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Yunbo Cao

35 accepted papers

2026

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

ICML 2026poster

Multi-Hop Fact Verification (MHFV) necessitates complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models (LLMs) which often suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought (CoT), …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

AdaDARE-gamma: Balancing Stability and Plasticity in Multi-modal LLMs through Efficient Adaptation

CVPR 2025poster

Adapting Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to target tasks often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, where acquiring new task-specific knowledge compromises performance on pre-trained tasks. In this paper, we introduce AdaDARE-\gamma, an efficient approach that alleviates catastrophic forg…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade

NAACL 2024long

In the constant updates of the product dialogue systems, we need to retrain the natural language understanding (NLU) model as new data from the real users would be merged into the existing data accumulated in the last updates. Within the newly added data, new intents would emerge and might have sema…

2024

Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators

ACL 2024long

In this paper, we uncover a positional bias in the evaluation paradigm of adopting large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, as a referee to score and compare the quality of responses generated by candidate models. We find that the quality ranking of candidate responses can be easily hacked by simp…

2024

SkillNet-X: A Multilingual Multitask Model with Sparsely Activated Skills

ICASSP 2024accepted

Traditional multitask learning methods typically can only leverage shared knowledge within specific tasks or languages, resulting in a loss of either cross-language or cross-task knowledge. This paper proposes a general multilingual multitask model, named SkillNet-X, which enables a single model to…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Bi-Drop: Enhancing Fine-tuning Generalization via Synchronous sub-net Estimation and Optimization

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding. However, fine-tuning pretrained models on limited training data tends to overfit and thus diminish performance. This paper presents Bi-Drop, a fine-tuning strategy that selectively updates model parameters…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Contextual Similarity is More Valuable Than Character Similarity: An Empirical Study for Chinese Spell Checking

ICASSP 2023accepted

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) task aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recently, related researches focus on introducing character similarity from confusion set to enhance the CSC models, ignoring the context of characters that contain richer information. To make better use of context…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Denoising Bottleneck with Mutual Information Maximization for Video Multimodal Fusion

ACL 2023long

Video multimodal fusion aims to integrate multimodal signals in videos, such as visual, audio and text, to make a complementary prediction with multiple modalities contents. However, unlike other image-text multimodal tasks, video has longer multimodal sequences with more redundancy and noise in bot…

2023

DialogQAE: N-to-N Question Answer Pair Extraction from Customer Service Chatlog

EMNLP 2023long findings

Harvesting question-answer (QA) pairs from customer service chatlog in the wild is an efficient way to enrich the knowledge base for customer service chatbots in the cold start or continuous integration scenarios. Prior work attempts to obtain 1-to-1 QA pairs from growing customer service chatlog, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Enhancing Continual Relation Extraction via Classifier Decomposition

ACL 2023findings

Continual relation extraction (CRE) models aim at handling emerging new relations while avoiding catastrophically forgetting old ones in the streaming data. Though improvements have been shown by previous CRE studies, most of them only adopt a vanilla strategy when models first learn representations…

2023

G3R: A Graph-Guided Generate-and-Rerank Framework for Complex and Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Generation

ACL 2023findings

We present a framework called G3R for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL generation. G3R aims to address two limitations of current approaches: (1) The structure of the abstract syntax tree (AST) is not fully explored during the decoding process which is crucial for complex SQL generation; (2) Dom…

2023

Soft Language Clustering for Multilingual Model Pre-training

ACL 2023long

Multilingual pre-trained language models have demonstrated impressive (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer abilities, however, their performance is hindered when the target language has distant typologyfrom the source language or when pre-training data is limited in size. In this paper, we propose XLM…

2022

A Non-Hierarchical Attention Network with Modality Dropout for Textual Response Generation in Multimodal Dialogue Systems

ICASSP 2022accepted

Existing text- and image-based multimodal dialogue systems use the traditional Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) framework, which has an utterance-level encoder to model utterance representation and a context-level encoder to model context representation. Although pioneer efforts have sh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

AiM: Taking Answers in Mind to Correct Chinese Cloze Tests in Educational Applications

COLING 2022main

To automatically correct handwritten assignments, the traditional approach is to use an OCR model to recognize characters and compare them to answers. The OCR model easily gets confused on recognizing handwritten Chinese characters, and the textual information of the answers is missing during the mo…

2022

An Enhanced Span-based Decomposition Method for Few-Shot Sequence Labeling

NAACL 2022long

Few-Shot Sequence Labeling (FSSL) is a canonical paradigm for the tagging models, e.g., named entity recognition and slot filling, to generalize on an emerging, resource-scarce domain. Recently, the metric-based meta-learning framework has been recognized as a promising approach for FSSL. However, m…

2022

CQR-SQL: Conversational Question Reformulation Enhanced Context-Dependent Text-to-SQL Parsers

EMNLP 2022finding

Context-dependent text-to-SQL is the task of translating multi-turn questions into database-related SQL queries. Existing methods typically focus on making full use of history context or previously predicted SQL for currently SQL parsing, while neglecting to explicitly comprehend the schema and conv…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Contrastive Learning with Prompt-derived Virtual Semantic Prototypes for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

EMNLP 2022finding

Contrastive learning has become a new paradigm for unsupervised sentence embeddings.Previous studies focus on instance-wise contrastive learning, attempting to construct positive pairs with textual data augmentation. In this paper, we propose a novel Contrastive learning method with Prompt-derived V…

2022

DialogUSR: Complex Dialogue Utterance Splitting and Reformulation for Multiple Intent Detection

EMNLP 2022finding

While interacting with chatbots, users may elicit multiple intents in a single dialogue utterance. Instead of training a dedicated multi-intent detection model, we propose DialogUSR, a dialogue utterance splitting and reformulation task that first splits multi-intent user query into several single-i…

2022

DualNER: A Dual-Teaching framework for Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition

EMNLP 2022finding

We present DualNER, a simple and effective framework to make full use of both annotated source language corpus and unlabeled target language text for zero-shot cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER). In particular, we combine two complementary learning paradigms of NER, i.e., sequence labeling…

2022

HPT: Hierarchy-aware Prompt Tuning for Hierarchical Text Classification

EMNLP 2022main

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

2022

Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for AMR Parsing

ACL 2022short

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, and is recently empowered by pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. However, there exists a gap between their flat training objective (i.e., equally treats all output…

2022

Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation

EMNLP 2022main

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to continually learn new relations from a class-incremental data stream. CRE model usually suffers from catastrophic forgetting problem, i.e., the performance of old relations seriously degrades when the model learns new relations. Most previous work attribut…

2022

Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking

EMNLP 2022finding

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. Recent researches start from the pretrained knowledge of language models and take multimodal information into CSC models to improve the performance. However, they overlook the rich knowledge in the dictionary, the refer…

2022

Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction

EMNLP 2022finding

Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is both a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. Recently, many data-driven approaches are proposed for the development of CGEC research. However, there are two major limitations in the CGEC field: First, the lack of high-qualit…

2022

Pre-training and Fine-tuning Neural Topic Model: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Incorporating External Knowledge

ACL 2022long

Recent years have witnessed growing interests in incorporating external knowledge such as pre-trained word embeddings (PWEs) or pre-trained language models (PLMs) into neural topic modeling. However, we found that employing PWEs and PLMs for topic modeling only achieved limited performance improveme…

2022

Seeking Patterns, Not just Memorizing Procedures: Contrastive Learning for Solving Math Word Problems

ACL 2022findings

Math Word Problem (MWP) solving needs to discover the quantitative relationships over natural language narratives. Recent work shows that existing models memorize procedures from context and rely on shallow heuristics to solve MWPs. In this paper, we look at this issue and argue that the cause is a…

2022

The Past Mistake is the Future Wisdom: Error-driven Contrastive Probability Optimization for Chinese Spell Checking

ACL 2022findings

Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors, which are mainly caused by the phonological or visual similarity. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) promote the progress of CSC task. However, there exists a gap between the learned knowledge of PLMs and the…

2022

Type-Driven Multi-Turn Corrections for Grammatical Error Correction

ACL 2022findings

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically detect and correct grammatical errors. In this aspect, dominant models are trained by one-iteration learning while performing multiple iterations of corrections during inference. Previous studies mainly focus on the data augmentation approach…

2021

A Divide-And-Conquer Approach for Multi-label Multi-hop Relation Detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering

EMNLP 2021finding

Relation detection in knowledge base question answering, aims to identify the path(s) of relations starting from the topic entity node that is linked to the answer node in knowledge graph. Such path might consist of multiple relations, which we call multi-hop. Moreover, for a single question, there…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Unified Multi-Task Learning Framework for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations

AAAI 2021technical

Joint extraction of entities and relations focuses on detecting entity pairs and their relations simultaneously with a unified model. Based on the extraction order, previous works mainly solve this task through relation-last, relation-first and relation-middle manner. However, these methods still su…

2021

Correlation-Guided Representation for Multi-Label Text Classification

IJCAI 2021poster

Multi-label text classification is an essential task in natural language processing. Existing multi-label classification models generally consider labels as categorical variables and ignore the exploitation of label semantics. In this paper, we view the task as a correlation-guided text representati…

Cited by 33SourcePDFScholar
2021

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

ACL 2021long

We study the learning of a matching model for dialogue response selection. Motivated by the recent finding that models trained with random negative samples are not ideal in real-world scenarios, we propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains the matching model in an “easy-to-dif…

2021

Diversity and Consistency: Exploring Visual Question-Answer Pair Generation

EMNLP 2021finding

Although showing promising values to downstream applications, generating question and answer together is under-explored. In this paper, we introduce a novel task that targets question-answer pair generation from visual images. It requires not only generating diverse question-answer pairs but also ke…

2021

Exploiting Unlabeled Data via Partial Label Assignment for Multi-Class Semi-Supervised Learning

AAAI 2021technical

In semi-supervised learning, one key strategy in exploiting unlabeled data is trying to estimate its pseudo-label based on current predictive model, where the unlabeled data assigned with pseudo-label is further utilized to enlarge labeled data set for model update. Nonetheless, the supervision info…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2020

Asking Effective and Diverse Questions: A Machine Reading Comprehension based Framework for Joint Entity-Relation Extraction

IJCAI 2020poster

Recent advances cast the entity-relation extraction to a multi-turn question answering (QA) task and provide an effective solution based on the machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. However, they use a single question to characterize the meaning of entities and relations, which is intuitively…