Qianren Mao
Author directory2026
Selective Knowledge Edit Reversal via Gated Singular Vector Shrinkage
Weifeng Jiang | Ruirui Chen | Qianren Mao | Junnan Liu | Qili Zhang | Kwok-Yan Lam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Weifeng Jiang | Ruirui Chen | Qianren Mao | Junnan Liu | Qili Zhang | Kwok-Yan Lam
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Knowledge editing provides an efficient way to update factual knowledge in large language models. However, malicious edits may introduce safety risks, making it necessary to reverse undesirable editing effects. Existing reversal methods for parameter-modifying edits mainly focus on global removal, which may also erase beneficial edits that should be preserved. In this paper, we study selective reversal of edited knowledge, where the goal is to reverse targeted edited facts while preserving the remaining edited facts. Based on the hypothesis that each edit is sparsely encoded within the dominant subspace of the edited matrix, we propose a spectral-based reversal framework that locates edit-sensitive components within the dominant singular subspace of edited weights. Experiments across multiple settings demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reversing selected edits while preserving unrelated edited facts. These results suggest that different edits are sparsely encoded within dominant singular components and can be separable when the number of edits is moderate, making selective spectral reversal a promising direction for locating edit-specific components and repairing edited language models.
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging
Zhuoran Li | Rui Xu | Jian Yang | Junnan Liu | Zhijun Chen | Qianren Mao | Hongcheng Guo | Jiaheng Liu | Likang Xiao | Ming LI | Xiaojie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhuoran Li | Rui Xu | Jian Yang | Junnan Liu | Zhijun Chen | Qianren Mao | Hongcheng Guo | Jiaheng Liu | Likang Xiao | Ming LI | Xiaojie Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.
2025
Lightweight Contenders: Navigating Semi-Supervised Text Mining through Peer Collaboration and Self Transcendence
Qianren Mao | Weifeng Jiang | Junnan Liu | Chenghua Lin | Qian Li | Xianqing Wen | Jianxin Li | Jinhu Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Qianren Mao | Weifeng Jiang | Junnan Liu | Chenghua Lin | Qian Li | Xianqing Wen | Jianxin Li | Jinhu Lu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
The semi-supervised learning (SSL) strategy in lightweight models requires reducing annotated samples and facilitating cost-effective inference. However, the constraint on model parameters, imposed by the scarcity of training labels, limits the SSL performance. In this paper, we introduce PS-NET, a novel framework tailored for semi-supervised text mining with lightweight models. PS-NET incorporates online distillation to train lightweight student models by imitating the Teacher model. It also integrates an ensemble of student peers that collaboratively instruct each other. Additionally, PS-NET implements a constant adversarial perturbation schema to further self-augmentation by progressive generalizing. Our PS-NET, equipped with a 2-layer distilled BERT, exhibits notable performance enhancements over SOTA lightweight SSL frameworks of FLiText and Disco in SSL text classification with extremely rare labelled data.
2023
Bipartite Graph Pre-training for Unsupervised Extractive Summarization with Graph Convolutional Auto-Encoders
Qianren Mao | Shaobo Zhao | Jiarui Li | Xiaolei Gu | Shizhu He | Bo Li | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Qianren Mao | Shaobo Zhao | Jiarui Li | Xiaolei Gu | Shizhu He | Bo Li | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Pre-trained sentence representations are crucial for identifying significant sentences in unsupervised document extractive summarization. However, the traditional two-step paradigm of pre-training and sentence-ranking, creates a gap due to differing optimization objectives. To address this issue, we argue that utilizing pre-trained embeddings derived from a process specifically designed to optimize informative and distinctive sentence representations helps rank significant sentences. To do so, we propose a novel graph pre-training auto-encoder to obtain sentence embeddings by explicitly modelling intra-sentential distinctive features and inter-sentential cohesive features through sentence-word bipartite graphs. These fine-tuned sentence embeddings are then utilized in a graph-based ranking algorithm for unsupervised summarization. Our method is a plug-and-play pre-trained model that produces predominant performance for unsupervised summarization frameworks by providing summary-worthy sentence representations. It surpasses heavy BERT- or RoBERTa-based sentence representations in downstream tasks.
LATENTLOGIC: Learning Logic Rules in Latent Space over Knowledge Graphs
Junnan Liu | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Yangqiu Song | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Junnan Liu | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Yangqiu Song | Jianxin Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Learning logic rules for knowledge graph reasoning is essential as such rules provide interpretable explanations for reasoning and can be generalized to different domains. However, existing methods often face challenges such as searching in a vast search space (e.g., enumeration of relational paths or multiplication of high-dimensional matrices) and inefficient optimization (e.g., techniques based on reinforcement learning or EM algorithm). To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework called LatentLogic to efficiently mine logic rules by controllable generation in the latent space. Specifically, to map the discrete relational paths into the latent space, we leverage a pre-trained VAE and employ a discriminator to establish an energy-based distribution. Additionally, we incorporate a sampler based on ordinary differential equations, enabling the efficient generation of logic rules in our approach. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.
DisCo: Distilled Student Models Co-training for Semi-supervised Text Mining
Weifeng Jiang | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Jianxin Li | Ting Deng | Weiyi Yang | Zheng Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weifeng Jiang | Qianren Mao | Chenghua Lin | Jianxin Li | Ting Deng | Weiyi Yang | Zheng Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Many text mining models are constructed by fine-tuning a large deep pre-trained language model (PLM) in downstream tasks. However, a significant challenge that arises nowadays is how to maintain performance when we use a lightweight model with limited labeled samples. We present DisCo, a semi-supervised learning (SSL) framework for fine-tuning a cohort of small student models generated from a large PLM using knowledge distillation. Our key insight is to share complementary knowledge among distilled student cohorts to promote their SSL effectiveness. DisCo employs a novel co-training technique to optimize a cohort of multiple small student models by promoting knowledge sharing among students under diversified views: model views produced by different distillation strategies and data views produced by various input augmentations. We evaluate DisCo on both semi-supervised text classification and extractive summarization tasks. Experimental results show that DisCo can produce student models that are 7.6× smaller and 4.8 × faster in inference than the baseline PLMs while maintaining comparable performance. We also show that DisCo-generated student models outperform the similar-sized models elaborately tuned in distinct tasks.
2022
Noise-injected Consistency Training and Entropy-constrained Pseudo Labeling for Semi-supervised Extractive Summarization
Yiming Wang | Qianren Mao | Junnan Liu | Weifeng Jiang | Hongdong Zhu | Jianxin Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Yiming Wang | Qianren Mao | Junnan Liu | Weifeng Jiang | Hongdong Zhu | Jianxin Li
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Labeling large amounts of extractive summarization data is often prohibitive expensive due to time, financial, and expertise constraints, which poses great challenges to incorporating summarization system in practical applications. This limitation can be overcome by semi-supervised approaches: consistency-training and pseudo-labeling to make full use of unlabeled data. Researches on the two, however, are conducted independently, and very few works try to connect them. In this paper, we first use the noise-injected consistency training paradigm to regularize model predictions. Subsequently, we propose a novel entropy-constrained pseudo labeling strategy to obtain high-confidence labels from unlabeled predictions, which can obtain high-confidence labels from unlabeled predictions by comparing the entropy of supervised and unsupervised predictions. By combining consistency training and pseudo-labeling, this framework enforce a low-density separation between classes, which decently improves the performance of supervised learning over an insufficient labeled extractive summarization dataset.
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Co-authors
- Jianxin Li 5
- Junnan Liu 5
- Weifeng Jiang 4
- Chenghua Lin 3
- Ruirui Chen 1
- Zhijun Chen 1
- Ting Deng 1
- Xiaolei Gu 1
- Hongcheng Guo 1
- Shizhu He (何世柱) 1
- Ming LI 1
- Kwok-Yan Lam 1
- Bo Li 1
- Jiarui Li 1
- Qian Li 1
- Zhuoran Li 1
- Jiaheng Liu 1
- Jinhu Lu 1
- Yangqiu Song 1
- Xiaojie Wang 1
- Yiming Wang 1
- Zheng Wang 1
- Xianqing Wen 1
- Likang Xiao 1
- Rui Xu 1
- Jian Yang 1
- Weiyi Yang 1
- Qili Zhang 1
- Shaobo Zhao 1
- Hongdong Zhu 1