Papers by Chaochao Lu
ARise: Towards Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning via Risk-Adaptive Search (2025.acl-long)
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Yize Zhang, Tianshu Wang, Sirui Chen, Kun Wang, Xingyu Zeng, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Le Sun, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities but their application in open-ended, knowledge-intensive, complex reasoning scenarios is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates risk assessment of intermediate reasoning states with dynamic retrieval-augmented generation within a Monte Carlo tree search paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art KAR methods by up to 23.10% and the latest RAG-equipped large reasoning models by upto 25.37%. |
Can Post-Training Transform LLMs into Causal Reasoners? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Causal inference is a core component of human cognition and requires decision-makers to distinguish between causation and association. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset comprising seven core causal tasks for training and five diverse test sets and evaluate five different post-training approaches. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 93.5% accuracy on the CaLM benchmark, compared to 55.4% by OpenAI o3. |
Quantifying and Mitigating Unimodal Biases in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Causal Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have facilitated the development of Multimodal LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a causal framework to interpret unimodal biases in visual question answering problems and a framework to integrate information from different modalities and mitigate biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes visual question answering (VQA) problems to assess their impact on predictions. |
CELLO: Causal Evaluation of Large Vision-Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large vision-language models have improved causal reasoning abilities . however, current models struggle with tasks like causal reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained and unified definition of causality involving interactions between humans and objects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses traditional commonsense causality by including explicit causal graphs . it also shows that current LVLMs can benefit from a causally inspired prompting strategy . |
Adaptive Prompt Optimization for Open-Ended Tasks: Uncertainty Preference as a Secondary Signal (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent training-free prompt optimizers treat performance as maximizing a single scalar score and ignore a second signal that the desired style is task dependent. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-entropy-based method that uses task uncertainty to guide prompt optimization by selecting high-entropicy candidates for creative tasks and low-energetic candidates for conservative ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on MT-Bench subsets and integrates easily into existing prompt optimizers. |
CLEAR: Can Language Models Really Understand Causal Graphs? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models lack a conceptual framework for understanding causal graphs, but there is still potential for improvement. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework to define causal graph understanding by assessing language models’ behaviors through four practical criteria derived from diverse disciplines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework defines three complexity levels and encompasses 20 causal graph-based tasks across 20 different levels. |
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuanfu Wang, Pengyu Wang, Chenyang Xi, Bo Tang, Junyi Zhu, Wenqiang Wei, Chen Chen, Chao Yang, Jingfeng Zhang, Chaochao Lu, Yijun Niu, Keming Mao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Jie Hu, Mingchuan Yang
| Challenge: | Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%. |
Evolving Agentic Workflow Driven by Human-Agent Collaboration (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxin Liu, Jinxuan Zhang, Yuezhang Peng, Hefeng Zhou, Xiangfeng Wang, Jiong Lou, Chentao Wu, Jie LI, Jingjing Qu, Chaochao Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate agentic workflows using large language models are limited by high manual design costs, inefficient agentic search, and poor dynamic adaptability to new tasks and human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolutionary framework for generating agentic workflows through human-agent collaboration using evolutionary algorithms that mutate and cross over their structures, prompts, and LLM backbones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other automated baselines by 27.34% while achieving comparable performance to o1-preview at only one-fourth of the cost. |
From Imitation to Introspection: Probing Self-Consciousness in Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models demonstrate impressive abilities in areas like natural language understanding, content creation, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a definition of self-consciousness for language models and refine ten core concepts by leveraging structural causal games. |
| Outcome: | The proposed definitions are based on structural causal games and ten core concepts. |
IP-Dialog: Evaluating Implicit Personalization in Dialogue Systems with Synthetic Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Traditional data generation methods are labor-intensive, resource-demanding, and raise privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic synthetic data generation approach and introduce the **I**mplicit **P**ersonalized **Dialog**ue benchmark along with a training dataset, covering 10 tasks and 12 user attribute types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach incorporates the **Implicit **P**ersonalized **Dialog**ue benchmark along with a training dataset, covering 10 tasks and 12 user attribute types. |