papers

Publications (105)

cs.CL2025

Multi-Trigger Poisoning Amplifies Backdoor Vulnerabilities in LLMs

Sanhanat Sivapiromrat, Caiqi Zhang, Marco Basaldella +1

Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to data poisoning attacks, where malicious training examples embed hidden behaviours triggered by specifi…

cs.CL2022

Probing Cross-Lingual Lexical Knowledge from Multilingual Sentence Encoders

Ivan Vulić, Goran Glavaš, Fangyu Liu +3

Pretrained multilingual language models (LMs) can be successfully transformed into multilingual sentence encoders (SEs; e.g., LaBSE, xMPNet) via additional fine-tuning or model dis…

cs.CL2025

A Survey on Prompt Tuning

Zongqian Li, Yixuan Su, Nigel Collier

This survey reviews prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for adapting language models by prepending trainable continuous vectors while keeping the model frozen. We classif…

cs.CL2018

Unseen Word Representation by Aligning Heterogeneous Lexical Semantic Spaces

Victor Prokhorov, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Dimitri Kartsaklis +2

Word embedding techniques heavily rely on the abundance of training data for individual words. Given the Zipfian distribution of words in natural language texts, a large number of…

cs.CL2026

Multi-agent AI systems outperform human teams in creativity

Tiancheng Hu, Yixuan Jiang, Haotian Li +5

Although artificial intelligence (AI) now matches or exceeds human performance across numerous cognitive tasks, creativity remains a highly contested frontier. As AI systems based…

cs.CL2026

Confident Rankings with Fewer Items: Adaptive LLM Evaluation with Continuous Scores

Esma Balkır, Alice Pernthaller, Marco Basaldella +2

Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) has proven effective for efficient LLM evaluation on multiple-choice benchmarks, but modern LLM evaluation increasingly relies on generation tas…

cs.CL2026

Confidence Estimation for LLMs in Multi-turn Interactions

Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Xiaochen Zhu +5

While confidence estimation is a promising direction for mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs), current research overwhelmingly focuses on single-turn settings.…

cs.CL2025

PT-MoE: An Efficient Finetuning Framework for Integrating Mixture-of-Experts into Prompt Tuning

Zongqian Li, Yixuan Su, Nigel Collier

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have shown promise in adapting large language models, yet existing approaches exhibit counter-intuitive phenomena: integrating router…

cs.CL2019

An Empirical Study of Sections in Classifying Disease Outbreak Reports

Son Doan, Mike Conway, Nigel Collier

Identifying articles that relate to infectious diseases is a necessary step for any automatic bio-surveillance system that monitors news articles from the Internet. Unlike scientif…

cs.LG2026

Flexi-LoRA with Input-Adaptive Ranks: Efficient Finetuning for Speech and Reasoning Tasks

Zongqian Li, Yixuan Su, Han Zhou +2

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods like Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) have become essential for deploying large language models, yet their static parameter allocation remains sub…

cs.CL2025

iNews: A Multimodal Dataset for Modeling Personalized Affective Responses to News

Tiancheng Hu, Nigel Collier

Understanding how individuals perceive and react to information is fundamental for advancing social and behavioral sciences and developing human-centered AI systems. Current approa…

cs.CL2021

Learning Domain-Specialised Representations for Cross-Lingual Biomedical Entity Linking

Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen +1

Injecting external domain-specific knowledge (e.g., UMLS) into pretrained language models (LMs) advances their capability to handle specialised in-domain tasks such as biomedical e…

cs.CL2011

OMG U got flu? Analysis of shared health messages for bio-surveillance

Nigel Collier, Nguyen Truong Son, Ngoc Mai Nguyen

Background: Micro-blogging services such as Twitter offer the potential to crowdsource epidemics in real-time. However, Twitter posts ('tweets') are often ambiguous and reactive to…

cs.CL2022

Do ever larger octopi still amplify reporting biases? Evidence from judgments of typical colour

Fangyu Liu, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Jeremy R. Cole +1

Language models (LMs) trained on raw texts have no direct access to the physical world. Gordon and Van Durme (2013) point out that LMs can thus suffer from reporting bias: texts ra…

cs.CL2026

Scaling Data Difficulty: Improving Coding Models via Reinforcement Learning on Fresh and Challenging Problems

Zongqian Li, Tengchao Lv, Shaohan Huang +8

Training next-generation code generation models requires high-quality datasets, yet existing datasets face difficulty imbalance, format inconsistency, and data quality problems. We…

cs.CL2022

Rewire-then-Probe: A Contrastive Recipe for Probing Biomedical Knowledge of Pre-trained Language Models

Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu, Ehsan Shareghi +3

Knowledge probing is crucial for understanding the knowledge transfer mechanism behind the pre-trained language models (PLMs). Despite the growing progress of probing knowledge for…

cs.CL2020

Will-They-Won't-They: A Very Large Dataset for Stance Detection on Twitter

Costanza Conforti, Jakob Berndt, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar +3

We present a new challenging stance detection dataset, called Will-They-Won't-They (WT-WT), which contains 51,284 tweets in English, making it by far the largest available dataset…

cs.CL2020

Stylistic Dialogue Generation via Information-Guided Reinforcement Learning Strategy

Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Yan Wang +4

Stylistic response generation is crucial for building an engaging dialogue system for industrial use. While it has attracted much research interest, existing methods often generate…

cs.CL2019

On the Importance of the Kullback-Leibler Divergence Term in Variational Autoencoders for Text Generation

Victor Prokhorov, Ehsan Shareghi, Yingzhen Li +2

Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are known to suffer from learning uninformative latent representation of the input due to issues such as approximated posterior collapse, or entangl…

cs.CL2023

BAND: Biomedical Alert News Dataset

Zihao Fu, Meiru Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng +3

Infectious disease outbreaks continue to pose a significant threat to human health and well-being. To improve disease surveillance and understanding of disease spread, several surv…

cs.CL2015

Adapting Phrase-based Machine Translation to Normalise Medical Terms in Social Media Messages

Nut Limsopatham, Nigel Collier

Previous studies have shown that health reports in social media, such as DailyStrength and Twitter, have potential for monitoring health conditions (e.g. adverse drug reactions, in…

cs.CL2025

ReasonGraph: Visualisation of Reasoning Paths

Zongqian Li, Ehsan Shareghi, Nigel Collier

Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning processes are challenging to analyze due to their complexity and the lack of organized visualization tools. We present ReasonGraph, a web-bas…

cs.CL2024

COFFEE: A Contrastive Oracle-Free Framework for Event Extraction

Meiru Zhang, Yixuan Su, Zaiqiao Meng +2

Event extraction is a complex information extraction task that involves extracting events from unstructured text. Prior classification-based methods require comprehensive entity an…

cs.CL2024

500xCompressor: Generalized Prompt Compression for Large Language Models

Zongqian Li, Yixuan Su, Nigel Collier

Prompt compression is crucial for enhancing inference speed, reducing costs, and improving user experience. However, current methods face challenges such as low compression ratios…

cs.CL2017

Towards a Seamless Integration of Word Senses into Downstream NLP Applications

Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Jose Camacho-Collados, Roberto Navigli +1

Lexical ambiguity can impede NLP systems from accurate understanding of semantics. Despite its potential benefits, the integration of sense-level information into NLP systems has r…

cs.CL2021

Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders

Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen +1

Pretrained Masked Language Models (MLMs) have revolutionised NLP in recent years. However, previous work has indicated that off-the-shelf MLMs are not effective as universal lexica…

cs.CL2020

Prototype-to-Style: Dialogue Generation with Style-Aware Editing on Retrieval Memory

Yixuan Su, Yan Wang, Simon Baker +4

The ability of a dialog system to express prespecified language style during conversations has a direct, positive impact on its usability and on user satisfaction. We introduce a n…

cs.CL2023

Visual Spatial Reasoning

Fangyu Liu, Guy Emerson, Nigel Collier

Spatial relations are a basic part of human cognition. However, they are expressed in natural language in a variety of ways, and previous work has suggested that current vision-and…

cs.CL2024

TOAD: Task-Oriented Automatic Dialogs with Diverse Response Styles

Yinhong Liu, Yimai Fang, David Vandyke +1

In light of recent advances in large language models (LLMs), the expectations for the next generation of virtual assistants include enhanced naturalness and adaptability across div…

cs.CL2021

MirrorWiC: On Eliciting Word-in-Context Representations from Pretrained Language Models

Qianchu Liu, Fangyu Liu, Nigel Collier +2

Recent work indicated that pretrained language models (PLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa can be transformed into effective sentence and word encoders even via simple self-supervised t…

cs.CL2011

Syndromic classification of Twitter messages

Nigel Collier, Son Doan

Recent studies have shown strong correlation between social networking data and national influenza rates. We expanded upon this success to develop an automated text mining system t…

cs.CL2023

POSQA: Probe the World Models of LLMs with Size Comparisons

Chang Shu, Jiuzhou Han, Fangyu Liu +2

Embodied language comprehension emphasizes that language understanding is not solely a matter of mental processing in the brain but also involves interactions with the physical and…

cs.CL2021

Mixture-of-Partitions: Infusing Large Biomedical Knowledge Graphs into BERT

Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu, Thomas Hikaru Clark +2

Infusing factual knowledge into pre-trained models is fundamental for many knowledge-intensive tasks. In this paper, we proposed Mixture-of-Partitions (MoP), an infusion approach t…

cmp-lg1996

Storage of Natural Language Sentences in a Hopfield Network

Nigel Collier

This paper look at how the Hopfield neural network can be used to store and recall patterns constructed from natural language sentences. As a pattern recognition and storage tool,…

cs.CL2016

De-Conflated Semantic Representations

Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Nigel Collier

One major deficiency of most semantic representation techniques is that they usually model a word type as a single point in the semantic space, hence conflating all the meanings th…

cs.CL2026

LoVeC: Reinforcement Learning for Better Verbalized Confidence in Long-Form Generations

Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li +2

Hallucination remains a major challenge for the safe and trustworthy deployment of large language models (LLMs) in factual content generation. Prior work has explored confidence es…

cs.AI2026

Failure Modes in Multi-Hop QA: The Weakest Link Effect and the Recognition Bottleneck

Meiru Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng, Nigel Collier

Despite scaling to massive context windows, Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with multi-hop reasoning due to inherent position bias, which causes them to overlook information…

cs.CL2019

A Pragmatic Guide to Geoparsing Evaluation

Milan Gritta, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Nigel Collier

Empirical methods in geoparsing have thus far lacked a standard evaluation framework describing the task, metrics and data used to compare state-of-the-art systems. Evaluation is f…

cs.CL2011

Towards cross-lingual alerting for bursty epidemic events

Nigel Collier

Background: Online news reports are increasingly becoming a source for event based early warning systems that detect natural disasters. Harnessing the massive volume of information…

cs.CL2024

Can LLM be a Personalized Judge?

Yijiang River Dong, Tiancheng Hu, Nigel Collier

Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) reflect diverse user values and preferences is crucial as their user bases expand globally. It is therefore encouraging to see the growin…

cs.CL2024

PiVe: Prompting with Iterative Verification Improving Graph-based Generative Capability of LLMs

Jiuzhou Han, Nigel Collier, Wray Buntine +1

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great abilities of solving various natural language tasks in different domains. Due to the training objective of LLMs and their pre-training…

cs.CL2011

What's unusual in online disease outbreak news?

Nigel Collier

Background: Accurate and timely detection of public health events of international concern is necessary to help support risk assessment and response and save lives. Novel event-bas…

cs.CL2024

Attention Instruction: Amplifying Attention in the Middle via Prompting

Meiru Zhang, Zaiqiao Meng, Nigel Collier

The context window of large language models has been extended to 128k tokens or more. However, language models still suffer from position bias and have difficulty in accessing and…

cs.CL2022

TaCL: Improving BERT Pre-training with Token-aware Contrastive Learning

Yixuan Su, Fangyu Liu, Zaiqiao Meng +4

Masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT and RoBERTa have revolutionized the field of Natural Language Understanding in the past few years. However, existing pre-trained MLMs oft…

cs.CL2026

Navigating the Alignment-Calibration Trade-off: A Pareto-Superior Frontier via Model Merging

Tiancheng Hu, Benjamin Minixhofer, Nigel Collier

The "alignment tax" of post-training is typically framed as a drop in task accuracy. We show it also involves a severe loss of calibration, making models overconfident, less reliab…

cs.CL2024

Quantifying the Persona Effect in LLM Simulations

Tiancheng Hu, Nigel Collier

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable promise in simulating human language and behavior. This study investigates how integrating persona variables-demographic, social,…

cs.CL2025

Aligning with Logic: Measuring, Evaluating and Improving Logical Preference Consistency in Large Language Models

Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo, Tianya Liang +3

Large Language Models (LLMs) are expected to be predictable and trustworthy to support reliable decision-making systems. Yet current LLMs often show inconsistencies in their judgme…

cs.CL2024

Generative Language Models Exhibit Social Identity Biases

Tiancheng Hu, Yara Kyrychenko, Steve Rathje +3

The surge in popularity of large language models has given rise to concerns about biases that these models could learn from humans. We investigate whether ingroup solidarity and ou…

cs.CL2024

Unlocking Structure Measuring: Introducing PDD, an Automatic Metric for Positional Discourse Coherence

Yinhong Liu, Yixuan Su, Ehsan Shareghi +1

Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in aligning generated text with user intentions across various tasks. When it comes to long-form text generati…

cs.LG2026

Breaking Training Bottlenecks: Effective and Stable Reinforcement Learning for Coding Models

Zongqian Li, Shaohan Huang, Zewen Chi +5

Modern code generation models exhibit longer outputs, accelerated capability growth, and changed training dynamics, rendering traditional training methodologies, algorithms, and da…

cs.CL2023

Instruct-SCTG: Guiding Sequential Controlled Text Generation through Instructions

Yinhong Liu, Yixuan Su, Ehsan Shareghi +1

Instruction-tuned large language models have shown remarkable performance in aligning generated text with user intentions across various tasks. However, maintaining human-like disc…

cs.CL2018

Card-660: Cambridge Rare Word Dataset - a Reliable Benchmark for Infrequent Word Representation Models

Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Dimitri Kartsaklis, Victor Prokhorov +1

Rare word representation has recently enjoyed a surge of interest, owing to the crucial role that effective handling of infrequent words can play in accurate semantic understanding…

cs.CL2022

How to tackle an emerging topic? Combining strong and weak labels for Covid news NER

Aleksander Ficek, Fangyu Liu, Nigel Collier

Being able to train Named Entity Recognition (NER) models for emerging topics is crucial for many real-world applications especially in the medical domain where new topics are cont…

cs.CV2022

Language Models Can See: Plugging Visual Controls in Text Generation

Yixuan Su, Tian Lan, Yahui Liu +5

Generative language models (LMs) such as GPT-2/3 can be prompted to generate text with remarkable quality. While they are designed for text-prompted generation, it remains an open…

cs.CL2020

COMETA: A Corpus for Medical Entity Linking in the Social Media

Marco Basaldella, Fangyu Liu, Ehsan Shareghi +1

Whilst there has been growing progress in Entity Linking (EL) for general language, existing datasets fail to address the complex nature of health terminology in layman's language.…

cs.CL2021

Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prototype Memory

Yixuan Su, Zaiqiao Meng, Simon Baker +1

Neural table-to-text generation models have achieved remarkable progress on an array of tasks. However, due to the data-hungry nature of neural models, their performances strongly…

cs.CL2021

Visually Grounded Reasoning across Languages and Cultures

Fangyu Liu, Emanuele Bugliarello, Edoardo Maria Ponti +3

The design of widespread vision-and-language datasets and pre-trained encoders directly adopts, or draws inspiration from, the concepts and images of ImageNet. While one can hardly…

cs.CL2026

Code Is More Than Text: Uncertainty Estimation for Code Generation

Yuling Shi, Caiqi Zhang, Yuexian Li +4

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as code generators, where silently wrong programs pose real safety and reliability risks. Reliable uncertainty estimation (UE…

cs.CL2023

Repetition In Repetition Out: Towards Understanding Neural Text Degeneration from the Data Perspective

Huayang Li, Tian Lan, Zihao Fu +5

There are a number of diverging hypotheses about the neural text degeneration problem, i.e., generating repetitive and dull loops, which makes this problem both interesting and con…

cs.CL2025

LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions

Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang +5

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach…

cs.CL2023

FireAct: Toward Language Agent Fine-tuning

Baian Chen, Chang Shu, Ehsan Shareghi +3

Recent efforts have augmented language models (LMs) with external tools or environments, leading to the development of language agents that can reason and act. However, most of the…

cs.CL2023

Contrastive Search Is What You Need For Neural Text Generation

Yixuan Su, Nigel Collier

Generating text with autoregressive language models (LMs) is of great importance to many natural language processing (NLP) applications. Previous solutions for this task often prod…

cs.CL2025

Aligning with Human Judgement: The Role of Pairwise Preference in Large Language Model Evaluators

Yinhong Liu, Han Zhou, Zhijiang Guo +4

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities as automatic evaluators in assessing the quality of generated natural language. However, LLMs still exhibit bi…

cs.CL2022

On the Effectiveness of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Zihao Fu, Haoran Yang, Anthony Man-Cho So +3

Fine-tuning pre-trained models has been ubiquitously proven to be effective in a wide range of NLP tasks. However, fine-tuning the whole model is parameter inefficient as it always…

cs.CL2020

Visual Pivoting for (Unsupervised) Entity Alignment

Fangyu Liu, Muhao Chen, Dan Roth +1

This work studies the use of visual semantic representations to align entities in heterogeneous knowledge graphs (KGs). Images are natural components of many existing KGs. By combi…

cs.CL2023

Decoder-Only or Encoder-Decoder? Interpreting Language Model as a Regularized Encoder-Decoder

Zihao Fu, Wai Lam, Qian Yu +4

The sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) task aims at generating the target sequence based on the given input source sequence. Traditionally, most of the seq2seq task is resolved by the…

cs.CL2022

A Contrastive Framework for Neural Text Generation

Yixuan Su, Tian Lan, Yan Wang +3

Text generation is of great importance to many natural language processing applications. However, maximization-based decoding methods (e.g. beam search) of neural language models o…

cs.CL2024

Prompt Compression for Large Language Models: A Survey

Zongqian Li, Yinhong Liu, Yixuan Su +1

Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for complex natural language tasks typically requires long-form prompts to convey detailed requirements and information, which results in in…

cs.CL2022

Prix-LM: Pretraining for Multilingual Knowledge Base Construction

Wenxuan Zhou, Fangyu Liu, Ivan Vulić +2

Knowledge bases (KBs) contain plenty of structured world and commonsense knowledge. As such, they often complement distributional text-based information and facilitate various down…

cs.CL2025

Conformity in Large Language Models

Xiaochen Zhu, Caiqi Zhang, Tom Stafford +2

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are i…

cs.CL2025

Time to Revist Exact Match

Auss Abbood, Zaiqiao Meng, Nigel Collier

Temporal question answering is an established method for evaluating temporal reasoning in large language models. Expected answers are often numeric (e.g., dates or durations), yet…

cs.IR2019

Global Health Monitor: A Web-based System for Detecting and Mapping Infectious Diseases

Son Doan, Quoc-Hung Ngo, Ai Kawazoe +1

We present the Global Health Monitor, an online Web-based system for detecting and mapping infectious disease outbreaks that appear in news stories. The system analyzes English new…

cs.CL2026

SimBench: Benchmarking the Ability of Large Language Models to Simulate Human Behaviors

Tiancheng Hu, Joachim Baumann, Lorenzo Lupo +3

Large language model (LLM) simulations of human behavior have the potential to revolutionize the social and behavioral sciences, if and only if they faithfully reflect real human b…

cs.CL2021

Plan-then-Generate: Controlled Data-to-Text Generation via Planning

Yixuan Su, David Vandyke, Sihui Wang +2

Recent developments in neural networks have led to the advance in data-to-text generation. However, the lack of ability of neural models to control the structure of generated outpu…

cs.CL2021

Learning Sparse Sentence Encoding without Supervision: An Exploration of Sparsity in Variational Autoencoders

Victor Prokhorov, Yingzhen Li, Ehsan Shareghi +1

It has been long known that sparsity is an effective inductive bias for learning efficient representation of data in vectors with fixed dimensionality, and it has been explored in…

cs.CL2023

Biomedical Named Entity Recognition via Dictionary-based Synonym Generalization

Zihao Fu, Yixuan Su, Zaiqiao Meng +1

Biomedical named entity recognition is one of the core tasks in biomedical natural language processing (BioNLP). To tackle this task, numerous supervised/distantly supervised appro…

cs.CL2023

MatCha: Enhancing Visual Language Pretraining with Math Reasoning and Chart Derendering

Fangyu Liu, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene +6

Visual language data such as plots, charts, and infographics are ubiquitous in the human world. However, state-of-the-art vision-language models do not perform well on these data.…

cs.CL2025

When Personalization Meets Reality: A Multi-Faceted Analysis of Personalized Preference Learning

Yijiang River Dong, Tiancheng Hu, Yinhong Liu +2

While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is widely used to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, it typically assumes homogeneous preferences ac…

cs.CL2025

UNCLE: Benchmarking Uncertainty Expressions in Long-Form Generation

Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang +4

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, particularly in long-form generations. A promising direction to mitigate hallucination is to teach LLMs to express uncertai…

cs.CL2024

Fairer Preferences Elicit Improved Human-Aligned Large Language Model Judgments

Han Zhou, Xingchen Wan, Yinhong Liu +3

Large language models (LLMs) have shown promising abilities as cost-effective and reference-free evaluators for assessing language generation quality. In particular, pairwise LLM e…

cs.SI2011

An analysis of Twitter messages in the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake

Son Doan, Bao-Khanh Ho Vo, Nigel Collier

Social media such as Facebook and Twitter have proven to be a useful resource to understand public opinion towards real world events. In this paper, we investigate over 1.5 million…

cs.CL2025

TRIDENT: Benchmarking LLM Safety in Finance, Medicine, and Law

Zheng Hui, Yijiang River Dong, Ehsan Shareghi +1

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-risk domains such as law, finance, and medicine, systematically evaluating their domain-specific safety and compli…

cs.CL2026

When Calibration Rankings Reverse: Accuracy-Controlled Evaluation for Fair Comparison of LLMs

Zhichao Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang +3

Calibration evaluates whether a model confidence aligns with its empirical accuracy. Existing studies often compare the calibration of different large language models using global…

stat.ML2013

Change-Point Detection in Time-Series Data by Relative Density-Ratio Estimation

Song Liu, Makoto Yamada, Nigel Collier +1

The objective of change-point detection is to discover abrupt property changes lying behind time-series data. In this paper, we present a novel statistical change-point detection a…

cs.CV2024

Sparkles: Unlocking Chats Across Multiple Images for Multimodal Instruction-Following Models

Yupan Huang, Zaiqiao Meng, Fangyu Liu +3

Large language models exhibit enhanced zero-shot performance on various tasks when fine-tuned with instruction-following data. Multimodal instruction-following models extend these…

cs.CL2021

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

Yixuan Su, Deng Cai, Qingyu Zhou +6

We study the learning of a matching model for dialogue response selection. Motivated by the recent finding that models trained with random negative samples are not ideal in real-wo…

cs.CL2025

Beyond the Final Layer: Intermediate Representations for Better Multilingual Calibration in Large Language Models

Ej Zhou, Caiqi Zhang, Tiancheng Hu +4

Confidence calibration, the alignment of a model's predicted confidence with its actual accuracy, is crucial for the reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, t…

cs.LG2023

A Stability Analysis of Fine-Tuning a Pre-Trained Model

Zihao Fu, Anthony Man-Cho So, Nigel Collier

Fine-tuning a pre-trained model (such as BERT, ALBERT, RoBERTa, T5, GPT, etc.) has proven to be one of the most promising paradigms in recent NLP research. However, numerous recent…

cs.CL2019

Generating Knowledge Graph Paths from Textual Definitions using Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Victor Prokhorov, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Nigel Collier

We present a novel method for mapping unrestricted text to knowledge graph entities by framing the task as a sequence-to-sequence problem. Specifically, given the encoded state of…

cs.CL2024

TopViewRS: Vision-Language Models as Top-View Spatial Reasoners

Chengzu Li, Caiqi Zhang, Han Zhou +3

Top-view perspective denotes a typical way in which humans read and reason over different types of maps, and it is vital for localization and navigation of humans as well as of `no…

cs.CL2025

Atomic Calibration of LLMs in Long-Form Generations

Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Zhisong Zhang +4

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from hallucinations, posing significant challenges for real-world applications. Confidence calibration, as an effective indicator of hallu…

cs.CL2024

Improving Word Translation via Two-Stage Contrastive Learning

Yaoyiran Li, Fangyu Liu, Nigel Collier +2

Word translation or bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) is a key cross-lingual task, aiming to bridge the lexical gap between different languages. In this work, we propose a robust a…

cs.CL2024

LUQ: Long-text Uncertainty Quantification for LLMs

Caiqi Zhang, Fangyu Liu, Marco Basaldella +1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability in a variety of NLP tasks. However, LLMs are also prone to generate nonfactual content. Uncertainty Quantificat…

cs.CL2026

Demystifying Multi-Agent Debate: The Role of Confidence and Diversity

Xiaochen Zhu, Caiqi Zhang, Yizhou Chi +3

Multi-agent debate (MAD) is widely used to improve large language model (LLM) performance through test-time scaling, yet recent work shows that vanilla MAD often underperforms simp…

cs.CL2018

Mapping Text to Knowledge Graph Entities using Multi-Sense LSTMs

Dimitri Kartsaklis, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar, Nigel Collier

This paper addresses the problem of mapping natural language text to knowledge base entities. The mapping process is approached as a composition of a phrase or a sentence into a po…

cs.CL2026

Steer Model beyond Assistant: Controlling System Prompt Strength via Contrastive Decoding

Yijiang River Dong, Tiancheng Hu, Zheng Hui +1

Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting in…

cs.CL2023

DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation

Fangyu Liu, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Francesco Piccinno +7

Visual language such as charts and plots is ubiquitous in the human world. Comprehending plots and charts requires strong reasoning skills. Prior state-of-the-art (SOTA) models req…

cs.CR2026

Privacy-R1: Privacy-Aware Multi-LLM Agent Collaboration via Reinforcement Learning

Zheng Hui, Yijiang River Dong, Sanhanat Sivapiromrat +2

When users submit queries to Large Language Models (LLMs), their prompts can often contain sensitive data, forcing a difficult choice: Send the query to a powerful proprietary LLM…

cs.CL2026

Value of Information: A Framework for Human-Agent Communication

Yijiang River Dong, Tiancheng Hu, Zheng Hui +4

Large Language Model (LLM) agents deployed for real-world tasks face a fundamental dilemma: user requests are underspecified, yet agents must decide whether to act on incomplete in…

cs.CL2025

All Roads Lead to Rome: Graph-Based Confidence Estimation for Large Language Model Reasoning

Caiqi Zhang, Chang Shu, Ehsan Shareghi +1

Confidence estimation is essential for the reliable deployment of large language models (LLMs). Existing methods are primarily designed for factual QA tasks and often fail to gener…