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Man Lan

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12 papers

1 author row

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

Activating Visual Context and Commonsense Reasoning Through Masked Prediction in VLMs

Jiaao Yu
Shenwei Li
Mingjie Han
Yifei Yin
Wenzheng Song
Chenghao Jia
Man Lan

Recent breakthroughs in reasoning models have markedly advanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, particularly via training on tasks with verifiable rewards. Yet, a significant gap persists in their adaptation to real-world multimodal scenarios, most notably, vision-language tasks, due to a heavy focus on single-modal language settings. While efforts to transplant reinforcement learning techniques from NLP to Visual Language Models (VLMs) have emerged, these approaches often remain confined to perception-centric tasks or reduce images to textual summaries, failing to fully exploit visual context and commonsense knowledge, ultimately constraining the generalization of reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal environments. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel fine-tuning task, Masked Prediction via Context and Commonsense (MPCC), which forces models to integrate visual context and commonsense reasoning by reconstructing semantically meaningful content from occluded images, thereby laying the foundation for generalized reasoning. To systematically evaluate the model’s performance in generalized reasoning, we developed a specialized evaluation benchmark, MPCC-Eval, and employed various fine-tuning strategies to guide reasoning. Among these, we introduced an innovative training method, Reinforcement Fine-Tuning with Prior Sampling, which not only enhances model performance but also improves its generalized reasoning capabilities in out-of-distribution (OOD) and cross-task scenarios.

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NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Protein Design with Dynamic Protein Vocabulary

Nuowei Liu
Jiahao Kuang
Yanting Liu
Tao Ji
Changzhi Sun
Man Lan
Yuanbin Wu

Protein design is a fundamental challenge in biotechnology, aiming to design novel sequences with specific functions within the vast space of possible proteins. Recent advances in deep generative models have enabled function-based protein design from textual descriptions, yet struggle with structural plausibility. Inspired by classical protein design methods that leverage natural protein structures, we explore whether incorporating fragments from natural proteins can enhance foldability in generative models. Our empirical results show that even random incorporation of fragments improves foldability. Building on this insight, we introduce ProDVa, a novel protein design approach that integrates a text encoder for functional descriptions, a protein language model for designing proteins, and a fragment encoder to dynamically retrieve protein fragments based on textual functional descriptions. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively designs protein sequences that are both functionally aligned and structurally plausible. Compared to state-of-the-art models, ProDVa achieves comparable function alignment using less than 0. 04% of the training data, while designing significantly more well-folded proteins, with the proportion of proteins having pLDDT above 70 increasing by 7. 38% and those with PAE below 10 increasing by 9. 62%.

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AAAI Conference 2025 Conference Paper

ReactGPT: Understanding of Chemical Reactions via In-Context Tuning

Zhe Chen
Zhe Fang
Wenhao Tian
Zhaoguang Long
Changzhi Sun
Yuefeng Chen
Hao Yuan
Honglin Li

The interdisciplinary field of chemistry and artificial intelligence (AI) is an active area of research aimed at accelerating scientific discovery. Large language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in biochemical tasks, especially the molecule caption translation, which aims to align between molecules and natural language texts. However, existing works mainly focus on single molecules, while alignment between chemical reactions and natural language text remains largely unexplored. Additionally, the description of reactions is an essential part in biochemical patents and literature, and research on this aspect not only can help better understand chemical reactions but also promote research on automating chemical synthesis and retrosynthesis. In this work, we propose \textbf{ReactGPT}, a framework aiming to bridge the gap between chemical reaction and text. ReactGPT allows a new task: reaction captioning, by adapting LLMs to learn reaction-text alignment from context examples via In-Context Tuning. Specifically, ReactGPT jointly leverages a Fingerprints-based Reaction Retrieval module, a Domain-Specific Prompt Design module, and a two-stage In-Context Tuning module. We evaluate the effectiveness of ReactGPT on reaction captioning and experimental procedure prediction, both of these tasks can reflect the understanding of chemical reactions. Experimental results show that compared to previous models, ReactGPT exhibits competitive capabilities in resolving chemical reactions and generating high-quality text with correct structure.

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AAAI Conference 2024 Conference Paper

From Coarse to Fine: A Distillation Method for Fine-Grained Emotion-Causal Span Pair Extraction in Conversation

Xinhao Chen
Chong Yang
Changzhi Sun
Man Lan
Aimin Zhou

We study the problem of extracting emotions and the causes behind these emotions in conversations. Existing methods either tackle them separately or jointly model them at the coarse-grained level of emotions (fewer emotion categories) and causes (utterance-level causes). In this work, we aim to jointly extract more fine-grained emotions and causes. We construct a fine-grained dataset FG-RECCON, includes 16 fine-grained emotion categories and span-level causes. To further improve the fine-grained extraction performance, we propose to utilize the casual discourse knowledge in a knowledge distillation way. Specifically, the teacher model learns to predict causal connective words between utterances, and then guides the student model in identifying both the fine-grained emotion labels and causal spans. Experimental results demonstrate that our distillation method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both RECCON and FG-RECCON dataset.

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IJCAI Conference 2023 Conference Paper

An Effective and Efficient Time-aware Entity Alignment Framework via Two-aspect Three-view Label Propagation

Li Cai
Xin Mao
Youshao Xiao
Changxu Wu
Man Lan

Entity alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entity pairs between different knowledge graphs (KGs), which is crucial to promote knowledge fusion. With the wide use of temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs), time-aware EA (TEA) methods appear to enhance EA. Existing TEA models are based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) and achieve state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance, but it is difficult to transfer them to large-scale TKGs due to the scalability issue of GNN. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient non-neural EA framework between TKGs, namely LightTEA, which consists of four essential components: (1) Two-aspect Three-view Label Propagation, (2) Sparse Similarity with Temporal Constraints, (3) Sinkhorn Operator, and (4) Temporal Iterative Learning. All of these modules work together to improve the performance of EA while reducing the time consumption of the model. Extensive experiments on public datasets indicate that our proposed model significantly outperforms the SOTA methods for EA between TKGs, and the time consumed by LightTEA is only dozens of seconds at most, no more than 10% of the most efficient TEA method.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Generating CCG Categories

Yufang Liu
Tao Ji
Yuanbin Wu
Man Lan

Previous CCG supertaggers usually predict categories using multi-class classification. Despite their simplicity, internal structures of categories are usually ignored. The rich semantics inside these structures may help us to better handle relations among categories and bring more robustness into existing supertaggers. In this work, we propose to generate categories rather than classify them: each category is decomposed into a sequence of smaller atomic tags, and the tagger aims to generate the correct sequence. We show that with this finer view on categories, annotations of different categories could be shared and interactions with sentence contexts could be enhanced. The proposed category generator is able to achieve state-of-the-art tagging (95. 5% accuracy) and parsing (89. 8% labeled F1) performances on the standard CCGBank. Furthermore, its performances on infrequent (even unseen) categories, out-of-domain texts and low resource language give promising results on introducing generation models to the general CCG analyses.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

A Multi-Task Learning Approach for Improving Product Title Compression with User Search Log Data

Jingang Wang
Junfeng Tian
Long Qiu
Sheng Li
Jun Lang
Luo Si
Man Lan

It is a challenging and practical research problem to obtain effective compression of lengthy product titles for Ecommerce. This is particularly important as more and more users browse mobile E-commerce apps and more merchants make the original product titles redundant and lengthy for Search Engine Optimization. Traditional text summarization approaches often require a large amount of preprocessing costs and do not capture the important issue of conversion rate in E-commerce. This paper proposes a novel multi-task learning approach for improving product title compression with user search log data. In particular, a pointer network-based sequence-to-sequence approach is utilized for title compression with an attentive mechanism as an extractive method and an attentive encoder-decoder approach is utilized for generating user search queries. The encoding parameters (i. e. , semantic embedding of original titles) are shared among the two tasks and the attention distributions are jointly optimized. An extensive set of experiments with both human annotated data and online deployment demonstrate the advantage of the proposed research for both compression qualities and online business values.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Inference on Syntactic and Semantic Structures for Machine Comprehension

Chenrui Li
Yuanbin Wu
Man Lan

Hidden variable models are important tools for solving open domain machine comprehension tasks and have achieved remarkable accuracy in many question answering benchmark datasets. Existing models impose strong independence assumptions on hidden variables, which leaves the interaction among them unexplored. Here we introduce linguistic structures to help capturing global evidence in hidden variable modeling. In the proposed algorithms, question-answer pairs are scored based on structured inference results on parse trees and semantic frames, which aims to assign hidden variables in a global optimal way. Experiments on the MCTest dataset demonstrate that the proposed models are highly competitive with state-of-the-art machine comprehension systems.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

A Learning Error Analysis for Structured Prediction with Approximate Inference

Yuanbin Wu
Man Lan
Shiliang Sun
Qi Zhang
Xuanjing Huang

In this work, we try to understand the differences between exact and approximate inference algorithms in structured prediction. We compare the estimation and approximation error of both underestimate and overestimate models. The result shows that, from the perspective of learning errors, performances of approximate inference could be as good as exact inference. The error analyses also suggest a new margin for existing learning algorithms. Empirical evaluations on text classification, sequential labelling and dependency parsing witness the success of approximate inference and the benefit of the proposed margin.

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AAAI Conference 2013 Conference Paper

From Semantic to Emotional Space in Probabilistic Sense Sentiment Analysis

Mitra Mohtarami
Man Lan
Chew Lim Tan

This paper proposes an effective approach to model the emotional space of words to infer their Sense Sentiment Similarity (SSS). SSS reflects the distance between the words regarding their senses and underlying sentiments. We propose a probabilistic approach that is built on a hidden emotional model in which the basic human emotions are considered as hidden. This leads to predict a vector of emotions for each sense of the words, and then to infer the sense sentiment similarity. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is investigated in two Natural Language Processing tasks: Indirect yes/no Question Answer Pairs Inference and Sentiment Orientation Prediction.

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AAAI Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Sense Sentiment Similarity: An Analysis

Mitra Mohtarami
Hadi Amiri
Man Lan
Thanh Phu Tran
Chew Lim Tan

This paper describes an emotion-based approach to acquire sentiment similarity of word pairs with respect to their senses. Sentiment similarity indicates the similarity between two words from their underlying sentiments. Our approach is built on a model which maps from senses of words to vectors of twelve basic emotions. The emotional vectors are used to measure the sentiment similarity of word pairs. We show the utility of measuring sentiment similarity in two main natural language processing tasks, namely, indirect yes/no question answer pairs (IQAP) Inference and sentiment orientation (SO) prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach can effectively capture the sentiment similarity of word pairs and utilize this information to address the above mentioned tasks.

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AAAI Conference 2006 Conference Paper

Proposing a New Term Weighting Scheme for Text Categorization

Man Lan

In text categorization, term weighting methods assign appropriate weights to the terms to improve the classification performance. In this study, we propose an effective term weighting scheme, i. e. tf. rf, and investigate several widely-used unsupervised and supervised term weighting methods on two popular data collections in combination with SVM and kNN algorithms. From our controlled experimental results, not all supervised term weighting methods have a consistent superiority over unsupervised term weighting methods. Specifically, the three supervised methods based on the information theory, i. e. tf. χ2, tf. ig and tf. or, perform rather poorly in all experiments. On the other hand, our proposed tf. rf achieves the best performance consistently and outperforms other methods substantially and significantly. The popularly-used tf. idf method has not shown a uniformly good performance with respect to different data corpora.

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