Papers by Bolin Ding
Incentivizing Strong Reasoning from Weak Supervision (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning-intensive tasks, but enhancing their reasoning abilities typically relies on expensive high-quality demonstrations and reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to incentivize reasoning abilities of large language models without expensive demonstrations and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can recover 94% of the gains of expensive RL at a fraction of the cost. |
Enhancing Tool Learning in Large Language Models with Hierarchical Error Checklists (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, but their effectiveness is often hampered by parameter mis-filling during tool calling. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical tool error checklist framework to diagnose and mitigate tool-calling errors without relying on extensive real-world interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves parameter-filling accuracy and tool-calling success rates compared to baseline methods. |
Tunable Soft Prompts are Messengers in Federated Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect model privacy in federated learning (FL) are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning approach that provides model privacy protection via tunable soft prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach provides protection for the global model while reducing communication and computation costs. |
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate factual consistency in text summarization neglect the intrinsic cause of factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship between source document, generated summary, and the language prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves correlation with human judgments and convenience of usage on three public abstractive text summarization datasets. |
Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness, whereas general LLMs perform suboptimal on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks while demonstrating strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths. |
ToolCoder: A Systematic Code-Empowered Tool Learning Framework for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hanxing Ding, Shuchang Tao, Liang Pang, Zihao Wei, Jinyang Gao, Bolin Ding, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tool learning rely on hand-crafted prompts and natural language reasoning, making multi-step planning difficult and lacking precise error diagnosis and reflection mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates tool learning as a code generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance in task completion accuracy and execution reliability compared to existing approaches. |
Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks treat memory as a static append-only archive . Existing systems focus on passive accumulation, resulting in a 'passive accumulation' of memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for experience-driven agent evolution that integrates procedural memory with contextual information to create a high-quality experience pool. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld show that ReMe outperforms memoryless Qwen3-8B. |
LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems are Scalable Graph Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiarui Ji, Runlin Lei, Jialing Bi, Zhewei Wei, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Xuchen Pan, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Social graphs are mathematical structures stem from pairwise interactions between entities through nodes and edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation that simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves macroscopic graph structure metrics by 11% . the proposed model can generate graphs with up to 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges . |
When to Trust LLMs: Aligning Confidence with Response Quality (2024.findings-acl)
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Shuchang Tao, Liuyi Yao, Hanxing Ding, Yuexiang Xie, Qi Cao, Fei Sun, Jinyang Gao, Huawei Shen, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Existing methods express reliability by confidence level, but lack objective guidance . Existing approaches express reliability but lack guidance on when to trust LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based approach to align confidence with quality to ensure reliability . they propose 'conqORD' to help model to verbalize greater confidence for higher quality responses . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CONQORD significantly improves confidence and response accuracy . the proposed approach can be used to determine reliability of large language models . |
Language Adaptation of Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on LLaMA2 (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has seen a skyrocketing increase in recent years. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of the language adaptation process for Large Language Models including vocabulary expansion, continued pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on empirical studies conducted on LLaMA2 and discussions on various settings affecting the model's capabilities. |
d-TreeRPO: Towards More Reliable Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods suffer from reliability bottlenecks due to reward sparsity and intractable computations . d-TreeRPO provides fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable reinforcement learning framework for diffusion large language models that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and achieves significant improvements across reasoning benchmarks. |
Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied reasoning are coarse-grained and expensive . branch-and-browse framework enables fine-grounded, memory-guided, and efficient multi-branch reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods. |
Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant computational resources for deployment and use. |
| Approach: | They propose to use low-bit quantization methods to reduce memory footprint and increase inference rate to improve performance of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can reduce the memory footprint and increase the inference rate of LLMs. |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
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Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
Respecting Temporal-Causal Consistency: Entity-Event Knowledge Graph for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Standard unstructured RAG methods rely on embedding-similarity matching and lack any general mechanism to encode or exploit chronological information. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that integrates a document retrieval generator with an exter-nal document retriever to enhance the model's accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art unstructured and KG-based RAG frameworks on causal and character consistency queries. |