Can Xu
Author directoryOther people with similar names: Can Xu
Unverified author pages with similar names: Can Xu
2026
Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models
Qiyuan Zhang | Yufei Wang | Tianhe Wu | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Kai Zheng | Xue Liu | Chen Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Qiyuan Zhang | Yufei Wang | Tianhe Wu | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Kai Zheng | Xue Liu | Chen Ma
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent advancements in Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning considerably enhances the reliability of evaluation. However, current works predominantly rely on unstructured length scaling, ignoring the divergent efficacy of different reasoning mechanisms: Breadth-CoT (multi-dimensional principle coverage) and Depth-CoT (substantive judgment soundness). To address this, we introduce Mix-GRM, a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured Breadth-CoT and Depth-CoT through a modular synthesis pipeline, subsequently employing Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to internalize and optimize these mechanisms. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mix-GRM establishes a new state-of-the-art across five benchmarks, surpassing leading open-source RMs by an average of 8.2%. Our results reveal a clear divergence in reasoning: Breadth-CoT benefits subjective preference tasks, whereas Depth-CoT excels in objective correctness tasks. Consequently, misaligning the reasoning mechanism with the task directly degrades performance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that RLVR acts as a switching amplifier, inducing an emergent polarization where the model spontaneously allocates its reasoning style to match task demands.
RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards
Junyi Zhou | Qiyuan Zhang | Yufei Wang | Fuyuan Lyu | Yidong Ming | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Kai Zheng | Peng Kang | Xue Liu | Chen Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junyi Zhou | Qiyuan Zhang | Yufei Wang | Fuyuan Lyu | Yidong Ming | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Kai Zheng | Peng Kang | Xue Liu | Chen Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.
2025
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models
Huawen Feng | Pu Zhao | Qingfeng Sun | Can Xu | Fangkai Yang | Lu Wang | Qianli Ma | Qingwei Lin | Saravan Rajmohan | Dongmei Zhang | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Huawen Feng | Pu Zhao | Qingfeng Sun | Can Xu | Fangkai Yang | Lu Wang | Qianli Ma | Qingwei Lin | Saravan Rajmohan | Dongmei Zhang | Qi Zhang
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Despite recent progress achieved by code large language models (LLMs), their remarkable abilities are largely dependent on fine-tuning on the high-quality data, posing challenges for data collection and annotation. To address this, current methods often design various data flywheels to collect complex code instructions, enabling models to handle more intricate tasks. However, these approaches typically rely on off-the-shelf datasets and data augmentation from a limited set of proprietary LLMs (e.g., Claude, GPT4, and so on), which restricts the diversity of the constructed data and makes it prone to systemic biases. In this paper, we propose WarriorCoder, a novel paradigm learns from expert battles to address these limitations. Specifically, we create an arena where leading expert code LLMs challenge each other, with evaluations conducted by impartial judges. This competitive framework generates novel training data from scratch, leveraging the strengths of all participants. Experimental results show that WarriorCoder achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to previous models of the same size, even without relying on proprietary LLMs.
2024
Leveraging Large Language Models for NLG Evaluation: Advances and Challenges
Zhen Li | Xiaohan Xu | Tao Shen | Can Xu | Jia-Chen Gu | Yuxuan Lai | Chongyang Tao | Shuai Ma
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhen Li | Xiaohan Xu | Tao Shen | Can Xu | Jia-Chen Gu | Yuxuan Lai | Chongyang Tao | Shuai Ma
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
In the rapidly evolving domain of Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation, introducing Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new avenues for assessing generated content quality, e.g., coherence, creativity, and context relevance. This paper aims to provide a thorough overview of leveraging LLMs for NLG evaluation, a burgeoning area that lacks a systematic analysis. We propose a coherent taxonomy for organizing existing LLM-based evaluation metrics, offering a structured framework to understand and compare these methods. Our detailed exploration includes critically assessing various LLM-based methodologies, as well as comparing their strengths and limitations in evaluating NLG outputs. By discussing unresolved challenges, including bias, robustness, domain-specificity, and unified evaluation, this paper seeks to offer insights to researchers and advocate for fairer and more advanced NLG evaluation techniques.
Re-Reading Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models
Xiaohan Xu | Chongyang Tao | Tao Shen | Can Xu | Hongbo Xu | Guodong Long | Jian-Guang Lou | Shuai Ma
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaohan Xu | Chongyang Tao | Tao Shen | Can Xu | Hongbo Xu | Guodong Long | Jian-Guang Lou | Shuai Ma
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
To enhance the reasoning capabilities of off-the-shelf Large Language Models (LLMs), we introduce a simple, yet general and effective prompting method, RE2, i.e., Re-Reading the question as input. Unlike most thought-eliciting prompting methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which aim to elicit the reasoning process in the output, RE2 shifts the focus to the input by processing questions twice, thereby enhancing the understanding process. Consequently, RE2 demonstrates strong generality and compatibility with most thought-eliciting prompting methods, including CoT. Crucially, RE2 facilitates a “bidirectional” encoding in unidirectional decoder-only LLMs because the first pass could provide global information for the second pass. We begin with a preliminary empirical study as the foundation of RE2, illustrating its potential to enable “bidirectional” attention mechanisms. We then evaluate RE2 on extensive reasoning benchmarks across 14 datasets, spanning 112 experiments, to validate its effectiveness and generality. Our findings indicate that, with the exception of a few scenarios on vanilla ChatGPT, RE2 consistently enhances the reasoning performance of LLMs through a simple re-reading strategy. Further analyses reveal RE2’s adaptability, showing how it can be effectively integrated with different LLMs, thought-eliciting prompting, and ensemble strategies.
Automatic Instruction Evolving for Large Language Models
Weihao Zeng | Can Xu | Yingxiu Zhao | Jian-Guang Lou | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weihao Zeng | Can Xu | Yingxiu Zhao | Jian-Guang Lou | Weizhu Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Fine-tuning large pre-trained language models with Evol-Instruct has achieved encouraging results across a wide range of tasks. However, designing effective evolving methods for instruction evolution requires substantial human expertise. This paper proposes Auto Evol-Instruct, an end-to-end framework that evolves instruction datasets using large language models without any human effort. The framework automatically analyzes and summarizes suitable evolutionary strategies for the given instruction data and iteratively improves the evolving method based on issues exposed during the instruction evolution process. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the best method optimized by Auto Evol-Instruct outperforms human-designed methods on various benchmarks, including MT-Bench, AlpacaEval, GSM8K, and HumanEval.
2022
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting
Qingfeng Sun | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Yujing Wang | Jian Miao | Xiubo Geng | Yining Chen | Fei Xu | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Qingfeng Sun | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Yujing Wang | Jian Miao | Xiubo Geng | Yining Chen | Fei Xu | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Current Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (KDG) models specialize in producing rational and factual responses. However, to establish long-term relationships with users, the KDG model needs the capability to generate responses in a desired style or attribute. Thus, we study a new problem: Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (SKDG). It presents two challenges: (1) How to train a SKDG model where no <context, knowledge, stylized response> triples are available. (2) How to cohere with context and preserve the knowledge when generating a stylized response. In this paper, we propose a novel disentangled template rewriting (DTR) method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates (from monolingual stylized corpus) and content templates (from KDG corpus). The entire framework is end-to-end differentiable and learned without supervision. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks indicate that DTR achieves a significant improvement on all evaluation metrics compared with previous state-of-the-art stylized dialogue generation methods. Besides, DTR achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art KDG methods in standard KDG evaluation setting.
TegTok: Augmenting Text Generation via Task-specific and Open-world Knowledge
Chao-Hong Tan | Jia-Chen Gu | Chongyang Tao | Zhen-Hua Ling | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Chao-Hong Tan | Jia-Chen Gu | Chongyang Tao | Zhen-Hua Ling | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022
Generating natural and informative texts has been a long-standing problem in NLP. Much effort has been dedicated into incorporating pre-trained language models (PLMs) with various open-world knowledge, such as knowledge graphs or wiki pages. However, their ability to access and manipulate the task-specific knowledge is still limited on downstream tasks, as this type of knowledge is usually not well covered in PLMs and is hard to acquire. To address the problem, we propose augmenting TExt Generation via Task-specific and Open-world Knowledge (TegTok) in a unified framework. Our model selects knowledge entries from two types of knowledge sources through dense retrieval and then injects them into the input encoding and output decoding stages respectively on the basis of PLMs. With the help of these two types of knowledge, our model can learn what and how to generate. Experiments on two text generation tasks of dialogue generation and question generation, and on two datasets show that our method achieves better performance than various baseline models.
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations
Wei Chen | Yeyun Gong | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Bolun Yao | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Xiaowu Hu | Bartuer Zhou | Biao Cheng | Daxin Jiang | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wei Chen | Yeyun Gong | Can Xu | Huang Hu | Bolun Yao | Zhongyu Wei | Zhihao Fan | Xiaowu Hu | Bartuer Zhou | Biao Cheng | Daxin Jiang | Nan Duan
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We study the problem of coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. The problem is equally important with fine-grained response selection, but is less explored in existing literature. In this paper, we propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. In our CFC model, dense representations of query, candidate contexts and responses is learned based on the multi-tower architecture using contextual matching, and richer knowledge learned from the one-tower architecture (fine-grained) is distilled into the multi-tower architecture (coarse-grained) to enhance the performance of the retriever. To evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we construct two new datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus. Extensive experimental results on the two datasets show that the proposed method achieves huge improvement over all evaluation metrics compared with traditional baseline methods.
PromDA: Prompt-based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLU Tasks
Yufei Wang | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Huang Hu | Chongyang Tao | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yufei Wang | Can Xu | Qingfeng Sun | Huang Hu | Chongyang Tao | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
This paper focuses on the Data Augmentation for low-resource Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. We propose Prompt-based Data Augmentation model (PromDA) which only trains small-scale Soft Prompt (i.e., a set of trainable vectors) in the frozen Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). This avoids human effort in collecting unlabeled in-domain data and maintains the quality of generated synthetic data. In addition, PromDA generates synthetic data via two different views and filters out the low-quality data using NLU models. Experiments on four benchmarks show that synthetic data produced by PromDA successfully boost up the performance of NLU models which consistently outperform several competitive baseline models, including a state-of-the-art semi-supervised model using unlabeled in-domain data. The synthetic data from PromDA are also complementary with unlabeled in-domain data. The NLU models can be further improved when they are combined for training.
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation
Qingfeng Sun | Yujing Wang | Can Xu | Kai Zheng | Yaming Yang | Huang Hu | Fei Xu | Jessica Zhang | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qingfeng Sun | Yujing Wang | Can Xu | Kai Zheng | Yaming Yang | Huang Hu | Fei Xu | Jessica Zhang | Xiubo Geng | Daxin Jiang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Responsing with image has been recognized as an important capability for an intelligent conversational agent. Yet existing works only focus on exploring the multimodal dialogue models which depend on retrieval-based methods, but neglecting generation methods. To fill in the gaps, we first present a new task: multimodal dialogue response generation (MDRG) - given the dialogue history, one model needs to generate a text sequence or an image as response. Learning such a MDRG model often requires multimodal dialogues containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. Motivated by the challenge in practice, we consider MDRG under a natural assumption that only limited training examples are available. In such a low-resource setting, we devise a novel conversational agent, Divter, in order to isolate parameters that depend on multimodal dialogues from the entire generation model. By this means, the major part of the model can be learned from a large number of text-only dialogues and text-image pairs respectively, then the whole parameters can be well fitted using the limited training examples. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method achieves state-of-the-art results in both automatic and human evaluation, and can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Qingfeng Sun 6
- Huang Hu 5
- Daxin Jiang 5
- Xiubo Geng 4
- Chongyang Tao 4
- Yufei Wang 3
- Kai Zheng 3
- Jia-Chen Gu 2
- Xue Liu 2
- Jian-Guang Lou 2
- Chen Ma 2
- Shuai Ma 2
- Tao Shen 2
- Yujing Wang 2
- Fei Xu 2
- Xiaohan Xu 2
- Qiyuan Zhang 2
- Wei Chen 1
- Weizhu Chen 1
- Yining Chen 1
- Biao Cheng 1
- Nan Duan 1
- Zhihao Fan 1
- Huawen Feng 1
- Yeyun Gong 1
- Xiaowu Hu 1
- Peng Kang 1
- Yuxuan Lai 1
- Zhen Li 1
- Qingwei Lin 1
- Zhenhua Ling 1
- Guodong Long 1
- Fuyuan Lyu 1
- Qianli Ma 1
- Jian Miao 1
- Yidong Ming 1
- Saravan Rajmohan 1
- Chao-Hong Tan 1
- Lu Wang 1
- Zhongyu Wei (魏忠钰) 1
- Tianhe Wu 1
- Hongbo Xu 1
- Fangkai Yang 1
- Yaming Yang 1
- Bolun Yao 1
- Weihao Zeng 1
- Dongmei Zhang 1
- Jessica Zhang 1
- Qi Zhang 1
- Pu Zhao 1
- Yingxiu Zhao 1
- Bartuer Zhou 1
- Junyi Zhou 1