Xiaobo Shu
Author directory2026
SpiralFormer: Looped Transformers Can Learn Hierarchical Dependencies via Multi-Resolution Recursion
Chengting Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Yadao Wang | Yizhen Zhang | Haoyi Wu | You Wu | Rujiao Long | Ziheng Chen | Yuchi Xu | Wenbo Su | Bo Zheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Chengting Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Yadao Wang | Yizhen Zhang | Haoyi Wu | You Wu | Rujiao Long | Ziheng Chen | Yuchi Xu | Wenbo Su | Bo Zheng
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recursive (looped) Transformers decouple computational depth from parameter depth by repeatedly applying shared layers, providing an explicit architectural primitive for iterative refinement and latent reasoning. However, early looped Transformers often underperform non-recursive baselines of equal compute. While recent literature has introduced more effective recursion mechanisms to mitigate this gap, existing architectures still operate at a fixed, full-token resolution, neglecting the potential efficiency of computing over compressed latent representations. In this paper, we propose SpiralFormer, a looped Transformer that executes recurrence under a multi-resolution recursion schedule. We provide probing evidence that multi-resolution recursion enables the model to learn hierarchical dependencies by inducing iteration-wise functional specialization across different scales. Empirically, SpiralFormer achieves better parameter and compute efficiency than both looped and non-looped baselines across model scales from 160M to 1.4B, establishing sequence resolution as a potential axis for scaling recursive architectures.
2021
From What to Why: Improving Relation Extraction with Rationale Graph
Zhenyu Zhang | Bowen Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Xue Mengge | Tingwen Liu | Li Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021
Zhenyu Zhang | Bowen Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Xue Mengge | Tingwen Liu | Li Guo
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021
2020
Document-level Relation Extraction with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph
Zhenyu Zhang | Bowen Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Tingwen Liu | Hengzhu Tang | Wang Yubin | Li Guo
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Zhenyu Zhang | Bowen Yu | Xiaobo Shu | Tingwen Liu | Hengzhu Tang | Wang Yubin | Li Guo
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Document-level relation extraction (RE) poses new challenges over its sentence-level counterpart since it requires an adequate comprehension of the whole document and the multi-hop reasoning ability across multiple sentences to reach the final result. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based model with Dual-tier Heterogeneous Graph (DHG) for document-level RE. In particular, DHG is composed of a structure modeling layer followed by a relation reasoning layer. The major advantage is that it is capable of not only capturing both the sequential and structural information of documents but also mixing them together to benefit for multi-hop reasoning and final decision-making. Furthermore, we employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) based message propagation strategy to accumulate information on DHG. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on two widely used datasets, and further analyses suggest that all the modules in our model are indispensable for document-level RE.