Man Yao
Author directory2026
DeepPersona: Scaling Persona Depth via Taxonomy-Guided Generation
Zhen Wang | Yufan Zhou | Zhongyan Luo | Lyumanshan Ye | Adam Wood | Saab Mansour | Man Yao | Luoshang Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhen Wang | Yufan Zhou | Zhongyan Luo | Lyumanshan Ye | Adam Wood | Saab Mansour | Man Yao | Luoshang Pan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Synthetic personas support LLM personalization, social simulation, and alignment evaluation, yet existing resources typically represent each individual with only a small number of structured attributes. We introduce DeepPersona, a generative engine that scales persona depth to roughly 200 instantiated taxonomy nodes while preserving narrative coherence. DeepPersona combines (i) a hierarchical taxonomy of 8,496 human-descriptive attributes mined from 62k personalizable QA pairs in real user-chatbot dialogues and (ii) a progressive sampler that conditions each new attribute on the evolving persona and uses a stratified similarity prior to balance coherence and diversity. The same engine can expand shallow inputs, such as PersonaHub entries, into deep profiles. Across three complementary evaluations, DeepPersona improves judge-extracted attribute count by 32% and judge-rated uniqueness by 44% over the strongest prior persona resource; improves LLM personalization quality by up to 11.6% across ten dimensions, with human evaluators preferring DeepPersona responses in 81.2% to 87.0% of pairwise comparisons; and reduces the distributional gap to real World Values Survey responses by 31.7%, while recovering Big Five personality distributions 17% closer to ground truth than the strongest LLM baseline.
2025
MMDEND: Dendrite-Inspired Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Neuron for Sequence Modeling
Kexin Wang | Yuhong Chou | Di Shang | Shijie Mei | Jiahong Zhang | Yanbin Huang | Man Yao | Bo Xu | Guoqi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kexin Wang | Yuhong Chou | Di Shang | Shijie Mei | Jiahong Zhang | Yanbin Huang | Man Yao | Bo Xu | Guoqi Li
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Vanilla spiking neurons are simplified from complex biological neurons with dendrites, soma, and synapses, into single somatic compartments. Due to limitations in performance and training efficiency, vanilla spiking neurons face significant challenges in modeling long sequences. In terms of performance, the oversimplified dynamics of spiking neurons omit long-term temporal dependencies. Additionally, the long-tail membrane potential distribution and binary activation discretization errors further limit their capacity to model long sequences. In terms of efficiency, the serial mechanism of spiking neurons leads to excessively long training times for long sequences. Though parallel spiking neurons are an efficient solution, their number of parameters is often tied to the hidden dimension or sequence length, which makes current parallel neurons unsuitable for large architectures. To address these issues, we propose MMDEND: a Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Dendritic Neuron. Its proportion-adjustable multi-branch, multi-compartment structure enables long-term temporal dependencies. Additionally, we introduce a Scaling-Shifting Integer Firing (SSF) mechanism that fits the long-tail membrane potential distribution, retains efficiency, and mitigates discretization errors. Compared with parallel neurons, MMDEND achieves better long-sequence modeling capability with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption. Visualization also confirms that the SSF mechanism effectively fits long-tail distributions.
2024
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network
Kexin Wang | Jiahong Zhang | Yong Ren | Man Yao | Di Shang | Bo Xu | Guoqi Li
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Kexin Wang | Jiahong Zhang | Yong Ren | Man Yao | Di Shang | Bo Xu | Guoqi Li
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) has demonstrated its effectiveness and efficiency in vision, natural language, and speech understanding tasks, indicating their capacity to “see”, “listen”, and “read”. In this paper, we design SpikeVoice, which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN, to explore the potential of SNN to “speak”. A major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. The serial nature of spiking neurons, however, leads to the invisibility of information at future spiking time steps, limiting SNN models to capture sequence dependencies solely within the same time step. We term this phenomenon “partial-time dependency”. To address this issue, we introduce Spiking Temporal-Sequential Attention (STSA) in the SpikeVoice. To the best of our knowledge, SpikeVoice is the first TTS work in the SNN field. We perform experiments using four well-established datasets that cover both Chinese and English languages, encompassing scenarios with both single-speaker and multi-speaker configurations. The results demonstrate that SpikeVoice can achieve results comparable to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. Both our demo and code are available as supplementary material.