Lin Hai
Author directoryAlso published as: Hai Lin
2026
Entropy Equilibrium Sampling: Tuning-Free Truncation for Language Model Decoding
Xiaodong Cai | Hai Lin | Shaoxiong Zhan | Weiqi Luo | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim | XiuTeng Zhou | Chunxia Ma | Yu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xiaodong Cai | Hai Lin | Shaoxiong Zhan | Weiqi Luo | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim | XiuTeng Zhou | Chunxia Ma | Yu Yang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Token sampling strategies critically influence text generation quality in large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods introduce additional hyperparameters, requiring extensive tuning and complicating deployment. We present Entropy Equilibrium Sampling (EES), a tuning-free approach grounded in information theory that dynamically determines the candidate set size using a first-crossing rule: it stops candidate-set expansion at the first index where cumulative probability mass exceeds the normalized entropy of the top-k distribution and retains the preceding prefix. We evaluate EES on reasoning, mathematical, and open-ended generation tasks across multiple model architectures and scales. Our results show that EES achieves robust performance across temperature settings without retuning truncation hyperparameters, delivering competitive accuracy with tuned baselines while maintaining diversity. Analysis reveals that the retained candidate-set size k* automatically encodes temperature effects, adapting from near-greedy behavior at low temperatures to broad candidate retention at high temperatures. By eliminating truncation-specific hyperparameter tuning, EES simplifies deployment while providing stable and competitive performance. Our code is publicly available.
GMSA: Enhancing Context Compression via Group Merging and Layer Semantic Alignment
Jiwei Tang | Zhicheng Zhang | Shunlong Wu | Jingheng Ye | Lichen Bai | Zitai Wang | Tingwei Lu | Lin Hai | Yiming Zhao | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiwei Tang | Zhicheng Zhang | Shunlong Wu | Jingheng Ye | Lichen Bai | Zitai Wang | Tingwei Lu | Lin Hai | Yiming Zhao | Hai-Tao Zheng | Hong-Gee Kim
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, in long-context scenarios, they face two challenges: high computational cost and information redundancy. To address these challenges, we propose GMSA, an encoder-decoder context compression framework that generates a compact sequence of soft tokens for downstream tasks. GMSA introduces Group Merging to achieve more uniform aggregation, mitigating semantic dominance during autoencoder pretraining, and Layer Semantic Alignment (LSA) to bridge the semantic gap between high-level abstract semantics and low-level input semantics. We first pretrain GMSA as an autoencoder and then fine-tune it for downstream tasks. Experiments demonstrate that GMSA improves context reconstruction compared to existing soft prompt compression paradigm and outperforms baselines on multiple long-context question answering and summarization benchmarks across two backbone models, while maintaining low end-to-end latency.
2025
Perception Compressor: A Training-Free Prompt Compression Framework in Long Context Scenarios
Jiwei Tang | Jin Xu | Tingwei Lu | Zhicheng Zhang | Yiming Zhao | Lin Hai | Hai-Tao Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Jiwei Tang | Jin Xu | Tingwei Lu | Zhicheng Zhang | Yiming Zhao | Lin Hai | Hai-Tao Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in various scenarios. However, they suffer from much redundant information and are sensitive to the position of key information in long context scenarios. To address these challenges, we present Perception Compressor, a training-free prompt compression framework. It includes a perception retriever that leverages guiding questions and instruction to retrieve the most relevant demonstrations, a dual-slope ratio allocator to dynamically allocate compression ratios and open-book ratios, and a semi-guided iterative compression that retains key information at the token level while removing tokens that distract the LLM. We conduct extensive experiments on long context benchmarks, i.e., NaturalQuestions, LongBench, and MuSiQue. Experiment results show that Perception Compressor outperforms existing methods by a large margin, achieving state-of-the-art performance.
2024
OpenFMNav: Towards Open-Set Zero-Shot Object Navigation via Vision-Language Foundation Models
Yuxuan Kuang | Hai Lin | Meng Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Yuxuan Kuang | Hai Lin | Meng Jiang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Object navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to navigate through unseen environments to find queried objects. Many previous methods attempted to solve this task by relying on supervised or reinforcement learning, where they are trained on limited household datasets with close-set objects. However, two key challenges are unsolved: understanding free-form natural language instructions that demand open-set objects, and generalizing to new environments in a zero-shot manner. Aiming to solve the two challenges, in this paper, we propose OpenFMNav, an Open-set Foundation Model based framework for zero-shot object Navigation. We first unleash the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) to extract proposed objects from natural language instructions that meet the user’s demand. We then leverage the generalizability of large vision language models (VLMs) to actively discover and detect candidate objects from the scene, building a Versatile Semantic Score Map (VSSM). Then, by conducting common sense reasoning on VSSM, our method can perform effective language-guided exploration and exploitation of the scene and finally reach the goal. By leveraging the reasoning and generalizing abilities of foundation models, our method can understand free-form human instructions and perform effective open-set zero-shot navigation in diverse environments. Extensive experiments on the HM3D ObjectNav benchmark show that our method surpasses all the strong baselines on all metrics, proving our method’s effectiveness. Furthermore, we perform real robot demonstrations to validate our method’s open-set-ness and generalizability to real-world environments.