Cheng Tang
2026
MedQPA-Gen: Medical Question Proposing and Answering for Report Generation
Weijie Liang | Xiyue Zhu | Ruike Zhu | Chenhao Li | Cheng Tang | Zhiyu Liu | Zhihua Gong | Shirui Luo | Yudu Li | Volodymyr Kindratenko
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Weijie Liang | Xiyue Zhu | Ruike Zhu | Chenhao Li | Cheng Tang | Zhiyu Liu | Zhihua Gong | Shirui Luo | Yudu Li | Volodymyr Kindratenko
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Medical report generation from medical images is a vital AI task that helps doctors with diagnosis and marks a significant step toward creating general AI-powered medical systems. However, previous methods either fail to optimize factual accuracy or heavily depend on expert preference data. To overcome these challenges, we propose MedQPA, an automatic and generalizable report evaluation technique that uses question proposing and answering to enable controllable, structured reasoning grounded in medical domain knowledge and the factual correctness of the report. Additionally, we design MedQPA-Gen, a medical report generation pipeline that maximizes the MedQPA score through prompt engineering and reinforcement learning with MedQPA as a reward signal. We demonstrate that MedQPA is an accurate evaluation metric that closely correlates with human preferences. More importantly, MedQPA-Gen achieves higher human preference scores and better performance on downstream tasks. We open-source code at this repo https://github.com/MedQPA-gen/MedQPA-gen.
MessToClean: Evidence-Grounded Structure-Preserving Reconstruction for Real-World Degraded Exam Paper Images
Jiayi Tuo | Cheng Tang | Zihan Wang | Chenyue Zhou | Yao Li | Yanbiao Ma | Chao Wang | Wei Dai | Mingxuan Wang | Shitong Qin | Ziwei Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jiayi Tuo | Cheng Tang | Zihan Wang | Chenyue Zhou | Yao Li | Yanbiao Ma | Chao Wang | Wei Dai | Mingxuan Wang | Shitong Qin | Ziwei Zhao
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Intelligent education systems often collect exam sheets as in-the-wild photos. These photos often suffer from distortions and noise caused by handwriting and occlusions, collectively referred to as Real-World Degraded Exam Images (RDEI). Structure-preserving reconstruction is key to converting RDEI into structured assets for downstream educational applications. Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often fail under RDEI, leading to disrupted structure and evidence-unsupported hallucinations. To tackle these challenges, we propose MessToClean, a backbone-agnostic, evidence-driven pipeline that treats off-the-shelf MLLMs as interchangeable components. By grounding extraction in pixel-aligned evidence and enforcing post-hoc consistency auditing on recovered structures, MessToClean mitigates unsupported hallucinations and enhances both controllability and structural fidelity in question-level reconstruction. We curate RDEI-Exam from our educational platforms and evaluate across 12 state-of-the-art MLLM backbones. Across these, MessToClean improves stem consistency by 1.01-3.18%, figure consistency by 0.50-49.16%, and refusal F1 by 1.06-10.88% across question types.
2025
Attention-Seeker: Dynamic Self-Attention Scoring for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction
Erwin Daniel Lopez Zapata | Cheng Tang | Atsushi Shimada
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Erwin Daniel Lopez Zapata | Cheng Tang | Atsushi Shimada
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
This paper proposes Attention-Seeker, an unsupervised keyphrase extraction method that leverages self-attention maps from a Large Language Model to estimate the importance of candidate phrases. Our approach identifies specific components – such as layers, heads, and attention vectors – where the model pays significant attention to the key topics of the text. The attention weights provided by these components are then used to score the candidate phrases. Unlike previous models that require manual tuning of parameters (e.g., selection of heads, prompts, hyperparameters), Attention-Seeker dynamically adapts to the input text without any manual adjustments, enhancing its practical applicability. We evaluate Attention-Seeker on four publicly available datasets: Inspec, SemEval2010, SemEval2017, and Krapivin. Our results demonstrate that, even without parameter tuning, Attention-Seeker outperforms most baseline models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on three out of four datasets, particularly excelling in extracting keyphrases from long documents.