Xuelian Cheng
Author directory2026
Learning Compositional Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding with Synthetic Curriculum
Xingjian Wang | Shijian Wang | Yibo Wang | Zihao Yu | Runhao Fu | Xuelian Cheng | Zongyuan Ge
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xingjian Wang | Shijian Wang | Yibo Wang | Zihao Yu | Runhao Fu | Xuelian Cheng | Zongyuan Ge
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Despite the impressive progress of recent MLLMs on spatio-temporal video grounding (STVG), existing evaluations and training data focus primarily on simple queries. They largely overlook the compositional queries prevalent in real-world scenarios, where a target must be disambiguated by jointly reasoning about its attributes and relations to other entities. To bridge this gap, we propose Compositional Spatio-Temporal Video Grounding (CompSTVG), a task that requires models to process complex textual queries where every intertwined attribute and relational cue is essential for disambiguation. To facilitate this task at scale, we build a synthetic data engine that leverages a spatio-temporal scene graph as a difficulty measure and casts difficulty-controlled query synthesis as a constraint programming problem, producing difficulty-graded data for both evaluation and training. Built on this engine, we introduce STVG-CompBench, a benchmark stratified by explicit difficulty levels that jointly capture temporal complexity and spatial interference. Evaluating 11 representative STVG models on STVG-CompBench reveals that current models perform poorly on compositional queries, exhibiting a sharp performance drop that is typically obscured by overall dataset-level averages. We further construct synthetic training data and propose CurrSTVG, a curriculum reinforcement learning framework that delivers consistent gains, with the largest improvements observed on the most challenging compositional queries.
VIBE-Bench: Evaluating Personalized Large Language Models When Profiles Don’t Mean Preferences
Yiwen Jiang | Yang Deng | Stephanie Fong | Zimu Wang | Yaling Shen | Wei Feng | Hongxi Yang | Xiangyu Zhao | Zhongxing Xu | Deval Mehta | Xuelian Cheng | Zongyuan Ge
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yiwen Jiang | Yang Deng | Stephanie Fong | Zimu Wang | Yaling Shen | Wei Feng | Hongxi Yang | Xiangyu Zhao | Zhongxing Xu | Deval Mehta | Xuelian Cheng | Zongyuan Ge
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Personalized Large Language Models (PLLMs) aim to tailor responses to individual users, where a central challenge is preference reasoning: inferring query-relevant preferences from user-related history. Existing benchmarks, however, largely assume that such preference can be retrieved from semantically related history. We study an underexplored but practically important regime, profile-preference conceptual misalignment (PRCM), where observable profile cues and query-specific preferences lie in different concept spaces, making semantic retrieval inconsistent for personalization. We introduce Vibe-Bench, a benchmark with two psychology-grounded tasks, 3,504 personas and 12,239 dialogues, including a manually verified gold test set, and requires cross-concept preference reasoning beyond surface semantic overlap. Experiments with several personalization methods show that current PLLMs largely rely on shallow semantic correlations and fail to acquire robust cross-concept mappings. These findings establish PRCM as a distinct failure regime in PLLMs and position Vibe-Bench as a focused testbed for advancing preference reasoning beyond semantic matching.