Papers by Bohan Li
Agentic Economic Modeling (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | AEM is a framework that aligns synthetic LLM choices with small-sample human evidence for reliable econometric inference. |
| Approach: | They introduce a framework that aligns synthetic LLM choices with small-sample human evidence for reliable econometric inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RCT efficiency and establishes a foundation method for LLM-based counterfactual generation. |
On the Sentence Embeddings from Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained contextual representations like BERT have been widely used for NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform anisotropic sentence embedding distribution to smooth and isotropic Gaussian distribution by normalizing flows that are learned with an unsupervised objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art embeddings on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks. |
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. |
A Surprisingly Effective Fix for Deep Latent Variable Modeling of Text (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Variational Autoencoders are powerful language models and effective representation learning frameworks. |
| Approach: | They propose a fix for posterior collapse which improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction and latent representation learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed fix significantly improves held-out likelihood, reconstruction, and latent representation learning compared with previous state-of-the-art methods. |
ExAnte: A Benchmark for Ex-Ante Inference in Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) struggle with ex-ante reasoning—making inferences or predictions without access to future information. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that assesses LLMs’ ex-ante inference ability across four tasks: stock prediction, question answering, Wikipedia event generation, and scientific publication generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses LLMs’ ex-ante inference ability across four tasks. |
A Two-Stage Framework with Self-Supervised Distillation for Cross-Domain Text Classification (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-domain text classification relies on domain-invariant features or task-agnostic features. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework for cross-domain text classification that leverages or reuses rich labeled data from the source domain and unlabeled data in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on a public cross-domain text classification benchmark. |
MetaPrompting: Learning to Learn Better Prompts (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research on prompting moves from discrete tokens based "hard prompts" to continuous "soft prompts", which employ learnable vectors as pseudo prompt tokens and achieve better performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized soft prompting method that uses model-agnostic meta-learning to find better initialization for soft prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three datasets and brings new state-of-the-art performance. |
Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Yancheng Wang, Yingzhen Yang, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning from large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning fails . they propose 'data-based' training that trains LLMs from scratch . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables models to generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training. |
From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Liangjie Huang, Alimohammad Beigi, Chengshuai Zhao, Zhen Tan, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Yuxuan Jiang, Canyu Chen, Tianhao Wu, Kai Shu, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) inspire the "LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm . traditional methods of assessment and evaluation fail in dynamic and open-ended scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm where LLMs are leveraged to perform scoring, ranking, or selection for machine learning evaluation scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-based judgment and evaluation paradigms are based on large language models and are compared to the current model-driven evaluation paradigm. |
BSCodec: A Band-Split Neural Codec for High-Quality Universal Audio Reconstruction (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Neural audio codecs have enabled high-fidelity reconstruction of speech, music and sound . however, speech-optimized codec systems suffer degradation on music or sound if they ignore spectral differences . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural audio codec that splits the spectral dimension into separate bands and compresses each band independently. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that BSCodec achieves better reconstruction quality on music and sound compared to existing codecs. |
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xukai Wang, Xuanbo Liu, Mingrui Chen, Haitian Zhong, Xuanlin Yang, Bohan Zeng, Jinbo Hu, Hao Liang, Junbo Niu, Xuchen Li, Ruitao Wu, Ruichuan An, Yang Shi, Liu Liu, Qiang Liu, Zhouchen Lin, Xu-Yao Zhang, Wentao Zhang, Bin Dong
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
Can Large Language Models Understand You Better? An MBTI Personality Detection Dataset Aligned with Population Traits (2025.coling-main)
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Bohan Li, Jiannan Guan, Longxu Dou, Yunlong Feng, Dingzirui Wang, Yang Xu, Enbo Wang, Qiguang Chen, Bichen Wang, Xiao Xu, Yimeng Zhang, Libo Qin, Yanyan Zhao, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | Existing data on MBTI personality detection are based on self-reported labels and fail to capture the full range of population personality traits. |
| Approach: | They construct a manually annotated MBTI personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists and use them to identify the task. |
| Outcome: | The MBTIBench is the first manually annotated MBti personality detection dataset with soft labels under the guidance of psychologists. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
MathAgent: Adversarial Evolution of Constraint Graphs for Mathematical Reasoning Data Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to synthesising high-quality mathematical reasoning data without human priors suffer from mode collapse and limited logical complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical synthesis framework that formulates data synthesis as an unsupervised optimization problem over a constraint graph followed by semantic instantiation rather than a direct text generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms widely-used datasets on eight mathematical benchmarks. |
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on PTQ spans three primary directions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of post-training quantization failures using PTQ . they show that targeted repair can mitigate Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. |
Task-Stratified Knowledge Scaling Laws for Post-Training Quantized Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws focus on general performance, overlooking crucial fine-grained factors and how quantization differentially impacts diverse knowledge capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies model size, bit-width, and fine-grained factors into memorization, application, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows strong fit and cross-architecture consistency on 293 different PTQ configurations. |
TableEval: A Real-World Benchmark for Complex, Multilingual, and Multi-Structured Table Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing TableQA benchmarks focus on simple flat tables and suffer from data leakage . current benchmarks are monolingual and fail to capture cross-lingual variability . |
| Approach: | They propose a table-based TableQA benchmark to evaluate LLMs on real-world tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they achieve high agreement with human judgment . the proposed framework improves on the alignment between model responses and reference answers . |
Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhen Tan, Dawei Li, Song Wang, Alimohammad Beigi, Bohan Jiang, Amrita Bhattacharjee, Mansooreh Karami, Jundong Li, Lu Cheng, Huan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing surveys focus on LLMs' specific utility for data annotation and synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate annotations from raw data . they also propose to review learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to improve the efficacy of machine learning models by generating and labeling raw data with relevant information. |
Inverse is Better! Fast and Accurate Prompt for Few-shot Slot Tagging (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent results show that prompting methods are inefficient for slot tagging tasks . inverse prompting only requires a one-turn prediction for each slot type . |
| Approach: | They propose an inverse prompting paradigm that reversely predicts slot values given slot types . the method is faster and significantly improves the effect on 10-shot setting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over 6.1 F1-scores on 10-shot setting and achieves new state-of-the-art performance. |