Shudong Hao
Author directory2026
Diagnosis Before Treatment? Investigating Intermediate-Variable Reasoning in LLMs
Zhishan Yuan | Tiago Almeida | Shudong Hao | Zining Zhu | Nickolas Elias Dawlabani | Ghazia Pervaiz | Yue Ning
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhishan Yuan | Tiago Almeida | Shudong Hao | Zining Zhu | Nickolas Elias Dawlabani | Ghazia Pervaiz | Yue Ning
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Many expert-domain decisions involve intermediate variables, yet standard LLM evaluation often measures only final-answer accuracy. We present a controlled study of intermediate-variable dependence in medical treatment selection, using diagnosis as an explicit variable between patient phenotype and treatment. We construct a six-option multiple-choice benchmark from PrimeKG-derived phenotype–disease–drug chains and evaluate six LLMs using behavioral diagnosis interventions, held-out QLoRA path supervision, external validation, and auxiliary layer-wise localization analysis. Providing the gold diagnosis improves average treatment accuracy from 49.9% to 84.9%, while incorrect predicted diagnoses reduce accuracy from 85.5% to 23.1%. A shuffled-diagnosis control yields 18.2% accuracy, suggesting that the effect depends on diagnosis correctness rather than merely adding disease-like text. Held-out QLoRA experiments show that path supervision improves treatment selection, with diagnosis-first full-chain and multitask objectives yielding the strongest gains. Center-of-Gravity localization further gives a modest diagnosis-first signal, which we interpret as a localization pattern rather than evidence of faithful clinical reasoning. Overall, in this controlled setting, final-answer accuracy can obscure failures in intermediate-variable dependence, while structured supervision can partially improve diagnosis-to-treatment behavior.
PatchHolmes: Agentic Patch Retrieval via Listwise Selection
Guanqun Yang | Yingming Zhou | Jiangrui Zheng | Shudong Hao | Xueqing Liu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Guanqun Yang | Yingming Zhou | Jiangrui Zheng | Shudong Hao | Xueqing Liu
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Patch retrieval, the task of finding the commit that fixes a known vulnerability, is the foundation of vulnerability management workflows, yet 60% to 63% of CVEs in the major advisory databases lack a patch link. We present PatchHolmes, a two-phase patch retrieval system that pairs a hybrid first-stage retriever with an agentic second-stage inspection loop. Unlike pointwise prior work that scores each candidate independently, the Phase 2 agent reads the top-100 listwise: it sees the full candidate list at once and selectively reads 3 to 10 commits through four budgeted tools before submitting a single best commit. On GitHubAD, PatchHolmes beats the pointwise binary classifier Favia by 25.34% Recall@1 and the retrieve-and-CoT baseline IRCoT by 31.40%, at one agent conversation per CVE versus Favia’s ten; with the candidate set held identical, the agent adds 27.32% Recall@1 over taking the retriever’s top candidate, and the same agent, transferred unchanged to PatchFinder_top10, lifts Recall@1 from PatchFinder’s own top-1 pick (24.28%) to 39.86%. Swapping the LLM backbone within the Qwen family changes Recall@1 by under 1%, and a second model family (gpt-oss) stays far above the no-agent floor, so the gain comes from the listwise agent loop; the entire system runs on a frozen open-weight model over a local Git repository, without fine-tuning or external search APIs.
2020
An Empirical Study on Crosslingual Transfer in Probabilistic Topic Models
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Computational Linguistics, Volume 46, Issue 1 - March 2020
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Computational Linguistics, Volume 46, Issue 1 - March 2020
Probabilistic topic modeling is a common first step in crosslingual tasks to enable knowledge transfer and extract multilingual features. Although many multilingual topic models have been developed, their assumptions about the training corpus are quite varied, and it is not clear how well the different models can be utilized under various training conditions. In this article, the knowledge transfer mechanisms behind different multilingual topic models are systematically studied, and through a broad set of experiments with four models on ten languages, we provide empirical insights that can inform the selection and future development of multilingual topic models.
2019
Analyzing Bayesian Crosslingual Transfer in Topic Models
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
We introduce a theoretical analysis of crosslingual transfer in probabilistic topic models. By formulating posterior inference through Gibbs sampling as a process of language transfer, we propose a new measure that quantifies the loss of knowledge across languages during this process. This measure enables us to derive a PAC-Bayesian bound that elucidates the factors affecting model quality, both during training and in downstream applications. We provide experimental validation of the analysis on a diverse set of five languages, and discuss best practices for data collection and model design based on our analysis.
2018
Lessons from the Bible on Modern Topics: Low-Resource Multilingual Topic Model Evaluation
Shudong Hao | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Shudong Hao | Jordan Boyd-Graber | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Multilingual topic models enable document analysis across languages through coherent multilingual summaries of the data. However, there is no standard and effective metric to evaluate the quality of multilingual topics. We introduce a new intrinsic evaluation of multilingual topic models that correlates well with human judgments of multilingual topic coherence as well as performance in downstream applications. Importantly, we also study evaluation for low-resource languages. Because standard metrics fail to accurately measure topic quality when robust external resources are unavailable, we propose an adaptation model that improves the accuracy and reliability of these metrics in low-resource settings.
Learning Multilingual Topics from Incomparable Corpora
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Shudong Hao | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Multilingual topic models enable crosslingual tasks by extracting consistent topics from multilingual corpora. Most models require parallel or comparable training corpora, which limits their ability to generalize. In this paper, we first demystify the knowledge transfer mechanism behind multilingual topic models by defining an alternative but equivalent formulation. Based on this analysis, we then relax the assumption of training data required by most existing models, creating a model that only requires a dictionary for training. Experiments show that our new method effectively learns coherent multilingual topics from partially and fully incomparable corpora with limited amounts of dictionary resources.
2017
CADET: Computer Assisted Discovery Extraction and Translation
Benjamin Van Durme | Tom Lippincott | Kevin Duh | Deana Burchfield | Adam Poliak | Cash Costello | Tim Finin | Scott Miller | James Mayfield | Philipp Koehn | Craig Harman | Dawn Lawrie | Chandler May | Max Thomas | Annabelle Carrell | Julianne Chaloux | Tongfei Chen | Alex Comerford | Mark Dredze | Benjamin Glass | Shudong Hao | Patrick Martin | Pushpendre Rastogi | Rashmi Sankepally | Travis Wolfe | Ying-Ying Tran | Ted Zhang
Proceedings of the IJCNLP 2017, System Demonstrations
Benjamin Van Durme | Tom Lippincott | Kevin Duh | Deana Burchfield | Adam Poliak | Cash Costello | Tim Finin | Scott Miller | James Mayfield | Philipp Koehn | Craig Harman | Dawn Lawrie | Chandler May | Max Thomas | Annabelle Carrell | Julianne Chaloux | Tongfei Chen | Alex Comerford | Mark Dredze | Benjamin Glass | Shudong Hao | Patrick Martin | Pushpendre Rastogi | Rashmi Sankepally | Travis Wolfe | Ying-Ying Tran | Ted Zhang
Proceedings of the IJCNLP 2017, System Demonstrations
Computer Assisted Discovery Extraction and Translation (CADET) is a workbench for helping knowledge workers find, label, and translate documents of interest. It combines a multitude of analytics together with a flexible environment for customizing the workflow for different users. This open-source framework allows for easy development of new research prototypes using a micro-service architecture based atop Docker and Apache Thrift.
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Co-authors
- Michael Paul 4
- Tiago Almeida 1
- Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber 1
- Deana Burchfield 1
- Annabelle Carrell 1
- Julianne Chaloux 1
- Tongfei Chen 1
- Alex Comerford 1
- Cash Costello 1
- Nickolas Elias Dawlabani 1
- Mark Dredze 1
- Kevin Duh 1
- Tim Finin 1
- Benjamin Glass 1
- Craig Harman 1
- Philipp Koehn 1
- Dawn Lawrie 1
- Tom Lippincott 1
- Xueqing Liu 1
- M. Patrick Martin 1
- Chandler May 1
- James Mayfield 1
- Scott Miller 1
- Yue Ning 1
- Ghazia Pervaiz 1
- Adam Poliak 1
- Pushpendre Rastogi 1
- Rashmi Sankepally 1
- Max Thomas 1
- Ying-Ying Tran 1
- Benjamin Van Durme 1
- Travis Wolfe 1
- Guanqun Yang 1
- Zhishan Yuan 1
- Ted Zhang 1
- Jiangrui Zheng 1
- Yingming Zhou 1
- Zining Zhu 1