MIDLM: Multi-Intent Detection with Bidirectional Large Language Models

Shangjian Yin, Peijie Huang, Yuhong Xu


Abstract
Decoder-only Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in language generation, exhibiting broad capabilities across various tasks. However, the application to label-sensitive language understanding tasks remains challenging due to the limitations of their autoregressive architecture, which restricts the sharing of token information within a sentence. In this paper, we address the Multi-Intent Detection (MID) task and introduce MIDLM, a bidirectional LLM framework that incorporates intent number detection and multi-intent selection. This framework allows autoregressive LLMs to leverage bidirectional information awareness through post-training, eliminating the need for training the models from scratch. Comprehensive evaluations across 8 datasets show that MIDLM consistently outperforms both existing vanilla models and pretrained baselines, demonstrating its superior performance in the MID task.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.179
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2616–2625
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.179/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shangjian Yin, Peijie Huang, and Yuhong Xu. 2025. MIDLM: Multi-Intent Detection with Bidirectional Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 2616–2625, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MIDLM: Multi-Intent Detection with Bidirectional Large Language Models (Yin et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.179.pdf