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Jian-Yun Nie

Jian-Yun Nie contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

11 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Multi-Task Embedder For Retrieval Augmented LLMs

LLMs confront inherent limitations in terms of its knowledge, memory, and action. The retrieval augmentation stands as a vital mechanism to address these limitations, which brings in useful information from external sources to augment the LLM. However, existing retrieval methods encounter two pressing issues. On one hand, the general retrievers are not properly optimized for retrieval augmentation hence exhibit limited effectiveness; on the other hand, the task-specific retrievers excel in the targeted retrieval augmentation scenario, while lack the versatility to handle diverse scenarios. In this work, we propose \textbf{LLM-Embedder} for the unified support of diverse retrieval augmentation scenarios. Our method presents three technical contributions. Firstly, we introduce a new \textit{reward formulation}, namely {rank-aware reward}. It exploits the ranking position of the desired output among $N$ sampled outputs from the LLM, which leads to fine-grained and robust computation of reward from the LLM's feedback. Secondly, we design a novel \textit{distillation objective}, called graded distillation. It incorporates both the absolute value and the relative order of the reward for more sufficient utilization of the LLM's feedback. Thirdly, we systematically optimize the \textit{multi-task learning}, which effectively unifies the multiple retrieval functionalities into one model. In our experiment, LLM-Embedder notably improves the LLM's performances in various downstream tasks, and outperforms both general and task-specific retrievers with a substantial advantage.

preprint2026arXiv

Herculean: An Agentic Benchmark for Financial Intelligence

As AI agents improve, the central question is no longer whether they can solve isolated well-defined financial tasks, but whether they can reliably carry out financial professional work. Existing financial benchmarks offer only a partial view of this ability, as they primarily evaluate static competencies such as question answering, retrieval, summarization, and classification. We introduce Herculean, the first skilled benchmark for agentic financial intelligence spanning four representative workflows, including Trading, Hedging, Market Insights, and Auditing. Each workflow is instantiated as a standardized MCP-based skill environment with its own tools, interaction dynamics, constraints, and success criteria, enabling consistent end-to-end assessment of heterogeneous agent systems. Across frontier agents, we find agents perform relatively well on Trading and Market Insights, but struggle substantially on Hedging and Auditing, where long-horizon coordination, state consistency, and structured verification are critical. Overall, our results point to a key gap in current agents in turning financial reasoning into dependable workflow execution in high-stakes financial workflows.

preprint2024arXiv

The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models

In the era of large language models (LLMs), hallucination (i.e., the tendency to generate factually incorrect content) poses great challenge to trustworthy and reliable deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. To tackle the LLM hallucination, three key questions should be well studied: how to detect hallucinations (detection), why do LLMs hallucinate (source), and what can be done to mitigate them (mitigation). To address these challenges, this work presents a systematic empirical study on LLM hallucination, focused on the the three aspects of hallucination detection, source and mitigation. Specially, we construct a new hallucination benchmark HaluEval 2.0, and designs a simple yet effective detection method for LLM hallucination. Furthermore, we zoom into the different training or utilization stages of LLMs and extensively analyze the potential factors that lead to the LLM hallucination. Finally, we implement and examine a series of widely used techniques to mitigate the hallucinations in LLMs. Our work has led to several important findings to understand the hallucination origin and mitigate the hallucinations in LLMs. Our code and data can be accessed at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/HaluEval-2.0.

preprint2022arXiv

From Easy to Hard: A Dual Curriculum Learning Framework for Context-Aware Document Ranking

Contextual information in search sessions is important for capturing users' search intents. Various approaches have been proposed to model user behavior sequences to improve document ranking in a session. Typically, training samples of (search context, document) pairs are sampled randomly in each training epoch. In reality, the difficulty to understand user's search intent and to judge document's relevance varies greatly from one search context to another. Mixing up training samples of different difficulties may confuse the model's optimization process. In this work, we propose a curriculum learning framework for context-aware document ranking, in which the ranking model learns matching signals between the search context and the candidate document in an easy-to-hard manner. In so doing, we aim to guide the model gradually toward a global optimum. To leverage both positive and negative examples, two curricula are designed. Experiments on two real query log datasets show that our proposed framework can improve the performance of several existing methods significantly, demonstrating the effectiveness of curriculum learning for context-aware document ranking.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning. While, it is challenging to fine-tune PLMs in a data-scarce situation. Therefore, it is non-trivial to develop a general and lightweight model that can adapt to various text generation tasks based on PLMs. To fulfill this purpose, the recent prompt-based learning offers a potential solution. In this paper, we improve this technique and propose a novel prompt-based method (PTG) for text generation in a transferable setting. First, PTG learns a set of source prompts for various source generation tasks and then transfers these prompts as target prompts to perform target generation tasks. To consider both task- and instance-level information, we design an adaptive attention mechanism to derive the target prompts. For each data instance, PTG learns a specific target prompt by attending to highly relevant source prompts. In extensive experiments, PTG yields competitive or better results than fine-tuning methods. We release our source prompts as an open resource, where users can add or reuse them to improve new text generation tasks for future research. Code and data can be available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Transfer-Prompts-for-Text-Generation.

preprint2022arXiv

PReGAN: Answer Oriented Passage Ranking with Weakly Supervised GAN

Beyond topical relevance, passage ranking for open-domain factoid question answering also requires a passage to contain an answer (answerability). While a few recent studies have incorporated some reading capability into a ranker to account for answerability, the ranker is still hindered by the noisy nature of the training data typically available in this area, which considers any passage containing an answer entity as a positive sample. However, the answer entity in a passage is not necessarily mentioned in relation with the given question. To address the problem, we propose an approach called \ttt{PReGAN} for Passage Reranking based on Generative Adversarial Neural networks, which incorporates a discriminator on answerability, in addition to a discriminator on topical relevance. The goal is to force the generator to rank higher a passage that is topically relevant and contains an answer. Experiments on five public datasets show that \ttt{PReGAN} can better rank appropriate passages, which in turn, boosts the effectiveness of QA systems, and outperforms the existing approaches without using external data.

preprint2022arXiv

Pretrained Language Models for Text Generation: A Survey

Text Generation aims to produce plausible and readable text in a human language from input data. The resurgence of deep learning has greatly advanced this field, in particular, with the help of neural generation models based on pre-trained language models (PLMs). Text generation based on PLMs is viewed as a promising approach in both academia and industry. In this paper, we provide a survey on the utilization of PLMs in text generation. We begin with introducing three key aspects of applying PLMs to text generation: 1) how to encode the input into representations preserving input semantics which can be fused into PLMs; 2) how to design an effective PLM to serve as the generation model; and 3) how to effectively optimize PLMs given the reference text and to ensure that the generated texts satisfy special text properties. Then, we show the major challenges arisen in these aspects, as well as possible solutions for them. We also include a summary of various useful resources and typical text generation applications based on PLMs. Finally, we highlight the future research directions which will further improve these PLMs for text generation. This comprehensive survey is intended to help researchers interested in text generation problems to learn the core concepts, the main techniques and the latest developments in this area based on PLMs.

preprint2022arXiv

Self-supervised Context-aware Style Representation for Expressive Speech Synthesis

Expressive speech synthesis, like audiobook synthesis, is still challenging for style representation learning and prediction. Deriving from reference audio or predicting style tags from text requires a huge amount of labeled data, which is costly to acquire and difficult to define and annotate accurately. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for learning style representation from abundant plain text in a self-supervised manner. It leverages an emotion lexicon and uses contrastive learning and deep clustering. We further integrate the style representation as a conditioned embedding in a multi-style Transformer TTS. Comparing with multi-style TTS by predicting style tags trained on the same dataset but with human annotations, our method achieves improved results according to subjective evaluations on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets in audiobook speech. Moreover, with implicit context-aware style representation, the emotion transition of synthesized audio in a long paragraph appears more natural. The audio samples are available on the demo web.

preprint2021arXiv

Content Selection Network for Document-grounded Retrieval-based Chatbots

Grounding human-machine conversation in a document is an effective way to improve the performance of retrieval-based chatbots. However, only a part of the document content may be relevant to help select the appropriate response at a round. It is thus crucial to select the part of document content relevant to the current conversation context. In this paper, we propose a document content selection network (CSN) to perform explicit selection of relevant document contents, and filter out the irrelevant parts. We show in experiments on two public document-grounded conversation datasets that CSN can effectively help select the relevant document contents to the conversation context, and it produces better results than the state-of-the-art approaches. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/DaoD/CSN.

preprint2021arXiv

Neural Sentence Ordering Based on Constraint Graphs

Sentence ordering aims at arranging a list of sentences in the correct order. Based on the observation that sentence order at different distances may rely on different types of information, we devise a new approach based on multi-granular orders between sentences. These orders form multiple constraint graphs, which are then encoded by Graph Isomorphism Networks and fused into sentence representations. Finally, sentence order is determined using the order-enhanced sentence representations. Our experiments on five benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms all the existing baselines significantly, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance. The results demonstrate the advantage of considering multiple types of order information and using graph neural networks to integrate sentence content and order information for the task. Our code is available at https://github.com/DaoD/ConstraintGraph4NSO.

preprint2020arXiv

VGCN-BERT: Augmenting BERT with Graph Embedding for Text Classification

Much progress has been made recently on text classification with methods based on neural networks. In particular, models using attention mechanism such as BERT have shown to have the capability of capturing the contextual information within a sentence or document. However, their ability of capturing the global information about the vocabulary of a language is more limited. This latter is the strength of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). In this paper, we propose VGCN-BERT model which combines the capability of BERT with a Vocabulary Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN). Local information and global information interact through different layers of BERT, allowing them to influence mutually and to build together a final representation for classification. In our experiments on several text classification datasets, our approach outperforms BERT and GCN alone, and achieve higher effectiveness than that reported in previous studies.