Papers by Ang Li
Masked Thought: Simply Masking Partial Reasoning Steps Can Improve Mathematical Reasoning Learning of Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Ting-En Lin, Ang Lv, Yuchuan Wu, Xin Gao, Ji-Rong Wen, Rui Yan, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Despite the advances in large language models, they still face difficulties with multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that randomly masks certain tokens within the chain of thought to improve model accuracy by 5% over standard supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy by 5% over standard fine-tuning with a few codes modified. |
Multi-modal Stance Detection: New Datasets and Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for stance detection for pure texts have limited results to multi-modal content. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal stance detection framework that leverages target information to learn multi-modal stance features from textual and visual modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art in multi-modal stance detection on five datasets based on Twitter . |
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks. |
Revisiting and Advancing Chinese Natural Language Understanding with Accelerated Heterogeneous Knowledge Pre-training (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Taolin Zhang, Junwei Dong, Jianing Wang, Chengyu Wang, Ang Wang, Yinghui Liu, Jun Huang, Yong Li, Xiaofeng He
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) can capture internal knowledge, but can't understand external background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models to improve context-aware representations via learning from structured relations in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Chinese knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models outperform strong baselines over various benchmark NLP tasks and in different model sizes. |
DialoGPS: Dialogue Path Sampling in Continuous Semantic Space for Data Augmentation in Multi-Turn Conversations (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a context leads to various responses, and a response answers multiple contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments open-domain dialogue generation from a many-to-many perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can augment open-domain dialogue generation tasks with automatic and human evaluation. |
Enhancing Court View Generation with Knowledge Injection and Guidance (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of natural language generation (NLG) rely on the extensive parameters of pretrained language models (PLMs) but their effectiveness may be compromised by insufficient domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-injected prompt encoder to incorporate domain knowledge during the training stage, thereby reducing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms established baselines on real-world data in responsivity of claims and in the ability to transfer domain knowledge. |
From Graph to Word Bag: Introducing Domain Knowledge to Confusing Charge Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing charge prediction methods have shown impressive performance, but they face significant challenges when dealing with confusing charges, such as Snatch and Robbery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which introduces domain knowledge regarding constituent elements to guide the model in making judgments on confusing charges, much like a judge’s reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach maintains exceptional performance in imbalanced label distributions. |
Reward Mixology: Crafting Hybrid Signals for Reinforcement Learning Driven In-Context Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for in-context learning (ICL) performance rely on quality and ordering of demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that models iterative demonstration selection as a Markov Decision Process and craft hybrid reward signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines outcome-based accuracy signals with process-oriented signals like stepwise influence and label entropy improvement. |
Making Large Language Models Efficient Dense Retrievers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that fine-tuning large language models for dense retrieval yields strong performance, but their substantial parameter counts make them computationally inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for developing efficient retrievers that performs coarse-to-fine compression through a coarse-grained coarse-tuning strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces model size and inference cost while preserving performance of full-size models. |
Mobile-Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for LLM-based Mobile Agents (2024.acl-long)
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Shihan Deng, Weikai Xu, Hongda Sun, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujianfeng Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Rui Yan, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for LLM-based mobile agents are insufficient to evaluate their capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-based mobile agents' planning capabilities . they expand UI operations by incorporating 103 APIs to accelerate task completion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 103 collected APIs and real user queries . the data is categorized into three distinct groups: SAST, SAMT, and MAMT . |
UniLR: Unleashing the Power of LLMs on Multiple Legal Tasks with a Unified Legal Retriever (2025.acl-long)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yifei Liu, Ming Cai, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Yangyang Kang, Chengyuan Liu, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods are designed for general domains, struggling with legal knowledge, or tailored for specific legal tasks, unable to handle diverse legal knowledge types. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel retrieval method that integrates specialized knowledge into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can perform multiple legal retrieval tasks for LLMs. |
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022. |
StepHint: Multi-level Stepwise Hints Enhance Reinforcement Learning to Reason (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) approaches face two challenges: the near-miss reward problem and exploration stagnation. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that partitions valid reasoning chains into reasoning steps using multi-level stepwise hints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms competing RLVR enhancement methods across six mathematical benchmarks and two out-of-domain benchmarks. |
Fortify the Shortest Stave in Attention: Enhancing Context Awareness of Large Language Models for Effective Tool Use (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we demonstrate that an inherent waveform pattern in the attention allocation of large language models significantly affects their performance in tasks demanding a high degree of context awareness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that compensates an attention trough with an attention peak by a process to enhance the model's awareness to various contextual positions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of a 7B model on the largest tool-use benchmark, comparable to that of GPT-4. |
CoEvo: Coevolution of LLM and Retrieval Model for Domain-Specific Information Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ang Li, Yiquan Wu, Yinghao Hu, Lizhi Qing, Shihang Wang, Chengyuan Liu, Tao Wu, Adam Jatowt, Ming Cai, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Recent methods to enhance queries by generating intermediary elements can degrade retrieval performance . combining LLMs and retrievers can be difficult, resulting in unreliable or irrelevant intermediaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates the coevolution of large language models and retrieval models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework facilitates the coevolution of LLMs and retrieval models. |
MobileVLM: A Vision-Language Model for Better Intra- and Inter-UI Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Qinzhuo Wu, Weikai Xu, Wei Liu, Tao Tan, Liujian Liujianfeng, Ang Li, Jian Luan, Bin Wang, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Recent mobile AI agents based on VLMs lack basic mobile capabilities due to their pre-trained nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile AI agent based on VLMs that includes additional pre-training stages to enhance both intra- and inter-UI understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing VLMs on the Chinese mobile dataset Mobile3M . |
Learning Flexible Large Multimodal Models with Arbitrary Modality Combinations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have potential for cross-modal understanding . but extending MLLM to handle diverse modalities introduces two challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage compression mechanism to reduce the number of modality tokens per modality and condense it into a single, compact token sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Flex-M3 outperforms its counterpart trained on only full-modality data. |
Beyond Local vs. External: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Trustworthy Knowledge Acquisition (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unmatched reasoning capabilities and dynamic knowledge, yet submitting raw queries to these services can expose sensitive user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formulates the trade-off between knowledge utility and privacy as a strategic game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces intent leakage while maintaining high-fidelity answer quality. |
A Challenge Dataset and Effective Models for Conversational Stance Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | stance detection studies focus on evaluating stances within individual instances, hindering progress of conversational stance analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn conversation stance detection dataset that encompasses multiple targets for conversational stance detector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset encompasses multiple targets for conversational stance detection. |
Envisioning Future from the Past: Hierarchical Duality Learning for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate high quality responses rely on future text . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical duality learning for dialogue to simulate human cognitive ability . they utilize hierarchically dualities at token hierarchy and utterance hierarchy to simulate duality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate high quality responses that connect both previous and follow-up dialogues. |
Legal Judgment Prediction based on Knowledge-enhanced Multi-Task and Multi-Label Text Classification (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Legal judgment prediction (LJP) is an essential task for legal AI, aiming at predicting judgments based on the facts of a case. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced approach that incorporates 'label-level knowledge' to enhance the representation of case facts for each task and 'task-level' knowledge to improve synergy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in comparison to state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
Embracing Imperfection: Simulating Students with Diverse Cognitive Levels Using LLM-based Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in education, enabling researchers to simulate students' learning patterns and learning patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for student simulation that takes into account student cognitive diversity and realism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism. |
"I Don’t Know What to Say": A Fact-Filling Questionnaire Method to Help Non-Experts Talk to LegalAI Assistant (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly expanded the scope of legal AI. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates questionnaires to help users refine queries . they leverage an iterative training process that collects valuable questionnaires . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the completeness of queries and ensures the performance of domain-specific models in downstream legal tasks. |
Stance Detection on Social Media with Background Knowledge (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies of stance detection focus on learning stance information about specific targets from context, but in real-world scenarios, we usually have a certain understanding of a target when we express our stance on it. |
| Approach: | They propose to take the background knowledge of the target into account for better stance detection by categorizing it into episodic and discourse knowledge categories and a heuristic retrieval algorithm based on the topic to retrieve the Wikipedia documents relevant to the sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmark datasets showing that the proposed framework is able to detect stances in-target and zero-shot scenarios. |
Bag of Tricks for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts: A Benchmark Across Reasoning, Efficiency, and Safety (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated aspects of MoE, with conflicting conclusions . a lack of consensus on optimal design choices is limiting to specific aspects of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate two popular MoE backbones across four dimensions of design choices . they find token-level routing and z-loss regularization improve reasoning performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates two popular MoE backbones on over eight metrics. |
Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration (2025.naacl-long)
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Ang Li, Jingqian Zhao, Bin Liang, Lin Gui, Hui Wang, Xi Zeng, Xingwei Liang, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |