Lu Xiang

Yang Zhao, Junnan Zhu, Lu Xiang et al.

A common scenario of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT) is that each translation task arrives in a sequential manner, and the training data of previous tasks is unavailable. In this scenario, the current methods suffer heavily from catastrophic forgetting (CF). To alleviate the CF, we investigate knowledge distillation based life-long learning methods. Specifically, in one-tomany scenario, we propose a multilingual distillation method to make the new model (student) jointly learn multilingual output from old model (teacher) and new task. In many-to one scenario, we find that direct distillation faces the extreme partial distillation problem, and we propose two different methods to address it: pseudo input distillation and reverse teacher distillation. The experimental results on twelve translation tasks show that the proposed methods can better consolidate the previous knowledge and sharply alleviate the CF.

Haitao Lin, Junnan Zhu, Lu Xiang et al.

Role-oriented dialogue summarization is to generate summaries for different roles in the dialogue, e.g., merchants and consumers. Existing methods handle this task by summarizing each role's content separately and thus are prone to ignore the information from other roles. However, we believe that other roles' content could benefit the quality of summaries, such as the omitted information mentioned by other roles. Therefore, we propose a novel role interaction enhanced method for role-oriented dialogue summarization. It adopts cross attention and decoder self-attention interactions to interactively acquire other roles' critical information. The cross attention interaction aims to select other roles' critical dialogue utterances, while the decoder self-attention interaction aims to obtain key information from other roles' summaries. Experimental results have shown that our proposed method significantly outperforms strong baselines on two public role-oriented dialogue summarization datasets. Extensive analyses have demonstrated that other roles' content could help generate summaries with more complete semantics and correct topic structures.

Zirui Zhang, Yaping Zhang, Lu Xiang et al.

Document Layout Analysis (DLA) is crucial for document artificial intelligence and has recently received increasing attention, resulting in an influx of large-scale public DLA datasets. Existing work often combines data from various domains in recent public DLA datasets to improve the generalization of DLA. However, directly merging these datasets for training often results in suboptimal model performance, as it overlooks the different layout structures inherent to various domains. These variations include different labeling styles, document types, and languages. This paper introduces PromptDLA, a domain-aware Prompter for Document Layout Analysis that effectively leverages descriptive knowledge as cues to integrate domain priors into DLA. The innovative PromptDLA features a unique domain-aware prompter that customizes prompts based on the specific attributes of the data domain. These prompts then serve as cues that direct the DLA toward critical features and structures within the data, enhancing the model's ability to generalize across varied domains. Extensive experiments show that our proposal achieves state-of-the-art performance among DocLayNet, PubLayNet, M6Doc, and D$^4$LA. Our code is available at https://github.com/Zirui00/PromptDLA.

Yaping Zhang, Yupu Liang, Zhiyang Zhang et al.

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) seeks to translate text embedded in document images from one language to another by jointly modeling both textual content and page layout, bridging optical character recognition (OCR) and natural language processing (NLP). The DIMT 2025 Challenge advances research on end-to-end document image translation, a rapidly evolving area within multimodal document understanding. The competition features two tracks, OCR-free and OCR-based, each with two subtasks for small (less than 1B parameters) and large (greater than 1B parameters) models. Participants submit a single unified DIMT system, with the option to incorporate provided OCR transcripts. Running from December 10, 2024 to April 20, 2025, the competition attracted 69 teams and 27 valid submissions in total. Track 1 had 34 teams and 13 valid submissions, while Track 2 had 35 teams and 14 valid submissions. In this report, we present the challenge motivation, dataset construction, task definitions, evaluation protocol, and a summary of results. Our analysis shows that large-model approaches establish a promising new paradigm for translating complex-layout document images and highlight substantial opportunities for future research.

Yaping Zhang, Qixuan Zhang, Xingquan Zhang et al.

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) and multimodal foundation models has sparked growing interest in their potential for scientific research. However, scientific intelligence encompasses a broad spectrum of abilities ranging from understanding fundamental knowledge to conducting creative discovery, and existing benchmarks remain fragmented. Most focus on narrow tasks and fail to reflect the hierarchical and multi-disciplinary nature of real scientific inquiry. We introduce \textbf{HiSciBench}, a hierarchical benchmark designed to evaluate foundation models across five levels that mirror the complete scientific workflow: \textit{Scientific Literacy} (L1), \textit{Literature Parsing} (L2), \textit{Literature-based Question Answering} (L3), \textit{Literature Review Generation} (L4), and \textit{Scientific Discovery} (L5). HiSciBench contains 8,735 carefully curated instances spanning six major scientific disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and astronomy, and supports multimodal inputs including text, equations, figures, and tables, as well as cross-lingual evaluation. Unlike prior benchmarks that assess isolated abilities, HiSciBench provides an integrated, dependency-aware framework that enables detailed diagnosis of model capabilities across different stages of scientific reasoning. Comprehensive evaluations of leading models, including GPT-5, DeepSeek-R1, and several multimodal systems, reveal substantial performance gaps: while models achieve up to 69\% accuracy on basic literacy tasks, performance declines sharply to 25\% on discovery-level challenges. HiSciBench establishes a new standard for evaluating scientific Intelligence and offers actionable insights for developing models that are not only more capable but also more reliable. The benchmark will be publicly released to facilitate future research.

Jing Ye, Xinpei Zhao, Lu Xiang et al.

While current emotional support dialogue systems typically rely on expert-defined scalar rewards for alignment, these signals suffer from severe information sparsity. They cannot explain why a response failed or how to adapt to dynamic user states, often diverging from the actual goal of facilitating positive emotional shifts. In practice, the most direct and reliable learning signal emerges from the user's continuous reactions during ongoing interaction. We therefore propose Reaction Aware Policy Optimization (RAPO), a framework that optimizes over interaction consequences rather than rubric scores. RAPO treats dialogue as a reaction-driven process and utilizes simulated user responses to generate dense natural-language feedback through three core components: Hindsight Dialogue Selection, which isolates pivotal turns that meaningfully alter user emotional trajectories; Generative Hindsight Feedback, which transforms user reactions into contrastive ranking signals and natural-language critiques; and Scalar-Verbal Hybrid Policy Optimization, which couples scalar reward optimization for global alignment with verbal feedback distillation for fine-grained semantic refinement. Extensive experiments on ESC and Sotopia demonstrate that RAPO significantly outperforms strong reinforcement learning baselines in driving positive interaction outcomes.

Jing Ye, Lu Xiang, Yaping Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising potential in providing empathetic support during interactions. However, their responses often become verbose or overly formulaic, failing to adequately address the diverse emotional support needs of real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we propose an innovative strategy-enhanced role-playing framework, designed to simulate authentic emotional support conversations. Specifically, our approach unfolds in two steps: (1) Strategy-Enhanced Role-Playing Interactions, which involve three pivotal roles -- Seeker, Strategy Counselor, and Supporter -- engaging in diverse scenarios to emulate real-world interactions and promote a broader range of dialogues; and (2) Emotional Support Agent Training, achieved through fine-tuning LLMs using our specially constructed dataset. Within this framework, we develop the \textbf{ServeForEmo} dataset, comprising an extensive collection of 3.7K+ multi-turn dialogues and 62.8K+ utterances. We further present \textbf{SweetieChat}, an emotional support agent capable of handling diverse open-domain scenarios. Extensive experiments and human evaluations confirm the framework's effectiveness in enhancing emotional support, highlighting its unique ability to provide more nuanced and tailored assistance.

Lu Xiang, Yang Zhao, Yaping Zhang et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their transformative potential across numerous disciplinary studies, reshaping the existing research methodologies and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. However, a systematic understanding of their integration into diverse disciplines remains underexplored. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the application of LLMs in interdisciplinary studies, categorising research efforts from both a technical perspective and with regard to their applicability. From a technical standpoint, key methodologies such as supervised fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation, agent-based approaches, and tool-use integration are examined, which enhance the adaptability and effectiveness of LLMs in discipline-specific contexts. From the perspective of their applicability, this paper explores how LLMs are contributing to various disciplines including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and the humanities and social sciences, demonstrating their role in discipline-specific tasks. The prevailing challenges are critically examined and the promising research directions are highlighted alongside the recent advances in LLMs. By providing a comprehensive overview of the technical developments and applications in this field, this survey aims to serve as an invaluable resource for the researchers who are navigating the complex landscape of LLMs in the context of interdisciplinary studies.

Yupu Liang, Yaping Zhang, Zhiyang Zhang et al.

Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT) aims to translate text within document images, facing generalization challenges due to limited training data and the complex interplay between visual and textual information. To address these challenges, we introduce M4Doc, a novel single-to-mix modality alignment framework leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). M4Doc aligns an image-only encoder with the multimodal representations of an MLLM, pre-trained on large-scale document image datasets. This alignment enables a lightweight DIMT model to learn crucial visual-textual correlations during training. During inference, M4Doc bypasses the MLLM, maintaining computational efficiency while benefiting from its multimodal knowledge. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements in translation quality, especially in cross-domain generalization and challenging document image scenarios.

Jing Ye, Lu Xiang, Yaping Zhang et al.

Effective emotional support hinges on understanding users' emotions and needs to provide meaningful comfort during multi-turn interactions. Large Language Models (LLMs) show great potential for expressing empathy; however, they often deliver generic and one-size-fits-all responses that fail to address users' specific needs. To tackle this issue, we propose a self-evolution framework designed to help LLMs improve their responses to better align with users' implicit preferences concerning user profiles (personalities), emotional states, and specific situations. Our framework consists of two distinct phases: \textit{(1)} \textit{Emotional Support Experience Acquisition}, where LLMs are fine-tuned on limited emotional support conversation data to provide basic support, and \textit{(2)} \textit{Self-Improvement for Personalized Emotional Support}, where LLMs leverage self-reflection and self-refinement to generate personalized responses. Through iterative direct preference optimization between the pre- and post-refined responses, our model generates responses that reflect a better understanding of the user's implicit preferences. Extensive experiments and evaluations demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the model's performance in emotional support, reducing unhelpful responses and minimizing discrepancies between user preferences and model outputs.

Yupu Liang, Yaping Zhang, Zhiyang Zhang et al.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong performance in document image tasks, especially Optical Character Recognition (OCR). However, they struggle with Document Image Machine Translation (DIMT), which requires handling both cross-modal and cross-lingual challenges. Previous efforts to enhance DIMT capability through Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on the DIMT dataset often result in the forgetting of the model's existing monolingual abilities, such as OCR. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel fine-tuning paradigm, named Synchronously Self-Reviewing (SSR) its OCR proficiency, inspired by the concept "Bilingual Cognitive Advantage". Specifically, SSR prompts the model to generate OCR text before producing translation text, which allows the model to leverage its strong monolingual OCR ability while learning to translate text across languages. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the proposed SSR learning helps mitigate catastrophic forgetting, improving the generalization ability of MLLMs on both OCR and DIMT tasks.

Jing Ye, Lu Xiang, Yaping Zhang et al.

Current evaluation paradigms for emotional support conversations tend to reward generic empathetic responses, yet they fail to assess whether the support is genuinely personalized to users' unique psychological profiles and contextual needs. We introduce EmoHarbor, an automated evaluation framework that adopts a User-as-a-Judge paradigm by simulating the user's inner world. EmoHarbor employs a Chain-of-Agent architecture that decomposes users' internal processes into three specialized roles, enabling agents to interact with supporters and complete assessments in a manner similar to human users. We instantiate this benchmark using 100 real-world user profiles that cover a diverse range of personality traits and situations, and define 10 evaluation dimensions of personalized support quality. Comprehensive evaluation of 20 advanced LLMs on EmoHarbor reveals a critical insight: while these models excel at generating empathetic responses, they consistently fail to tailor support to individual user contexts. This finding reframes the central challenge, shifting research focus from merely enhancing generic empathy to developing truly user-aware emotional support. EmoHarbor provides a reproducible and scalable framework to guide the development and evaluation of more nuanced and user-aware emotional support systems.

Haitao Lin, Liqun Ma, Junnan Zhu et al.

Dialogue summarization has drawn much attention recently. Especially in the customer service domain, agents could use dialogue summaries to help boost their works by quickly knowing customer's issues and service progress. These applications require summaries to contain the perspective of a single speaker and have a clear topic flow structure, while neither are available in existing datasets. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel Chinese dataset for Customer Service Dialogue Summarization (CSDS). CSDS improves the abstractive summaries in two aspects: (1) In addition to the overall summary for the whole dialogue, role-oriented summaries are also provided to acquire different speakers' viewpoints. (2) All the summaries sum up each topic separately, thus containing the topic-level structure of the dialogue. We define tasks in CSDS as generating the overall summary and different role-oriented summaries for a given dialogue. Next, we compare various summarization methods on CSDS, and experiment results show that existing methods are prone to generate redundant and incoherent summaries. Besides, the performance becomes much worse when analyzing the performance on role-oriented summaries and topic structures. We hope that this study could benchmark Chinese dialogue summarization and benefit further studies.

Haitao Lin, Lu Xiang, Yu Zhou et al.

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is one essential step in building a dialogue system. Due to the expensive cost of obtaining the labeled data, SLU suffers from the data scarcity problem. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on data augmentation for slot filling task in SLU. To achieve that, we aim at generating more diverse data based on existing data. Specifically, we try to exploit the latent language knowledge from pretrained language models by finetuning them. We propose two strategies for finetuning process: value-based and context-based augmentation. Experimental results on two public SLU datasets have shown that compared with existing data augmentation methods, our proposed method can generate more diverse sentences and significantly improve the performance on SLU.