Papers by Ben Liu
MSEarth: A Multimodal Benchmark for Earth Science Phenomenon Discovery with MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
Towards Explainable Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Structure-Aware Generative Framework (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on temporal reasoning models neglect the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating robust generalization capabilities. |
SMiLE: Schema-augmented Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for linking knowledge graphs lack contextual information in entity neighborhoods, which leads to false prediction results. |
| Approach: | They propose a Schema-augmented Multi-level contrastive LEarning framework to conduct knowledge graph link prediction using a knowledge graph schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a knowledge graph schema and is compared against state-of-the-art datasets. |
Familiarity-Aware Evidence Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves large language models by incorporating non-parametric knowledge through evidence retrieved from external sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free evidence compression technique that makes retrieved evidence more familiar to the target model while seamlessly integrating parametric knowledge from the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms the most recent evidence compression baselines across open-domain QA datasets while achieving high compression rates. |
Deja vu: Contrastive Historical Modeling with Prefix-tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-based methods for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning struggle to balance textual knowledge and temporal information with expensive purpose-built training strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive historical modeling framework with prefix-tuning for TEmporal Reasoning that feeds history-contextualized text into the pseudo-Siamese encoders to strike a textual-temporal balance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance on four transductive and three few-shot inductive TKGR benchmarks. |
Navigating the Infinite Dynamic Web Space: Effective In-Context Exploration via Cognitive Multi-Agent Collaboration (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Guozhao Mo, Yanjiang Liu, Yafei Shi, Jiawei Chen, Yang Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Le Sun, Bo Zheng, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic web navigation rely on greedy strategies or value estimation, struggle to achieve effective backtracking and are heavily dependent on proprietary models. |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive multi-agent collaboration framework that enhances cyberspace exploration capability through In-Context Exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the proprietary model Claude-3.5 Sonnet on the WebArena benchmark. |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
ResearchBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Inspiration-Based Task Decomposition (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yujie Liu, Zonglin Yang, Tong Xie, Jinjie Ni, Ben Gao, Yuqiang Li, Shixiang Tang, Wanli Ouyang, Erik Cambria, Dongzhan Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models on a sufficient set of scientific discovery sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts critical components from papers across 12 disciplines with expert validation confirming its accuracy. |
XMC-Agent : Dynamic Navigation over Scalable Hierarchical Index for Incremental Extreme Multi-label Classification (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yanjiang Liu, Tianyun Zhong, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Ben He, Shuheng Zhou, Huijia Zhu, Weiqiang Wang, Zhongyi Liu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for XMC struggle with the growing set of labels due to their static label assumptions, and embedding-based methods struggle with complex mapping relationships due to late interaction paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model (LLM) powered agent framework for extreme multi-label classification, XMC-Agent, which can effectively learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically increasing set of labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically growing set of labels and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard datasets. |
OS-Genesis: Automating GUI Agent Trajectory Construction via Reverse Task Synthesis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Zichen Ding, Chuanyang Jin, Yian Wang, Fangzhi Xu, Zhenyu Wu, Chengyou Jia, Liheng Chen, Zhoumianze Liu, Ben Kao, Guohao Li, Junxian He, Yu Qiao, Zhiyong Wu
| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated human-like computer control capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI data synthesis pipeline that reverse engineers GUI trajectory construction process by executing pre-defined tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI data synthesis pipeline overcomes the bottlenecks of previous methods that rely on pre-defined tasks and limited data diversity. |
Perturbed Masking: Parameter-free Probing for Analyzing and Interpreting BERT (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent pre-trained language models achieve state-of-the-art performance for downstream NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-free probing technique for analyzing pre-trained language models . their method does not require direct supervision from probing tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on linguistically-uninformed baselines on pre-trained language models. |
Evaluating Models’ Local Decision Boundaries via Contrast Sets (2020.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Matt Gardner, Yoav Artzi, Victoria Basmov, Jonathan Berant, Ben Bogin, Sihao Chen, Pradeep Dasigi, Dheeru Dua, Yanai Elazar, Ananth Gottumukkala, Nitish Gupta, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Gabriel Ilharco, Daniel Khashabi, Kevin Lin, Jiangming Liu, Nelson F. Liu, Phoebe Mulcaire, Qiang Ning, Sameer Singh, Noah A. Smith, Sanjay Subramanian, Reut Tsarfaty, Eric Wallace, Ally Zhang, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization but are misleading when a dataset has systematic gaps. |
| Approach: | They propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly lower on contrast sets than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases. |
Expanding the Boundaries of Vision Prior Knowledge in Multi-modal Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiao Liang, Yanjiang Liu, Weixiang Zhou, Ben He, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Jia Zheng, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun
| Challenge: | Existing research treats MLLMs as unified systems optimized through end-to-end training, but the impact of vision encoder’s prior knowledge is seldom investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a metric to quantify the effect of prior knowledge on MLLM performance by integrating prior knowledge at the vision encoder level into a training framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework incorporates prior knowledge at the vision encoder level, and significantly boosts visual understanding capabilities of MLLMs. |
OS-Sentinel: Towards Safety-Enhanced Mobile GUI Agents via Hybrid Validation in Realistic Workflows (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qiushi Sun, Mukai Li, Zhoumianze Liu, Zhihui Xie, Fangzhi Xu, Zhangyue Yin, Kanzhi Cheng, Zehao Li, Zichen Ding, Qi Liu, Zhiyong Wu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
Pre-trained Language Model with Prompts for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) focus on extracting information from timestamps and insufficiently utilizing implied information in relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal knowledge graph completion model with prompts that converts quadruples into pre-trained language inputs and prompts to make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information. |
Towards Enhancing Health Coaching Dialogue in Low-Resource Settings (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Zhou, Barbara Di Eugenio, Brian Ziebart, Lisa Sharp, Bing Liu, Ben Gerber, Nikolaos Agadakos, Shweta Yadav
| Challenge: | Health coaching is cost-prohibitive due to its highly personalized nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a health coaching dialogue system that converses with patients . they propose to use simplified NLU and NLG frameworks and mechanism-conditioned empathetic response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates more empathetic, fluent, and coherent responses . it outperforms the state-of-the-art in NLU tasks while requiring less annotations. |
Scale Down to Speed Up: Dynamic Data Selection for Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to Reinforcement Learning (RL) rely on massive static datasets, leading to computational inefficiency and redundant gradient updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric RL framework that dynamically selects the most informative training samples to optimize RL for mathematical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to full-data training methods while requiring only 1.5K samples instead of 220K, reducing training time from 13 days to just 4 hours on 8A800 GPUs. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |
Filter-then-Generate: Large Language Models with Structure-Text Adapter for Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical evidence suggests that LLMs perform worse than conventional KGC approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a filter-then-generate paradigm and a multiple-choice question format to harness the capability of LLMs while mitigating the issue casused by hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves substantial performance gain compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. |
Understanding Differential Search Index for Text Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Differentiable Search Index (DSI) is a new information retrieval framework . however, due to the black-box nature of the end-to-end neural architecture, it remains unclear to what extent it possesses basic indexing and retrieval abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task distillation approach to enhance the retrieval quality without altering the structure of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on various datasets. |