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Yuning Mao

23 accepted papers

2026

High Accuracy, Less Talk (HALT): Reliable LLMs through Capability-Aligned Finetuning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) currently respond to every prompt. However, they can produce incorrect answers when they lack knowledge or capability -- a problem known as hallucination. We instead propose post-training an LLM to generate content only when confident in its correctness and to otherwise…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Extrapolating to Unknown Opinions Using LLMs

COLING 2025main

From ice cream flavors to climate change, people exhibit a wide array of opinions on various topics, and understanding the rationale for these opinions can promote healthy discussion and consensus among them. As such, it can be valuable for a large language model (LLM), particularly as an AI assista…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Model Factuality with Fine-grained Critique-based Evaluator

ACL 2025long

Factuality evaluation aims to detect factual errors produced by language models (LMs) and hence guide the development of more factual models. Towards this goal, we train a factuality evaluator, FenCE, that provides LM generators with claim-level factuality feedback. In particular, we train FenCE to…

2024

M2PT: Multimodal Prompt Tuning for Zero-shot Instruction Learning

EMNLP 2024main

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across a wide range of domains, with increasing emphasis on enhancing their zero-shot generalization capabilities for unseen tasks across various modalities. Instruction tuning has emerged as an effective strategy for achiev…

2024

MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming

NAACL 2024long

Red-teaming is a common practice for mitigating unsafe behaviors in Large Language Models (LLMs), which involves thoroughly assessing LLMs to identify potential flaws and addressing them with responsible and accurate responses.While effective, manual red-teaming is costly, and existing automatic red…

Cited by 99SourcePDFScholar
2024

Rainbow Teaming: Open-Ended Generation of Diverse Adversarial Prompts

NeurIPS 2024poster

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly prevalent across many real-world applications, understanding and enhancing their robustness to adversarial attacks is of paramount importance. Existing methods for identifying adversarial prompts tend to focus on specific domains, lack diversity, o…

Cited by 71SourcePDFScholar
2024

Representation Deficiency in Masked Language Modeling

ICLR 2024poster

Masked Language Modeling (MLM) has been one of the most prominent approaches for pretraining bidirectional text encoders due to its simplicity and effectiveness. One notable concern about MLM is that the special $\texttt{[MASK]}$ symbol causes a discrepancy between pretraining data and downstream da…

2023

APrompt: Attention Prompt Tuning for Efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

With the continuous growth of large language models, the process of fine-tuning these models for new tasks has become increasingly parameter-intensive. Prompt tuning, a method that involves tuning a small set of soft prompts, has emerged as an effective and efficient approach for adapting large pre-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Generating Hashtags for Short-form Videos with Guided Signals

ACL 2023long

Short-form video hashtag recommendation (SVHR) aims to recommend hashtags to content creators from videos and corresponding descriptions. Most prior studies regard SVHR as a classification or ranking problem and select hashtags from a set of limited candidates. However, in reality, users can create…

2023

Progressive Prompts: Continual Learning for Language Models

ICLR 2023poster

We introduce Progressive Prompts – a simple and efficient approach for continual learning in language models. Our method allows forward transfer and resists catastrophic forgetting, without relying on data replay or a large number of task-specific parameters. Progressive Prompts learns a new soft pr…

2023

Residual Prompt Tuning: improving prompt tuning with residual reparameterization

ACL 2023findings

Prompt tuning is one of the successful approaches for parameter-efficient tuning of pre-trained language models. Despite being arguably the most parameter-efficient (tuned soft prompts constitute <0.1% of total parameters), it typically performs worse than other efficient tuning methods and is quite…

2023

RoAST: Robustifying Language Models via Adversarial Perturbation with Selective Training

EMNLP 2023long findings

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (LMs) has become the de facto standard in many NLP tasks. Nevertheless, fine-tuned LMs are still prone to robustness issues, such as adversarial robustness and model calibration. Several perspectives of robustness for LMs have been studied independently, but l…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

XLM-V: Overcoming the Vocabulary Bottleneck in Multilingual Masked Language Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Large multilingual language models typically rely on a single vocabulary shared across 100+ languages. As these models have increased in parameter count and depth, vocabulary size has remained largely unchanged. This \textit{vocabulary bottleneck} limits the representational capabilities of multilin…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

CiteSum: Citation Text-guided Scientific Extreme Summarization and Domain Adaptation with Limited Supervision

EMNLP 2022main

Scientific extreme summarization (TLDR) aims to form ultra-short summaries of scientific papers. Previous efforts on curating scientific TLDR datasets failed to scale up due to the heavy human annotation and domain expertise required. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective approach to auto…

2022

Eider: Empowering Document-level Relation Extraction with Efficient Evidence Extraction and Inference-stage Fusion

ACL 2022findings

Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract semantic relations among entity pairs in a document. Typical DocRE methods blindly take the full document as input, while a subset of the sentences in the document, noted as the evidence, are often sufficient for humans to predict the relati…

2022

SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Stepping from sentence-level to document-level, the research on relation extraction (RE) confronts increasing text length and more complicated entity interactions. Consequently, it is more challenging to encode the key information sources—relevant contexts and entity types. However, existing methods…

2022

Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation

EMNLP 2022main

Multi-dimensional evaluation is the dominant paradigm for human evaluation in Natural Language Generation (NLG), i.e., evaluating the generated text from multiple explainable dimensions, such as coherence and fluency. However, automatic evaluation in NLG is still dominated by similarity-based metric…

2022

UniPELT: A Unified Framework for Parameter-Efficient Language Model Tuning

ACL 2022long

Recent parameter-efficient language model tuning (PELT) methods manage to match the performance of fine-tuning with much fewer trainable parameters and perform especially well when training data is limited. However, different PELT methods may perform rather differently on the same task, making it no…

2022

Unsupervised Multi-Granularity Summarization

EMNLP 2022finding

Text summarization is a user-preference based task, i.e., for one document, users often have different priorities for the summary. As a key aspect of customization in summarization, granularity is used to measure the semantic coverage between the summary and source document. However, developing syst…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2021

Extract, Denoise and Enforce: Evaluating and Improving Concept Preservation for Text-to-Text Generation

EMNLP 2021main

Prior studies on text-to-text generation typically assume that the model could figure out what to attend to in the input and what to include in the output via seq2seq learning, with only the parallel training data and no additional guidance. However, it remains unclear whether current models can pre…

2021

Generation-Augmented Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering

ACL 2021long

We propose Generation-Augmented Retrieval (GAR) for answering open-domain questions, which augments a query through text generation of heuristically discovered relevant contexts without external resources as supervision. We demonstrate that the generated contexts substantially enrich the semantics o…

2021

Taxonomy Completion via Triplet Matching Network

AAAI 2021technical

Automatically constructing taxonomy finds many applications in e-commerce and web search. One critical challenge is as data and business scope grow in real applications, new concepts are emerging and needed to be added to the existing taxonomy. Previous approaches focus on the taxonomy expansion, i.…