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Yanan Cao

49 accepted papers

2026

Breaking One-Size-Fits-All: Revisiting Out-of-Distribution Detection on Graphs Under Diverse Distribution Shifts

AAAI 2026technical

Graph OOD detection is crucial in open-world scenarios, where OOD samples may manifest in diverse forms such as open-set deviations, feature-similar shifts, and structural anomalies, each exhibiting distinct geometric characteristics. However, most existing methods adopt a one-size-fits-all geometri

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

MetaGDPO: Alleviating Catastrophic Forgetting with Metacognitive Knowledge Through Group Direct Preference Optimization

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities, which can be effectively compressed into smaller models. However, existing datasets and fine-tuning approaches still face challenges that lead to catastrophic forgetting, particularly for models smaller than 8B. First, most datasets ty

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

PathMind: A Retrieve-Prioritize-Reason Framework for Knowledge Graph Reasoning with Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) is the task of inferring new knowledge by performing logical deductions on knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in complex reasoning tasks. Despite promising success, current LLM-based KGR methods still fac

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Towards Reliable Marking and Verification of AI-Generated Text via Geometry-aware Sentence-level Watermarking

ICML 2026poster

Large generative models raise growing concerns about provenance, misinformation, and impersonation. Digital watermarking offers a principled solution, yet extending it to natural language remains challenging due to text discreteness and sensitivity to semantic perturbations. Existing text watermarki…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Bottleneck-Constrained Contrastive Decoupled Network for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Classification

ICASSP 2025accepted

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment classification (MABSC) is a challenging task emerging in recent years, which aims to combine text and image to identify the sentiment polarity of each aspect. There exists a potential irrelevance between aspects and images, and mistakenly focusing on irrelevant imag…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DNA-DetectLLM: Unveiling AI-Generated Text via a DNA-Inspired Mutation-Repair Paradigm

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has blurred the line between AI-generated and human-written text. This progress brings societal risks such as misinformation, authorship ambiguity, and intellectual property concerns, highlighting the urgent need for reliable AI-generated text de…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Dual-Path Counterfactual Integration for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Classification

EMNLP 2025

Multimodal aspect-based sentiment classification (MABSC) requires fine-grained reasoning over both textual and visual content to infer sentiments toward specific aspects. However, existing methods often rely on superficial correlations—particularly between aspect terms and sentiment labels—leading t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dynamic Evaluation with Cognitive Reasoning for Multi-turn Safety of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant challenges for safety evaluation. Current static datasets struggle to identify emerging vulnerabilities due to three limitations: (1) they risk being exposed in model training data, leading to evaluation bias; (2) their limited…

2025

Enhancing Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion via Structure-Aware Alignment-Tuning

EMNLP 2025

Knowledge graph completion (KGC) aims to infer new knowledge and make predictions from knowledge graphs. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning capabilities. LLM-enhanced KGC methods primarily focus on designing task-specific instructions, achieving promising adva

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

From Trade-off to Synergy: A Versatile Symbiotic Watermarking Framework for Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns about the misuse of AI-generated text, making watermarking a promising solution. Mainstream watermarking schemes for LLMs fall into two categories: logits-based and sampling-based. However, current schemes entail trade-offs among robus…

2025

LayerNavigator: Finding Promising Intervention Layers for Efficient Activation Steering in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Activation steering is an efficient technique for aligning the behavior of large language models (LLMs) by injecting steering vectors directly into a model’s residual stream during inference. A pivotal challenge in this approach lies in choosing the right layers to intervene, as inappropriate select…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

NeedleInATable: Exploring Long-Context Capability of Large Language Models towards Long-Structured Tables

NeurIPS 2025poster

Processing structured tabular data, particularly large and lengthy tables, constitutes a fundamental yet challenging task for large language models (LLMs). However, existing long-context benchmarks like Needle-in-a-Haystack primarily focus on unstructured text, neglecting the challenge of diverse st…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

PIG: Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various domains but pose inherent privacy risks. Existing methods to evaluate privacy leakage in LLMs often use memorized prefixes or simple instructions to extract data, both of which well-alignment models can easily block. Meanwhile, Jailbreak attacks bypass L…

2025

RelationalCoder: Rethinking Complex Tables via Programmatic Relational Transformation

ACL 2025long

Semi-structured tables, with their varied layouts and formatting artifacts, remain a major obstacle for automated data processing and analytics. To address these challenges, we propose RelationalCoder, which uniformly converts semi-structured tables into relational data, enabling smooth integration…

2025

Reliably Bounding False Positives: A Zero-Shot Machine-Generated Text Detection Framework via Multiscaled Conformal Prediction

ACL 2025long

The rapid advancement of large language models has raised significant concerns regarding their potential misuse by malicious actors. As a result, developing effective detectors to mitigate these risks has become a critical priority. However, most existing detection methods focus excessively on detec…

2025

Sibyl: Empowering Empathetic Dialogue Generation in Large Language Models via Sensible and Visionary Commonsense Inference

COLING 2025main

Recently, there has been a heightened interest in building chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to emulate human-like qualities in multi-turn conversations. Despite having access to commonsense knowledge to better understand the psychological aspects and causality of dialogue context, even…

2025

UniFORM: Towards Unified Framework for Anomaly Detection on Graphs

AAAI 2025technical

Graph anomaly detection has attracted significant attention due to its critical applications, such as identifying money laundering in financial systems and detecting fake reviews on social networks. However, two major challenges persist: (1) anomaly detection at the node, edge, and graph levels is o…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DEIE: Benchmarking Document-level Event Information Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese News Dataset

COLING 2024main

A text corpus centered on events is foundational to research concerning the detection, representation, reasoning, and harnessing of online events. The majority of current event-based datasets mainly target sentence-level tasks, thus to advance event-related research spanning from sentence to documen…

2024

Graph Neural Stochastic Diffusion for Estimating Uncertainty in Node Classification

ICML 2024poster

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have advanced the state of the art in various domains. Despite their remarkable success, the uncertainty estimation of GNN predictions remains under-explored, which limits their practical applications especially in risk-sensitive areas. Current works suffer from either i…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

Sorting, Reasoning, and Extraction: An Easy-to-Hard Reasoning Framework for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

ICASSP 2024accepted

Document-level event argument extraction is a crucial task to help understand event information. Existing methods mostly ignore the different extraction difficulties of arguments, and the lack of task planning significantly affects the extraction and reasoning abilities of the model. In this paper,…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Subtle Signatures, Strong Shields: Advancing Robust and Imperceptible Watermarking in Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to an increase in AI-generated text on the Internet, presenting a crucial challenge to differentiate AI-created content from human-written text. This challenge is critical to prevent issues of authenticity, trust, and potential copyrigh…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

TISE: A Tripartite In-context Selection Method for Event Argument Extraction

NAACL 2024long

In-context learning enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs by providing several examples. A direct yet effective approach to obtain in-context example is to select the top-k examples based on their semantic similarity to the test input. However, when applied to event argument extraction (EAE),…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

An Empirical Study of Instruction-tuning Large Language Models in Chinese

EMNLP 2023long findings

The success of ChatGPT validates the potential of large language models (LLMs) in artificial general intelligence (AGI). Subsequently, the release of LLMs has sparked the open-source community's interest in instruction-tuning, which is deemed to accelerate ChatGPT's replication process. However, r…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Compressing and Debiasing Vision-Language Pre-Trained Models for Visual Question Answering

EMNLP 2023long main

Despite the excellent performance of vision-language pre-trained models (VLPs) on conventional VQA task, they still suffer from two problems: First, VLPs tend to rely on language biases in datasets and fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. Second, they are inefficient in terms of mem…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

DiffusEmp: A Diffusion Model-Based Framework with Multi-Grained Control for Empathetic Response Generation

ACL 2023long

Empathy is a crucial factor in open-domain conversations, which naturally shows one’s caring and understanding to others. Though several methods have been proposed to generate empathetic responses, existing works often lead to monotonous empathy that refers to generic and safe expressions. In this p…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2023

Divide, Conquer, and Combine: Mixture of Semantic-Independent Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking

ACL 2023long

Zero-shot transfer learning for Dialogue State Tracking (DST) helps to handle a variety of task-oriented dialogue domains without the cost of collecting in-domain data. Existing works mainly study common data- or model-level augmentation methods to enhance the generalization but fail to effectively…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Improving Bert Fine-Tuning via Stabilizing Cross-Layer Mutual Information

ICASSP 2023accepted

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models, such as BERT, has shown enormous success among various NLP tasks. Though simple and effective, the process of fine-tuning has been found unstable, which often leads to unexpected poor performance. To increase stability and generalizability, most existing work…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction

EMNLP 2023long findings

Event argument extraction is critical to various natural language processing tasks for providing structured information. Existing works usually extract the event arguments one by one, and mostly neglect to build dependency information among event argument roles, especially from the perspective of ev…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Multi-level Adaptive Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Internalization in Dialogue Generation

EMNLP 2023long main

Knowledge-grounded dialogue generation aims to mitigate the issue of text degeneration by incorporating external knowledge to supplement the context. However, the model often fails to internalize this information into responses in a human-like manner. Instead, it simply inserts segments of the provi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation

ACL 2023long

Recent studies have shown the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks. These retrieval-augmented methods allow models to explicitly acquire prior external knowledge in a non-parametric manner and regard the retrieved reference instances as cues to augment text generation…

2023

Seri: Sketching-Reasoning-Integrating Progressive Workflow for Empathetic Response Generation

ICASSP 2023accepted

Empathy is a key ability for a human-like dialogue system. Inspired by social psychology, empathy includes both affective and cognitive aspects. Previous works on this topic have merely focused on recognizing emotions or modeling cognition with commonsense knowledge. Nevertheless, the generated resu…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation

ACL 2023long

Dense retrieval is widely used for entity linking to retrieve entities from large-scale knowledge bases. Mainstream techniques are based on a dual-encoder framework, which encodes mentions and entities independently and calculates their relevances via rough interaction metrics, resulting in difficul…

2022

A Win-win Deal: Towards Sparse and Robust Pre-trained Language Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite the remarkable success of pre-trained language models (PLMs), they still face two challenges: First, large-scale PLMs are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Second, on the downstream tasks, PLMs tend to rely on the dataset bias and struggle to generalize to out-of-dist…

2022

CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction

COLING 2022main

Transforming the large amounts of unstructured text on the Internet into structured event knowledge is a critical, yet unsolved goal of NLP, especially when addressing document-level text. Existing methods struggle in Document-level Event Extraction (DEE) due to its two intrinsic challenges: (a) Nes…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

How Does Knowledge Graph Embedding Extrapolate to Unseen Data: A Semantic Evidence View

AAAI 2022technical

Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) aims to learn representations for entities and relations. Most KGE models have gained great success, especially on extrapolation scenarios. Specifically, given an unseen triple (h, r, t), a trained model can still correctly predict t from (h, r, ?), or h from (?, r, t…

2022

Language Prior Is Not the Only Shortcut: A Benchmark for Shortcut Learning in VQA

EMNLP 2022finding

Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are prone to learn the shortcut solution formed by dataset biases rather than the intended solution. To evaluate the VQA models’ reasoning ability beyond shortcut learning, the VQA-CP v2 dataset introduces a distribution shift between the training and test set…

2022

Learning to Win Lottery Tickets in BERT Transfer via Task-agnostic Mask Training

NAACL 2022long

Recent studies on the lottery ticket hypothesis (LTH) show that pre-trained language models (PLMs) like BERT contain matching subnetworks that have similar transfer learning performance as the original PLM. These subnetworks are found using magnitude-based pruning. In this paper, we find that the BE…

2022

Neural Label Search for Zero-Shot Multi-Lingual Extractive Summarization

ACL 2022long

In zero-shot multilingual extractive text summarization, a model is typically trained on English summarization dataset and then applied on summarization datasets of other languages. Given English gold summaries and documents, sentence-level labels for extractive summarization are usually generated u…

2022

Neutral Utterances are Also Causes: Enhancing Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment with Social Commonsense Knowledge

IJCAI 2022poster

Conversational Causal Emotion Entailment aims to detect causal utterances for a non-neutral targeted utterance from a conversation. In this work, we build conversations as graphs to overcome implicit contextual modelling of the original entailment style. Following the previous work, we further intro…

2022

Non-Autoregressive Chinese ASR Error Correction with Phonological Training

NAACL 2022long

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an efficient and widely used input method that transcribes speech signals into text. As the errors introduced by ASR systems will impair the performance of downstream tasks, we introduce a post-processing error correction method, PhVEC, to correct errors in text…

2022

Towards Robust Visual Question Answering: Making the Most of Biased Samples via Contrastive Learning

EMNLP 2022finding

Models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) often rely on the spurious correlations, i.e., the language priors, that appear in the biased samples of training set, which make them brittle against the out-of-distribution (OOD) test data. Recent methods have achieved promising progress in overcoming thi…

2021

Deep Differential Amplifier for Extractive Summarization

ACL 2021long

For sentence-level extractive summarization, there is a disproportionate ratio of selected and unselected sentences, leading to flatting the summary features when maximizing the accuracy. The imbalanced classification of summarization is inherent, which can’t be addressed by common algorithms easily…

2021

Flexible Non-Autoregressive Extractive Summarization with Threshold: How to Extract a Non-Fixed Number of Summary Sentences

AAAI 2021technical

Sentence-level extractive summarization is a fundamental yet challenging task, and recent powerful approaches prefer to pick sentences sorted by the predicted probabilities until the length limit is reached, a.k.a. ``Top-K Strategy''. This length limit is fixed based on the validation set, resulting…

2021

Multi-Granularity Heterogeneous Graph for Document-Level Relation Extraction

ICASSP 2021accepted

Reading text to extract relational facts has been a long-standing goal in natural language processing. It becomes especially challenging when the extraction scope is extended to document level, where multiple entities in a document generally exhibit complex intra- and inter-sentence relations. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

SOM-NCSCM : An Efficient Neural Chinese Sentence Compression Model Enhanced with Self-Organizing Map

EMNLP 2021main

Sentence Compression (SC), which aims to shorten sentences while retaining important words that express the essential meanings, has been studied for many years in many languages, especially in English. However, improvements on Chinese SC task are still quite few due to several difficulties: scarce o…

2021

TEBNER: Domain Specific Named Entity Recognition with Type Expanded Boundary-aware Network

EMNLP 2021main

To alleviate label scarcity in Named Entity Recognition (NER) task, distantly supervised NER methods are widely applied to automatically label data and identify entities. Although the human effort is reduced, the generated incomplete and noisy annotations pose new challenges for learning effective n…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2020

Graph Geometry Interaction Learning

NeurIPS 2020poster

While numerous approaches have been developed to embed graphs into either Euclidean or hyperbolic spaces, they do not fully utilize the information available in graphs, or lack the flexibility to model intrinsic complex graph geometry. To utilize the strength of both Euclidean and hyperbolic geometr…