Haojing Huang

Yinghui Li, Haojing Huang, Shirong Ma et al.

Recently, the development and progress of Large Language Models (LLMs) have amazed the entire Artificial Intelligence community. Benefiting from their emergent abilities, LLMs have attracted more and more researchers to study their capabilities and performance on various downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. While marveling at LLMs' incredible performance on all kinds of tasks, we notice that they also have excellent multilingual processing capabilities, such as Chinese. To explore the Chinese processing ability of LLMs, we focus on Chinese Text Correction, a fundamental and challenging Chinese NLP task. Specifically, we evaluate various representative LLMs on the Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) and Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) tasks, which are two main Chinese Text Correction scenarios. Additionally, we also fine-tune LLMs for Chinese Text Correction to better observe the potential capabilities of LLMs. From extensive analyses and comparisons with previous state-of-the-art small models, we empirically find that the LLMs currently have both amazing performance and unsatisfactory behavior for Chinese Text Correction. We believe our findings will promote the landing and application of LLMs in the Chinese NLP community.

Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Shaoshen Chen et al.

Chinese Text Error Correction (CTEC) aims to detect and correct errors in the input text, which benefits human daily life and various downstream tasks. Recent approaches mainly employ Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to resolve CTEC. Although PLMs have achieved remarkable success in CTEC, we argue that previous studies still overlook the importance of human thinking patterns. To enhance the development of PLMs for CTEC, inspired by humans' daily error-correcting behavior, we propose a novel model-agnostic progressive learning framework, named ProTEC, which guides PLMs-based CTEC models to learn to correct like humans. During the training process, ProTEC guides the model to learn text error correction by incorporating these sub-tasks into a progressive paradigm. During the inference process, the model completes these sub-tasks in turn to generate the correction results. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed model-agnostic ProTEC framework.

Jian Li, Haojing Huang, Yujia Zhang et al.

Recently, there has been significant interest in replacing the reward model in Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) methods for Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants. These approaches commonly use a binary cross-entropy mechanism on pairwise samples, i.e., minimizing and maximizing the loss based on preferred or dis-preferred responses, respectively. However, while this training strategy omits the reward model, it also overlooks the varying preference degrees within different responses. We hypothesize that this is a key factor hindering LLMs from sufficiently understanding human preferences. To address this problem, we propose a novel Self-supervised Preference Optimization (SPO) framework, which constructs a self-supervised preference degree loss combined with the alignment loss, thereby helping LLMs improve their ability to understand the degree of preference. Extensive experiments are conducted on two widely used datasets of different tasks. The results demonstrate that SPO can be seamlessly integrated with existing preference optimization methods and significantly boost their performance to achieve state-of-the-art performance. We also conduct detailed analyses to offer comprehensive insights into SPO, which verifies its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/lijian16/SPO.

Yinghui Li, Zishan Xu, Shaoshen Chen et al.

Writing assistance is an application closely related to human life and is also a fundamental Natural Language Processing (NLP) research field. Its aim is to improve the correctness and quality of input texts, with character checking being crucial in detecting and correcting wrong characters. From the perspective of the real world where handwriting occupies the vast majority, characters that humans get wrong include faked characters (i.e., untrue characters created due to writing errors) and misspelled characters (i.e., true characters used incorrectly due to spelling errors). However, existing datasets and related studies only focus on misspelled characters mainly caused by phonological or visual confusion, thereby ignoring faked characters which are more common and difficult. To break through this dilemma, we present Visual-C$^3$, a human-annotated Visual Chinese Character Checking dataset with faked and misspelled Chinese characters. To the best of our knowledge, Visual-C$^3$ is the first real-world visual and the largest human-crafted dataset for the Chinese character checking scenario. Additionally, we also propose and evaluate novel baseline methods on Visual-C$^3$. Extensive empirical results and analyses show that Visual-C$^3$ is high-quality yet challenging. The Visual-C$^3$ dataset and the baseline methods will be publicly available to facilitate further research in the community.

Haojing Huang, Jingheng Ye, Qingyu Zhou et al.

In recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks, which mostly solve this task in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we propose to decompose the CSC workflow into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks so that the rich external knowledge about the Chinese language can be leveraged more directly and efficiently. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play detection-and-reasoning module that is compatible with existing SOTA non-autoregressive CSC models to further boost their performance. We find that the detection-and-reasoning module trained for one model can also benefit other models. We also study the primary interpretability provided by the task decomposition. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.

Shangjian Yin, Peijie Huang, Jiatian Chen et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in language generation and general task performance. However, their application to spoken language understanding (SLU) remains challenging, particularly for token-level tasks, where the autoregressive nature of LLMs often leads to misalignment issues. They also struggle to capture nuanced interrelations in semantic-level tasks through direct fine-tuning alone. To address these challenges, we propose the Entity-level Language Model (ECLM) framework, which reformulates slot-filling as an entity recognition task and introduces a novel concept, \textit{Chain of Intent}, to enable step-by-step multi-intent recognition. Experimental results show that ECLM significantly outperforms strong baselines such as Uni-MIS, achieving gains of 3.7\% on MixATIS and 3.1\% on MixSNIPS. Compared to standard supervised fine-tuning of LLMs, ECLM further achieves improvements of 8.5\% and 21.2\% on these datasets, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/SJY8460/ECLM.

Yinghui Li, Haojing Huang, Jiayi Kuang et al.

How to alleviate the hallucinations of Large Language Models (LLMs) has always been the fundamental goal pursued by the LLMs research community. Looking through numerous hallucination-related studies, a mainstream category of methods is to reduce hallucinations by optimizing the knowledge representation of LLMs to change their output. Considering that the core focus of these works is the knowledge acquired by models, and knowledge has long been a central theme in human societal progress, we believe that the process of models refining knowledge can greatly benefit from the way humans learn. In our work, by imitating the human learning process, we design an Adaptive Contrastive Learning strategy. Our method flexibly constructs different positive and negative samples for contrastive learning based on LLMs' actual mastery of knowledge. This strategy helps LLMs consolidate the correct knowledge they already possess, deepen their understanding of the correct knowledge they have encountered but not fully grasped, forget the incorrect knowledge they previously learned, and honestly acknowledge the knowledge they lack. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Yinghui Li, Jiayi Kuang, Haojing Huang et al.

Leveraging mathematical Large Language Models (LLMs) for proof generation is a fundamental topic in LLMs research. We argue that the ability of current LLMs to prove statements largely depends on whether they have encountered the relevant proof process during training. This reliance limits their deeper understanding of mathematical theorems and related concepts. Inspired by the pedagogical method of "proof by counterexamples" commonly used in human mathematics education, our work aims to enhance LLMs' ability to conduct mathematical reasoning and proof through counterexamples. Specifically, we manually create a high-quality, university-level mathematical benchmark, CounterMATH, which requires LLMs to prove mathematical statements by providing counterexamples, thereby assessing their grasp of mathematical concepts. Additionally, we develop a data engineering framework to automatically obtain training data for further model improvement. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate that CounterMATH is challenging, indicating that LLMs, such as OpenAI o1, have insufficient counterexample-driven proof capabilities. Moreover, our exploration into model training reveals that strengthening LLMs' counterexample-driven conceptual reasoning abilities is crucial for improving their overall mathematical capabilities. We believe that our work offers new perspectives on the community of mathematical LLMs.

Yinghui Li, Shang Qin, Haojing Huang et al.

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely studied by researchers for their roles in various downstream NLP tasks. As a fundamental task in the NLP field, Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) aims to correct all potential grammatical errors in the input sentences. Previous studies have shown that LLMs' performance as correctors on CGEC remains unsatisfactory due to its challenging task focus. To promote the CGEC field to better adapt to the era of LLMs, we rethink the roles of LLMs in the CGEC task so that they can be better utilized and explored in CGEC. Considering the rich grammatical knowledge stored in LLMs and their powerful semantic understanding capabilities, we utilize LLMs as explainers to provide explanation information for the CGEC small models during error correction to enhance performance. We also use LLMs as evaluators to bring more reasonable CGEC evaluations, thus alleviating the troubles caused by the subjectivity of the CGEC task. In particular, our work is also an active exploration of how LLMs and small models better collaborate in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses on widely used datasets verify the effectiveness of our thinking intuition and the proposed methods.

Peng Xing, Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma et al.

Chinese Spelling Correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in given sentences. Recently, multi-domain CSC has gradually attracted the attention of researchers because it is more practicable. In this paper, we focus on the key flaw of the CSC model when adapting to multi-domain scenarios: the tendency to forget previously acquired knowledge upon learning new domain-specific knowledge (i.e., catastrophic forgetting). To address this, we propose a novel model-agnostic Multi-stage Knowledge Transfer (MKT) framework, which utilizes a continuously evolving teacher model for knowledge transfer in each domain, rather than focusing solely on new domain knowledge. It deserves to be mentioned that we are the first to apply continual learning methods to the multi-domain CSC task. Experiments prove the effectiveness of our proposed method, and further analyses demonstrate the importance of overcoming catastrophic forgetting for improving the model performance.

Jiayi Kuang, Haojing Huang, Yinghui Li et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated outstanding performance in mathematical reasoning capabilities. However, we argue that current large-scale reasoning models primarily rely on scaling up training datasets with diverse mathematical problems and long thinking chains, which raises questions about whether LLMs genuinely acquire mathematical concepts and reasoning principles or merely remember the training data. In contrast, humans tend to break down complex problems into multiple fundamental atomic capabilities. Inspired by this, we propose a new paradigm for evaluating mathematical atomic capabilities. Our work categorizes atomic abilities into two dimensions: (1) field-specific abilities across four major mathematical fields, algebra, geometry, analysis, and topology, and (2) logical abilities at different levels, including conceptual understanding, forward multi-step reasoning with formal math language, and counterexample-driven backward reasoning. We propose corresponding training and evaluation datasets for each atomic capability unit, and conduct extensive experiments about how different atomic capabilities influence others, to explore the strategies to elicit the required specific atomic capability. Evaluation and experimental results on advanced models show many interesting discoveries and inspirations about the different performances of models on various atomic capabilities and the interactions between atomic capabilities. Our findings highlight the importance of decoupling mathematical intelligence into atomic components, providing new insights into model cognition and guiding the development of training strategies toward a more efficient, transferable, and cognitively grounded paradigm of "atomic thinking".