Chang Yao
Author directory2026
Emotion Understanding in Streaming Video with Trajectory-Aware Reliability
Qingsong Wang | Qigong Lei | Zitong Wang | Bohan Yu | Zhiang Dong | Jian Liu | Weiqiang Wang | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Qingsong Wang | Qigong Lei | Zitong Wang | Bohan Yu | Zhiang Dong | Jian Liu | Weiqiang Wang | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Video emotion understanding is commonly studied as an offline classification problem, where the complete video segment is available before prediction.Real-time interaction, however, requires emotion decisions from incomplete and evolving evidence.This paper studies streaming video emotion understanding as a reliability-aware decision process over evolving emotion beliefs. In this setting, a single confident prefix prediction can still be unreliable when the underlying belief trajectory is unstable or repeatedly switches across emotion classes. We propose TRACE, a trajectory-aware reliability framework that forms low-latency emotion beliefs from streaming audio prefixes, estimates reliability from confidence, entropy, stability, and class-switching patterns, and selectively invokes contextual belief reinterpretation with visual, textual, and neighboring-utterance evidence. TRACE keeps stable cases in the low-latency online pathway while allocating stronger multimodal reasoning to uncertain cases that remain ambiguous. Experiments on StreamMER, MELD, and MER2024 show that TRACE improves the accuracy-cost trade-off, retaining most full-context gains while reducing unnecessary contextual reasoning.
Enhancing Repository-Level Code Completion with Reinforcement Learning in Real-World Scenarios
Zhenlong Dai | Zhuoluo Zhao | Xiu Tang | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Zhipeng Gao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhenlong Dai | Zhuoluo Zhao | Xiu Tang | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Zhipeng Gao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) for code, which closely aligns with the practical needs of real-world software development, has sparked growing attention in repository-level code completion. However, existing Code LLMs present challenges in focusing on suitable contexts from the repository and in deeply reasoning about cross-file dependencies. To address these challenges, we propose a novel reinforcement learning framework for repository-level code completion. To better understand both in-file and cross-file contexts, we employ identifier-driven intent recognition to capture completion intent, thereby improving the model’s performance in real-world scenarios. To enhance cross-file reasoning, we propose a reward-driven completion learning to effectively reward in complex repository completion scenarios. To guide LLMs in completing code that aligns with intended functionality and repository context, we introduce a selective-exploration strategy that directs the model to focus on low-confidence, high-reward tokens, promoting the exploration of valuable, underexplored completion patterns. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the performance of Code LLMs.
QBridge: Bridging Natural Language and SQL via Gold Query Rewriting with Agentic Refinement
Zhensheng Luo | Sai Wu | Yuan Qiu | Chang Yao | Gang Chen | Xiu Tang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhensheng Luo | Sai Wu | Yuan Qiu | Chang Yao | Gang Chen | Xiu Tang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) provides an intuitive interface for querying structured data, yet real user questions are often noisy, ambiguous, and weakly grounded to database semantics.As a result, token-level schema linking and single-pass SQL decoding can be brittle: small misunderstandings in language or schema grounding may propagate into incorrect generation.We present QBridge, an agentic, feedback-driven NL2SQL framework based on a Refined Gold Query Paradigm, which bridges natural language and SQL via Gold Query—a structured, SQL-aligned intermediate representation.A core insight of QBridge is Distilled Back-Translation (DBT) for SL-independent rewriting.DBT converts SQL-grounded supervision into execution-verified Gold-Query-style rewrites from a teacher model, and distills a lightweight, plug-and-play rewriter that generates schema-aware rewrites without requiring explicit schema linking at inference.QBridge then (i) verifies and conservatively refines the rewrite into a high-fidelity Refined Gold Query, and (ii) refines the generated SQL with dual feedback from execution validity and semantic consistency, enabling interpretable self-correction while remaining compatible with diverse SQL backbones.Extensive experiments on Spider, BIRD, and three robustness variants demonstrate that QBridge consistently improves zero-shot NL2SQL, outperforming strong prompting and agentic baselines while showing strong robustness and generalization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/WannaBSteve/QBridge.
Enhancing Reinforcement Learning for Radiology Report Generation with Evidence-aware Rewards and Self-correcting Preference Learning
Qin Zhou | Guoyan Liang | Qianyi Yang | Jingyuan Chen | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Zhe Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qin Zhou | Guoyan Liang | Qianyi Yang | Jingyuan Chen | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Zhe Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have advanced radiology report generation (RRG), yet two core limitations persist: (1) report-level rewards offer limited evidence-grounded guidance for clinical faithfulness; and (2) current methods lack an explicit self-improving mechanism to align with clinical preference. We introduce clinically aligned Evidence-aware Self-Correcting Reinforcement Learning (ESC-RL), comprising two key components. First, a Group-wise Evidence-aware Alignment Reward (GEAR) delivers group-wise, evidence-aware feedback. GEAR reinforces consistent grounding for true positives, recovers missed findings for false negatives, and suppresses unsupported content for false positives. Second, a Self-correcting Preference Learning (SPL) strategy automatically constructs a reliable, disease-aware preference dataset from multiple noisy observations and leverages an LLM to synthesize refined reports without human supervision. ESC-RL promotes clinically faithful, disease-aligned reward and supports continual self-improvement during training. Extensive experiments on two public chest X-ray datasets demonstrate consistent gains and state-of-the-art performance.
2025
Cognitive-Level Adaptive Generation via Capability-Aware Retrieval and Style Adaptation
Qingsong Wang | Tao Wu | Wang Lin | Yueying Feng | Gongsheng Yuan | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Qingsong Wang | Tao Wu | Wang Lin | Yueying Feng | Gongsheng Yuan | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in open-ended generation tasks. However, they often struggle to adapt content to users with differing cognitive capacities, leading to a phenomenon we term cognitive misalignment. This issue arises in two forms: knowledge-level misalignment, where content is too complex or too simplistic relative to user understanding, and presentation style misalignment, where the structure or tone hinders effective comprehension. To address these challenges, we propose the Cognitive-Level Alignment Framework (CLAF), a general-purpose generation framework that aligns both knowledge complexity and presentation style with user cognition. CLAF integrates a capability-aware retrieval module based on a hierarchical knowledge graph and a style optimization module guided by Bloom’s taxonomy and preference learning. Additionally, a knowledge-controllable generation component ensures consistency and relevance throughout the output. To support training and evaluation, we construct Scale, a cognitively annotated dataset containing responses at multiple comprehension levels per query. Empirical results show that CLAF enhances the adaptability and informativeness of LLM outputs across a range of user profiles, offering a robust solution to cognitive-level alignment in real-world applications.
Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey
Xinpeng Ti | Wentao Ye | Zhifang Zhang | Junbo Zhao | Chang Yao | Lei Feng | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xinpeng Ti | Wentao Ye | Zhifang Zhang | Junbo Zhao | Chang Yao | Lei Feng | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
With the continuous development of language models and the widespread availability of various types of accessible interfaces, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to an increasing number of fields. However, due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model development, protecting the model’s parameters and training data has become an urgent and crucial concern. Due to the revolutionary training and application paradigms of LLMs, many new attacks on language models have emerged in recent years. In this paper, we define these attacks as “reverse engineering” (RE) techniques on LMs and aim to provide an in-depth analysis of reverse engineering of language models. We illustrate various methods of reverse engineering applied to different aspects of a model, while also providing an introduction to existing protective strategies. On the one hand, it demonstrates the vulnerabilities of even black box models to different types of attacks; on the other hand, it offers a more holistic perspective for the development of new protective strategies for models.
CoLA: Collaborative Low-Rank Adaptation
Yiyun Zhou | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yiyun Zhou | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
The scaling law of Large Language Models (LLMs) reveals a power-law relationship, showing diminishing return on performance as model scale increases. While training LLMs from scratch is resource-intensive, fine-tuning a pre-trained model for specific tasks has become a practical alternative. Full fine-tuning (FFT) achieves strong performance; however, it is computationally expensive and inefficient. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, like LoRA, have been proposed to address these challenges by freezing the pre-trained model and adding lightweight task-specific modules. LoRA, in particular, has proven effective, but its application to multi-task scenarios is limited by interference between tasks. Recent approaches, such as Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) and asymmetric LoRA, have aimed to mitigate these issues but still struggle with sample scarcity and noise interference due to their fixed structure. In response, we propose CoLA, a more flexible LoRA architecture with an efficient initialization scheme, which introduces three collaborative strategies to enhance performance by better utilizing the quantitative relationships between matrices A and B. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of CoLA, outperforming existing PEFT methods, especially in low-sample scenarios. Our data and code are fully publicly available: https://github.com/zyy-2001/CoLA.
T2DR: A Two-Tier Deficiency-Resistant Framework for Incomplete Multimodal Learning
Han Lin | Xiu Tang | Huan Li | Wenxue Cao | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Lidan Shou | Gang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Han Lin | Xiu Tang | Huan Li | Wenxue Cao | Sai Wu | Chang Yao | Lidan Shou | Gang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Multimodal learning is garnering significant attention for its capacity to represent diverse human perceptions (e.g., linguistic, acoustic, and visual signals), achieving more natural and intuitive interactions with technology.However, the frequent occurrence of incomplete data, either within a single modality (intra-modality) or across different modalities (inter-modality), presents substantial challenges in reliable semantic interpretation and model reasoning.Furthermore, there is currently no robust representation learning mechanism capable of managing both intra-modality and inter-modality real-data deficiencies.To address this challenge, we present T2DR, a two-tier deficiency-resistant framework for incomplete multimodal learning, which comprises two main modules:(1) Intra-Modal Deficiency-Resistant module (IADR): To address fine-grained deficiencies, we introduce Intra-Attn to focus on the available data while avoiding excessive suppression of the missing regions.(2) Inter-Modal Deficiency-Resistant module (IEDR): To handle coarse-grained deficiencies, we propose the shared feature prediction (SFP) to leverage cross-modal shared features for preliminary data imputation. Subsequently, we apply Inter-Attn to allocate appropriate attention to each modality based on the results from the capability-aware scorer (CAS).Extensive experiments are performed on two well-known multimodal benchmarks, CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI, across various missing scenarios for sentiment analysis. Experimental results show that T2DR significantly outperforms the SOTA models. Code is available at https://github.com/LH019/T2DR.
Think Both Ways: Teacher-Student Bidirectional Reasoning Enhances MCQ Generation and Distractor Quality
Yimiao Qiu | Yang Deng | Quanming Yao | Zhimeng Zhang | Zhiang Dong | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yimiao Qiu | Yang Deng | Quanming Yao | Zhimeng Zhang | Zhiang Dong | Chang Yao | Jingyuan Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Generating high-quality Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) remains challenging for educational tools due to the need for contextual relevance and plausible distractors. Existing methods still struggle with these dual requirements, leading to questions that lack depth and distractors that are either too obvious or irrelevant. In this paper, we propose BiFlow, a novel framework that integrates bidirectional reasoning perspectives: teacher reasoning generates contextually relevant questions and plausible distractors, while student reasoning evaluates question clarity and the misleading nature of the distractors. To further enhance reasoning, we introduce PathFinder, a mechanism that employs breadth-first search and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) strategies to explore diverse reasoning paths, improving both the quality and diversity of generated questions and distractors. Additionally, we enrich the FairytaleQA dataset to FairytaleMCQ with high-quality distractors, providing a robust benchmark for MCQ generation. Experimental results demonstrate that BiFlow outperforms existing methods, particularly in generating text-grounded questions and high-quality distractors for narrative contexts, highlighting its value in educational applications.
2024
MPCoder: Multi-user Personalized Code Generator with Explicit and Implicit Style Representation Learning
Zhenlong Dai | Chang Yao | Wenkang Han | Ying Yuan | Zhipeng Gao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhenlong Dai | Chang Yao | Wenkang Han | Ying Yuan | Zhipeng Gao | Jingyuan Chen
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for assisting developers in their daily development. However, most research focuses on generating correct code, how to use LLMs to generate personalized code has seldom been investigated. To bridge this gap, we proposed MPCoder (Multi-user Personalized Code Generator) to generate personalized code for multiple users. To better learn coding style features, we utilize explicit coding style residual learning to capture the syntax code style standards and implicit style learning to capture the semantic code style conventions. We train a multi-user style adapter to better differentiate the implicit feature representations of different users through contrastive learning, ultimately enabling personalized code generation for multiple users. We further propose a novel evaluation metric for estimating similarities between codes of different coding styles. The experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach for this novel task.
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Co-authors
- Jingyuan Chen 7
- Sai Wu 4
- Xiu Tang 3
- Gang Chen 2
- Zhenlong Dai 2
- Zhiang Dong 2
- Qingsong Wang 2
- Wenxue Cao 1
- Yang Deng 1
- Lei Feng 1
- Yueying Feng 1
- Zhipeng Gao 1
- Zhipeng Gao 1
- Wenkang Han 1
- Qigong Lei 1
- Huan Li 1
- Guoyan Liang 1
- Han Lin 1
- Wang Lin 1
- Jian Liu 1
- Zhensheng Luo 1
- Yimiao Qiu 1
- Yuan Qiu 1
- Lidan Shou 1
- Xinpeng Ti 1
- Haobo Wang 1
- Weiqiang Wang (王维强) 1
- Zhe Wang 1
- Zitong Wang 1
- Tao Wu 1
- Qianyi Yang 1
- Quanming Yao 1
- Wentao Ye 1
- Bohan Yu 1
- Gongsheng Yuan 1
- Ying Yuan 1
- Zhifang Zhang 1
- Zhimeng Zhang 1
- Junbo Zhao 1
- Zhuoluo Zhao 1
- Qin Zhou 1
- Yiyun Zhou 1