for document-level translation? Interestingly, we obs…

2022

Structure-Unified M-Tree Coding Solver for Math Word Problem

EMNLP 2022main

As one of the challenging NLP tasks, designing math word problem (MWP) solvers has attracted increasing research attention for the past few years. In previous work, models designed by taking into account the properties of the binary tree structure of mathematical expressions at the output side have…

2022

Towards Multi-label Unknown Intent Detection

COLING 2022main

Multi-class unknown intent detection has made remarkable progress recently. However, it has a strong assumption that each utterance has only one intent, which does not conform to reality because utterances often have multiple intents. In this paper, we propose a more desirable task, multi-label unkn…

2022

latent-GLAT: Glancing at Latent Variables for Parallel Text Generation

ACL 2022long

Recently, parallel text generation has received widespread attention due to its success in generation efficiency. Although many advanced techniques are proposed to improve its generation quality, they still need the help of an autoregressive model for training to overcome the one-to-many multi-modal…

2021

Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation

ACL 2021short

kNN-MT, recently proposed by Khandelwal et al. (2020a), successfully combines pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to improve the translation accuracy. However, the traditional kNN algorithm used in kNN-MT simply retrieves a same numb…

2021

Automated Cross-prompt Scoring of Essay Traits

AAAI 2021technical

The majority of current research in Automated Essay Scoring (AES) focuses on prompt-specific scoring of either the overall quality of an essay or the quality with regards to certain traits. In real-world applications obtaining labelled data for a target essay prompt is often expensive or unfeasible,…

2021

DirectQE: Direct Pretraining for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

AAAI 2021technical

Machine Translation Quality Estimation (QE) is a task of predicting the quality of machine translations without relying on any reference. Recently, the predictor-estimator framework trains the predictor as a feature extractor, which leverages the extra parallel corpora without QE labels, achieving p…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2021

Duplex Sequence-to-Sequence Learning for Reversible Machine Translation

NeurIPS 2021poster

Sequence-to-sequence learning naturally has two directions. How to effectively utilize supervision signals from both directions? Existing approaches either require two separate models, or a multitask-learned model but with inferior performance. In this paper, we propose REDER (Reversible Duplex Tran…

2021

Learning Kernel-Smoothed Machine Translation with Retrieved Examples

EMNLP 2021main

How to effectively adapt neural machine translation (NMT) models according to emerging cases without retraining? Despite the great success of neural machine translation, updating the deployed models online remains a challenge. Existing non-parametric approaches that retrieve similar examples from a…

2021

Meta-LMTC: Meta-Learning for Large-Scale Multi-Label Text Classification

EMNLP 2021main

Large-scale multi-label text classification (LMTC) tasks often face long-tailed label distributions, where many labels have few or even no training instances. Although current methods can exploit prior knowledge to handle these few/zero-shot labels, they neglect the meta-knowledge contained in the d…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2021

Non-Autoregressive Translation by Learning Target Categorical Codes

NAACL 2021long

Non-autoregressive Transformer is a promising text generation model. However, current non-autoregressive models still fall behind their autoregressive counterparts in translation quality. We attribute this accuracy gap to the lack of dependency modeling among decoder inputs. In this paper, we propos…

2021

Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation

EMNLP 2021finding

Recently, kNN-MT (Khandelwal et al., 2020) has shown the promising capability of directly incorporating the pre-trained neural machine translation (NMT) model with domain-specific token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval to achieve domain adaptation without retraining. Despite being conceptual…

2021

When is Char Better Than Subword: A Systematic Study of Segmentation Algorithms for Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2021short

Subword segmentation algorithms have been a de facto choice when building neural machine translation systems. However, most of them need to learn a segmentation model based on some heuristics, which may produce sub-optimal segmentation. This can be problematic in some scenarios when the target langu…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Simple and Effective Approach to Robust Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction

COLING 2020main

Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction methods based on the initialization and the self-learning have achieved great success in similar language pairs, e.g., English-Spanish. But they still fail and have an accuracy of 0% in many distant language pairs, e.g., English-Japanese. In this work, we…

2020

Towards Making the Most of Context in Neural Machine Translation

IJCAI 2020poster

Document-level machine translation manages to outperform sentence level models by a small margin, but have failed to be widely adopted. We argue that previous research did not make a clear use of the global context, and propose a new document-level NMT framework that deliberately models the local co…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar