Yihang Wang
2026
Distilling Large Embeddings via Hyperspherical Householder Quantization
Yihang Wang | Bin Wu | Yueyang Su | Tianfu Zhang | Yiqi Du | Lei Yu | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yihang Wang | Bin Wu | Yueyang Su | Tianfu Zhang | Yiqi Du | Lei Yu | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large embedding models have become the backbone of modern retrieval systems, offering strong semantic representations at the cost of substantial storage and computation. While recent work explores quantizing embeddings into discrete document identifiers for generative retrieval, most existing approaches rely on Euclidean quantization, which is poorly aligned with the angular geometry induced by contrastive embedding training and often requires long identifier sequences to preserve semantic fidelity. In this work, we propose Hyperspherical Householder Quantization (HHQ), a geometry-aware distillation method that compresses large embeddings into short discrete representations via iterative Householder transformations on the unit hypersphere. By explicitly preserving cosine similarity at each step, HHQ distills semantic structure into compact identifiers that remain faithful to the original embedding space. To support reliable generation of these identifiers, we introduce constrained supervised fine-tuning and tree-aware dynamic masking to enforce structural validity during training and inference. Experiments on NQ and MS MARCO show that HHQ achieves competitive or superior retrieval performance using only five tokens per document, substantially reducing decoding cost while retaining strong semantic retrieval accuracy.
Detoxification for LLM: From Dataset Itself
Wei Shao | Yihang Wang | Gao yu Zhu | Ziqiang Cheng | Lei Yu | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wei Shao | Yihang Wang | Gao yu Zhu | Ziqiang Cheng | Lei Yu | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Existing detoxification methods for large language models mainly focus on post-training stage or inference time, while few tackle the source of toxicity, namely, the dataset itself. Such training-based or controllable decoding approaches cannot completely suppress the model’s inherent toxicity, whereas detoxifying the pretraining dataset can fundamentally reduce the toxicity that the model learns during training. Hence, we attempt to detoxify directly on raw corpora with SoCD (Soft Contrastive Decoding), which guides an LLM to localize and rewrite toxic spans in raw data while preserving semantics, in our proposed HSPD (Hierarchical Semantic-Preserving Detoxification) pipeline, yielding a detoxified corpus that can drop-in replace the original for fine-tuning or other training. On GPT2-XL, HSPD attains state-of-the-art detoxification, reducing Toxicity Probability (TP) from 0.42 to 0.18 and Expected Maximum Toxicity (EMT) from 0.43 to 0.20. We further validate consistent best-in-class results on LLaMA2-7B, OPT-6.7B, and Falcon-7B. These findings show that semantics-preserving, corpus-level rewriting with HSPD effectively suppresses downstream toxicity while retaining data utility and allowing seamless source-level mitigation, thereby reducing the cost of later model behavior adjustment.
2025
QUITO-X: A New Perspective on Context Compression from the Information Bottleneck Theory
Yihang Wang | Xu Huang | Bowen Tian | Yueyang Su | Lei Yu | Huaming Liao | Yixing Fan | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Yihang Wang | Xu Huang | Bowen Tian | Yueyang Su | Lei Yu | Huaming Liao | Yixing Fan | Jiafeng Guo | Xueqi Cheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Generative large language models ( LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in various industrial applications, owing to their promising In-Context Learning capabilities. However, the issue of long context in complex tasks poses a significant barrier to their wider adoption, manifested in two main aspects: (i) The excessively long context leads to high costs and inference delays. (ii) A substantial amount of task-irrelevant information introduced by long contexts exacerbates the “lost in the middle” problem. Existing methods compress context by removing redundant tokens using metrics such as self-information or perplexity ( PPL ), which is inconsistent with the objective of retaining the most important tokens when conditioning on a given query. In this study, we introduce information bottleneck theory (IB) to model the problem, offering a novel perspective that thoroughly addresses the essential properties required for context compression. Additionally, we propose a cross-attention-based approach to approximate mutual information in IB, which can be flexibly replaced with suitable alternatives in different scenarios. Extensive experiments on four datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a 25% increase in compression rate compared to the state-of-the-art, while maintaining question answering performance. In particular, the context compressed by our method even outperform the full context in some cases.
MDPO: Customized Direct Preference Optimization with a Metric-based Sampler for Question and Answer Generation
Yihang Wang | Bowen Tian | Yueyang Su | Yixing Fan | Jiafeng Guo
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Yihang Wang | Bowen Tian | Yueyang Su | Yixing Fan | Jiafeng Guo
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
With the extensive use of large language models, automatically generating QA datasets for domain-specific fine-tuning has become crucial. However, considering the multifaceted demands for readability, diversity, and comprehensiveness of QA data, current methodologies fall short in producing high-quality QA datasets. Moreover, the dependence of existing evaluation metrics on ground truth labels further exacerbates the challenges associated with the selection of QA data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for QA data generation, denoted as MDPO. We proposes a set of unsupervised evaluation metrics for QA data, enabling multidimensional assessment based on the relationships among context,question and answer. Furthermore, leveraging these metrics, we implement a customized direct preference optimization process that guides large language models to produce high-quality and domain-specific QA pairs. Empirical results on public datasets indicate that MDPO’s performance substantially surpasses that of state-of-the-art methods.