Gexiang Fang
2026
Retrieval as Generation: A Unified Framework with Self-Triggered Information Planning
Bo Li | Mingda Wang | Gexiang Fang | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bo Li | Mingda Wang | Gexiang Fang | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We revisit retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) by embedding retrieval control directly into generation. Instead of treating retrieval as an external intervention, we express retrieval decisions within token-level decoding, enabling end-to-end coordination without additional controllers or classifiers. Under the paradigm of Retrieval as Generation, we propose GRIP (Generation-guided Retrieval with Information Planning), a unified framework in which the model regulates retrieval behavior through control-token emission. Central to GRIP is Self-Triggered Information Planning, which allows the model to decide when to retrieve, how to reformulate queries, and when to terminate, all within a single autoregressive trajectory. This design tightly couples retrieval and reasoning and supports dynamic multi-step inference with on-the-fly evidence integration. To supervise these behaviors, we construct a structured training set covering answerable, partially answerable, and multi-hop queries, each aligned with specific token patterns. Experiments on five QA benchmarks show that GRIP surpasses strong RAG baselines and is competitive with GPT-4o while using substantially fewer parameters. Code and resources are provided in the supplementary materials.
2025
MPL: Multiple Programming Languages with Large Language Models for Information Extraction
Bo Li | Gexiang Fang | Wei Ye | Zhenghua Xu | Jinglei Zhang | Hao Cheng | Shikun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Bo Li | Gexiang Fang | Wei Ye | Zhenghua Xu | Jinglei Zhang | Hao Cheng | Shikun Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Recent research in information extraction (IE) focuses on utilizing code-style inputs to enhance structured output generation. The intuition behind this is that the programming languages (PLs) inherently exhibit greater structural organization than natural languages (NLs). This structural advantage makes PLs particularly suited for IE tasks. Nevertheless, existing research primarily focuses on Python for code-style simulation, overlooking the potential of other widely-used PLs (e.g., C++ and Java) during the supervised fine-tuning (SFT) phase. In this research, we propose Multiple Programming Languages with large language models for information extraction (abbreviated as MPL), a novel framework that explores the potential of incorporating different PLs in the SFT phase. Additionally, we introduce function-prompt with virtual running to simulate code-style inputs more effectively and efficiently. Experimental results on a wide range of datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MPL. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to provide a comprehensive analysis. Our code and additional files are in the supplementary materials.