Hao Xu
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Unverified author pages with similar names: Hao Xu
2026
GraphMed-LT: Patient-Specific Graph Memory with Latent Clinical Thought Refinement for Multi-Turn Medical Conversations
Zhaohan Meng | Zaiqiao Meng | Siwei Liu | Hao Xu | Ke Yuan | Iadh Ounis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhaohan Meng | Zaiqiao Meng | Siwei Liu | Hao Xu | Ke Yuan | Iadh Ounis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multi-turn medical question answering (QA) aims to model realistic clinical diagnosis, where a doctor gathers patient information across multiple turns of conversation. Existing multi-turn medical conversation systems have shown promising progress, but they often rely on accumulated conversation histories as memory, leaving clinical evidence fragmented across turns. We propose **GraphMed-LT**, a patient-specific graph memory approach with latent clinical thought refinement for multi-turn medical conversations. GraphMed-LT extracts patient-specific clinical triplets from patient responses, retrieves relevant knowledge triplets, and organises them into an incrementally updated graph memory. The graph memory is projected into graph-conditioned evidence tokens and refined inside a trainable doctor agent through hidden-state feedback, enabling the agent to update its internal clinical context before asking follow-up questions or producing the final answer. Experiments on three multi-turn medical QA benchmarks show that GraphMed-LT consistently outperforms existing multi-turn medical conversation baselines across multiple LLM backbones, achieving up to a 6.3 percentage-point absolute improvement over the strongest baseline. Further analyses show that GraphMed-LT asks more answerable follow-up questions and provides consistent gains across medical specialties.
SSE-Bio: A Structured Self-Evolving Agent with Agentic Retrieval Policy for Multi-Hop Biomedical Reasoning
Zhaohan Meng | Zaiqiao Meng | Siwei Liu | Hao Xu | Ke Yuan | Iadh Ounis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhaohan Meng | Zaiqiao Meng | Siwei Liu | Hao Xu | Ke Yuan | Iadh Ounis
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Biomedical multi-hop question answering (QA) requires models to connect evidence across intermediate entities such as diseases, drugs, proteins, and phenotypes. Existing agents typically rely on static retrieval workflows or coarse-grained prompt rewriting, which can lead to instruction drift when reasoning procedures need to be updated. We propose **SSE-Bio**, a structured self-evolving agent with an agentic retrieval policy for multi-hop biomedical reasoning. Instead of globally rewriting agent instructions, SSE-Bio maintains a structured state, selectively retrieves knowledge triplets and prior templates through a trainable proxy policy, and improves its reasoning memory through fine-grained template editing. To optimise retrieval decisions, we introduce a proxy-training strategy based on group relative policy optimization, where the proxy is improved through decision-contrastive groups over alternative retrieval choices. Experiments on three biomedical multi-hop QA benchmarks show that SSE-Bio consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving an improvement of 6.56 absolute points over the strongest self-evolving baseline on BioHopR.
HyperAdaLoRA: Accelerating LoRA Rank Allocation During Training via Hypernetworks without Sacrificing Performance
Hao Zhang | Zhenjia Li | Yifan Gao | Xi Xiao | Heng Zhang | Shuyang Zhang | Xiaoxincc | Bo Huang | Yuhang Wu | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Hao Zhang | Zhenjia Li | Yifan Gao | Xi Xiao | Heng Zhang | Shuyang Zhang | Xiaoxincc | Bo Huang | Yuhang Wu | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), especially Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), has emerged as a promising approach to fine-tuning large language models(LLMs) while reducing computational and memory overhead. However, LoRA assumes a uniform rank r for each incremental matrix, not accounting for the varying significance of weight matrices across different modules and layers. AdaLoRA leverages Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to parameterize updates and employs pruning of singular values to introduce dynamic rank allocation, thereby enhancing adaptability. However, during the training process, it often encounters issues of slow convergence speed and high computational overhead. To address this issue, we propose HyperAdaLoRA, a novel framework that accelerates the convergence of AdaLoRA by leveraging a hypernetwork. Instead of directly optimizing the components of Singular Value Decomposition (P, 𝛬, Q), HyperAdaLoRA employs a hypernetwork based on attention mechanisms to dynamically generate these parameters. By pruning the outputs of the hypernetwork that generates the singular values, dynamic rank allocation is achieved. Comprehensive experiments on various datasets and models demonstrate that our method achieves faster convergence without sacrificing performance. Moreover, our method generalizes well to other LoRA-based approaches, highlighting its strong generalization capability.
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation
Xi Xiao | Chenrui Ma | Yunbei Zhang | Chen Liu | Zhuxuanzi Wang | Yanshu Li | Lin Zhao | Guosheng Hu | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xi Xiao | Chenrui Ma | Yunbei Zhang | Chen Liu | Zhuxuanzi Wang | Yanshu Li | Lin Zhao | Guosheng Hu | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has become a cornerstone of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). Yet, its efficacy is hampered by two fundamental limitations: semantic drift, arising from treating all update directions with equal importance, and structural incoherence, due to adapting layers independently, resulting in uncoordinated and suboptimal updates. To address these issues, we propose StructLoRA, a framework that tackles both limitations through a principled dual-component design: (1) an Information Bottleneck-guided filter that prunes task-irrelevant directions to mitigate semantic drift, and (2) a lightweight, training-only graph-based coordinator that enforces inter-layer consistency to resolve structural incoherence. Extensive experiments across large language models, vision language models, and vision models (including LLaMA, LLaVA, and ViT) demonstrate that StructLoRA consistently establishes a new state of the art, outperforming not only vanilla LoRA but also advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. Notably, the gains are particularly pronounced in challenging low-rank and low-data regimes. Crucially, since the proposed modules operate only during training, StructLoRA improves performance with zero additional inference cost, shifting the focus of PEFT from mere parameter compression to a more holistic optimization of information quality and structural integrity.
2025
Sensitivity-LoRA : Low-Load Sensitivity-Based Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models
Hao Zhang | Bo Huang | Zhenjia Li | Xi Xiao | Hui Yi Leong | Zumeng Zhang | Xinwei Long | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Hao Zhang | Bo Huang | Zhenjia Li | Xi Xiao | Hui Yi Leong | Zumeng Zhang | Xinwei Long | Tianyang Wang | Hao Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed both everyday life and scientific research. However, adapting LLMs from general-purpose models to specialized tasks remains challenging, particularly in resource-constrained environments. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a prominent method within Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), has emerged as a promising approach to LLMs by approximating model weight updates using low-rank decomposition. However, LoRA is limited by its uniform rank ( r ) allocation to each incremental matrix, and existing rank allocation techniques aimed at addressing this issue remain computationally inefficient, complex, and unstable, hindering practical applications. To address these limitations, we propose Sensitivity-LoRA, an efficient fine-tuning method that dynamically allocates ranks to weight matrices based on both their global and local sensitivities. It leverages the second-order derivatives (Hessian Matrix) of the loss function to effectively capture weight sensitivity, enabling optimal rank allocation with minimal computational overhead. Our experimental results have demonstrated robust effectiveness, efficiency and stability of Sensitivity-LoRA across diverse tasks and benchmarks.