Xianyong Li


2026

Spurious correlations cause deep learning models to rely on predictive shortcuts that hold in the training data but break under distribution shifts, leading to large performance drops for minority groups. Existing strategies often rely on costly group annotations or employ unstable adversarial training. In this paper, we propose Prototype-guided debiasing using Robust Invariant Feature Transformations (PRIFT), a novel framework that mitigates spurious correlations by manipulating latent space geometry. Specifically, we introduce a prototype-guided modeling approach that leverages natural language prompts to represent confounders, transforming abstract biases into interpretable geometric anchors without auxiliary classifiers. Based on these anchors, we introduce a centered projection operator that adaptively purifies representations by removing confounding deviations specific to instances while preserving essential semantic structure. Furthermore, PRIFT can handle confounding factor information at different levels, ranging from true labels to unsupervised latent inference. Experiments on four text classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method; notably, PRIFT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and improves worst-group accuracy by over 20% on the CivilComments dataset compared to standard empirical risk minimization.

2025

Dialogue-level dependency parsing is crucial for understanding complex linguistic structures in conversational data, yet progress has been hindered by limited annotated resources and inadequate modeling of dialogue dynamics. Existing methods often fail to capture both intra- and inter-utterance dependencies effectively, particularly in languages like Chinese with rich contextual interactions. To address these challenges, we propose InterParser, a novel framework that integrates a pretrained language model (PLM), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), and biaffine scoring for comprehensive dependency parsing. Our model encodes token sequences using a PLM, refines representations via deep BiGRU layers, and employs separate projections for “head” and “dependent” roles to optimize arc and relation prediction. For cross-utterance dependencies, speaker-specific feature projections are introduced to enhance dialogue-aware scoring. Joint training minimizes cross-entropy losses for both intra- and inter-utterance dependencies, ensuring unified optimization. Experiments on a standard Chinese benchmark demonstrate that InterParser significantly outperforms prior methods, achieving state-of-the-art labeled attachment scores (LAS) for both intra- and inter-utterance parsing.