Xihe Qiu
2026
From Answers to Arguments: Toward Trustworthy Clinical Diagnostic Reasoning with Toulmin-Guided Curriculum Goal-Conditioned Learning
Chen Zhan | Xiaoyu Tan | Gengchen Ma | Yu-Jie Xiong | Xiaoyan Jiang | Xihe Qiu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chen Zhan | Xiaoyu Tan | Gengchen Ma | Yu-Jie Xiong | Xiaoyan Jiang | Xihe Qiu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into clinical decision support is critically obstructed by their opaque and often unreliable reasoning. In the high-stakes domain of healthcare, correct answers alone are insufficient; clinical practice demands full transparency to ensure patient safety and enable professional accountability. A pervasive and dangerous weakness of current LLMs is their tendency to produce "correct answers through flawed reasoning." This issue is far more than a minor academic flaw; such process errors signal a fundamental lack of robust understanding, making the model prone to broader hallucinations and unpredictable failures when faced with real-world clinical complexity. In this paper, we establish a framework for trustworthy clinical argumentation by adapting the Toulmin model to the diagnostic process. We propose a novel training pipeline: Curriculum Goal-Conditioned Learning (CGCL), designed to progressively train LLM to generate diagnostic arguments that explicitly follow this Toulmin structure. CGCL’s progressive three-stage curriculum systematically builds a solid clinical argument: (1) extracting facts and generating differential diagnoses; (2) justifying a core hypothesis while rebutting alternatives; and (3) synthesizing the analysis into a final, qualified conclusion. We validate CGCL using T-Eval, a quantitative framework measuring the integrity of the diagnosis reasoning. Experiments show that our method achieves diagnostic accuracy and reasoning quality comparable to resource-intensive Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods, while offering a more stable and efficient training pipeline.
2024
ULMR: Unlearning Large Language Models via Negative Response and Model Parameter Average
Shaojie Shi | Xiaoyu Tan | Xihe Qiu | Chao Qu | Kexin Nie | Yuan Cheng | Wei Chu | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Shaojie Shi | Xiaoyu Tan | Xihe Qiu | Chao Qu | Kexin Nie | Yuan Cheng | Wei Chu | Xu Yinghui | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest from the research community due to their broad applicability in many language-oriented tasks, and are now widely used in numerous areas of production and daily life. One source of the powerful capabilities of LLMs is the massive scale of their pre-training dataset. However, these pre-training datasets contain many outdated, harmful, and personally sensitive information, which inevitably becomes memorized by LLM during the pre-training process. Eliminating this undesirable data is crucial for ensuring the model’s safety and enhancing the user experience. However, the cost of extensively cleaning the pre-training dataset and retraining the model from scratch is very high. In this work, we propose ULMR , a unlearning framework for LLMs , which first uses carefully designed prompts to rewrite the instructions in the specified dataset, and generate corresponding negative responses. Subsequently, to ensure that the model does not excessively deviate post-training, we perform model parameter averaging to preserve the performance of the original LLM. We conducted experiments on two public datasets, TOFU and RWKU, demonstrating that our method can effectively forget specified information while retaining the capabilities of the original LLM.
2023
Self-Criticism: Aligning Large Language Models with their Understanding of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness
Xiaoyu Tan | Shaojie Shi | Xihe Qiu | Chao Qu | Zhenting Qi | Yinghui Xu | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Xiaoyu Tan | Shaojie Shi | Xihe Qiu | Chao Qu | Zhenting Qi | Yinghui Xu | Yuan Qi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Recently, there has been a notable surge in the significance of large language models (LLMs) that engage in conversational-style interactions, such as ChatGPT and Claude, as they contribute significantly to the progress of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Typically, these models undergo a two-phase fine-tuning process: instruction fine-tuning (IF) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). These methods aim to align the LLMs to be helpful, honest, and harmless (HHH). However, RLHF, which incorporates independent reward models trained on high-quality human feedback datasets, incurs high costs in terms of hardware resources and human efforts. Therefore, we explore the possibility of aligning LLMs with their own understanding of HHH through IF and in-context learning (ICL). In this study, we propose a novel framework called Self-Criticism, which allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH based on the definition they learned from a large-scale text corpus. We begin by employing IF on a given instruction set and learning HHH discrimination through few-shot ICL. Subsequently, the LLMs evaluate their own generated responses and learn to produce “better” responses based on self-judgment. Finally, the model is retrained based on the self-generated responses to distill the whole process. By analyzing our proposed method, we also find interesting connections between Self-Criticism and goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, and pseudo-labeling. Experimental results demonstrate that this method achieves nearly identical performance to RLHF in terms of both human evaluation and evaluation by other LLMs, with only a minimal alignment tax.