Papers by Bo Ni
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Unsupervised Concept Representation Learning for Length-Varying Text Similarity (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing document similarity approaches suffer from the information gap caused by context and vocabulary mismatches when comparing varying-length texts. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised concept representation learning approach to address this issue . they propose a concept-based document matching method to leverage recognition of local phrase features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better F1 score than baseline models on real-world data sets. |
DualRAG: A Dual-Process Approach to Integrate Reasoning and Retrieval for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Rong Cheng, Jinyi Liu, Yan Zheng, Fei Ni, Jiazhen Du, Hangyu Mao, Fuzheng Zhang, Bo Wang, Jianye Hao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge . et al., 2023; Liu e.t. al. 2023) suggest a dual-process framework for multi-step reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a synergistic dual-process framework that integrates reasoning and retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy and coherence even in smaller-scale models. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
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Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are the foundation of modern natural language processing, powering applications across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic defense framework which aggregates and evaluates the outputs of a knowledge-injected LLM, a base LLM and a dedicated judge model to enhance resistance against membership inference attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces MIA success by up to 27.8% for SFT and 526.3% for RAG compared to inference-time baseline while maintaining answer quality. |
Risk-Controlled Event-Driven Cascading Updates for Knowledge Graph Consistency Restoration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge Graphs (KGs) typically treat updates as independent facts . factual, localized updates can contradict and invalidate previously correct knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework for cascading KG update identification that leverages conformal prediction to provide reliable uncertainty guarantees over the cascade as a whole. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides reliable uncertainty guarantees over the cascade as a whole . it integrates large language models to enrich event representations with world knowledge. |
P-QuASAR: A Unified Probabilistic Framework for Holistic Patent Quality Assessment and Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing patent quality rely on modular pipelines or generic detectors, resulting in fragmented decisions and limited integration across quality dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic framework that represents patent specifications as Quality Graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on 500 patents against seven baselines. |
Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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King Zhu, Qianbo Zang, Shian Jia, Siwei Wu, Feiteng Fang, Yizhi Li, Shuyue Guo, Tianyu Zheng, Jiawei Guo, Bo Li, Haoning Wu, Xingwei Qu, Jian Yang, Ruibo Liu, Xiang Yue, Jiaheng Liu, Chenghua Lin, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Shiwen Ni, Wenhao Huang, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities. |
Unveil: Unified Visual-Textual Integration and Distillation for Multi-modal Document Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document retrieval in real-world scenarios faces significant challenges due to diverse document formats and modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-textual embedding framework that integrates textual and visual features for robust document representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed visual-textual embedding framework surpasses existing methods while preserving semantic fidelity. |