Huangwei Chen
2026
SCOUT: Selective Coupling via Optimal Unbalanced Transport for Interpretable Text Classification
Junhao Jia | Hanwen Zheng | Yueyi Wu | Huangwei Chen | Haishuai Wang | Jiajun Bu | Lei Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Junhao Jia | Hanwen Zheng | Yueyi Wu | Huangwei Chen | Haishuai Wang | Jiajun Bu | Lei Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Natural language data is inherently noisy, yet standard interpretable models often rely on scalar similarities that obscure the true evidentiary basis of a prediction. This limitation is particularly detrimental to prototype-based classification, where traditional full-alignment mechanisms force non-informative background segments to match informative prototypes, yielding unstable or misleading explanations. To mitigate this, we present SCOUT, a novel paradigm that grounds prototype reasoning in the selective correspondence of discriminative fragments. Concretely, we represent each document as a discrete distribution over span embeddings and employ differentiable Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) to align them with class-specific prototypes. Unlike standard methods, this mechanism enables the model to focus strictly on decisive evidence while leaving irrelevant noise unmatched via geometric mass suppression. To ensure verifiability, we anchor prototype supports to readable training spans, establishing a transparent bridge between input segments and stored knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that SCOUT yields prototypes focused on semantically significant spans, significantly outperforming traditional rationale extraction and post-hoc attribution methods in terms of faithfulness and stability.
Beyond the Individual: Virtualizing Multi-Disciplinary Reasoning for Clinical Intake via Collaborative Agents
Huangwei Chen | Wu Li | Junhao Jia | Yining Chen | Xiaotao Pang | Ya-Long Chen | Li Gonghui | Haishuai Wang | Jiajun Bu | Lei Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Huangwei Chen | Wu Li | Junhao Jia | Yining Chen | Xiaotao Pang | Ya-Long Chen | Li Gonghui | Haishuai Wang | Jiajun Bu | Lei Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
The initial outpatient consultation is critical for clinical decision-making, yet it is often conducted by a single physician under time pressure, making it prone to cognitive biases and incomplete evidence capture. Although the Multi-Disciplinary Team (MDT) reduces these risks, they are costly and difficult to scale to real-time intake. We propose Aegle, a synchronous virtual MDT framework that brings MDT-level reasoning to outpatient consultations via a graph-based multi-agent architecture. Aegle formalizes the consultation state using a structured SOAP representation, separating evidence collection from diagnostic reasoning to improve traceability and bias control. An orchestrator dynamically activates specialist agents, which perform decoupled parallel reasoning and are subsequently integrated by an aggregator into a coherent clinical note. Experiments on ClinicalBench and a real-world RAPID-IPN dataset across 24 departments and 53 metrics show that Aegle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source models in documentation quality and consultation capability.