Papers by Cheng Yuan

41 papers
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules.
Approach: They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time.
Outcome: The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time.
HATA: Trainable and Hardware-Efficient Hash-Aware Top-k Attention for Scalable Large Model Inference (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing top-k attention methods struggle to strike a balance between efficiency and accuracy.
Approach: They propose a top-k attention approach that integrates low-overhead techniques into the Top-k Attention process to achieve 7.2 speedup compared to vanilla full attention.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves 7.2 speedup compared to current top-k attention methods while maintaining model accuracy.
HacRED: A Large-Scale Relation Extraction Dataset Toward Hard Cases in Practical Applications (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Relation extraction (RE) is an essential topic in natural language processing and has attracted extensive attention.
Approach: They propose a case-oriented construction framework to build a hard case relation extraction dataset with 65,225 relational facts annotated from 9,231 documents.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves a high 96% F1 score on data quality and is far lower than humans.
ULMR: Unlearning Large Language Models via Negative Response and Model Parameter Average (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest from the research community due to their broad applicability in many language-oriented tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework which uses pre-training datasets to rewrite instructions and generate negative responses to preserve the performance of the original LLM.
Outcome: The proposed framework can erase the pre-training data while maintaining the performance of the original model.
Data Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing data selection methods for RLVR are heuristic-based, lacking theoretical guarantees and generalizability.
Approach: They propose an off-policy influence estimation method that approximates data influence using offline trajectories.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the computational cost of policy rollouts and improves storage and computation efficiency.
Do We Always Need Query-Level Workflows? Rethinking Agentic Workflow Generation for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches generate workflows either at task level or query level, but their relative costs and benefits remain unclear.
Approach: They propose a query-level workflow generation framework that generates tasks at task level and query level.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces token usage by up to 83% compared to existing approaches . it maintains competitive performance with an average degradation of just 0.61% compared with existing approaches across multiple datasets .
Optima: Optimizing Effectiveness and Efficiency for LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for a wide range of tasks, from * Equal Contribution.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances communication efficiency and task effectiveness in LLM-based multi-agent systems through training.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves communication efficiency and task effectiveness on multi-agent tasks with 2.8x performance gain with less than 10% tokens on tasks requiring heavy information exchange.
Boosting Scientific Concepts Understanding: Can Analogy from Teacher Models Empower Student Models? (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones.
Approach: They propose to use free-form analogies to aid students in understanding scientific concepts . they also show that analogies generated by student LMs can improve their own performance .
Outcome: The proposed model can help students understand scientific concepts, the authors show .
Two Streams, One Sarcasm: Orthogonal Expert Tuning for Holistic Multimodal Sarcasm Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for multimodal satirical cognition hinder evaluation of multimodal Sarcasm Understanding . lack of a unified benchmark for holistic satire cognition hampers evaluation of MSU .
Approach: They propose a framework to decouple experts into orthogonal shared perception and private execution streams to physically block gradient interference between tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior performance on DocMSU-PLUS.
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming.
Approach: They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space.
Outcome: The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis.
MPTc-Bench: Measuring Cross-market Generative Ability of Vision-Language Models via Movie Poster Transcreation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent work adapts textual transcreation to image editing and formulates image transcreations to better match a target audience while preserving meaning.
Approach: They propose a two-stage planner-editor pipeline in which an VLM planner specifies executable edits and an image editor renders them.
Outcome: The proposed model can transcreate a visual asset for a different market while preserving its identity while matching market-specific design preferences and multilingual typography.
Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, but its utility in LLMs has not been thoroughly examined.
Approach: They propose to allow LLMs to choose the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating, and to automate the selection process.
Outcome: The proposed format improves reasoning efficiency and reduces token usage while maintaining communicative effectiveness.
Multilingual Mix: Example Interpolation Improves Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to train multilingual models to learn the inductive bias of a shared vocabulary and set of parameters across languages.
Approach: They propose to use a multilingual crossover encoder-decoder to fuse language pairs at an instance level to encourage sharing of input and output spaces.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves quality on English-to-Many, Many-to English and zero-shot translation tasks from +0.5 BLEU up to +5.5 BLUE points.
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Obscures Hallucination Cues in Large Language Models: An Empirical Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can mitigate hallucinations by encouraging step-by-step reasoning, but its impact on halluciation detection remains underexplored.
Approach: They conduct an empirical evaluation of CoT prompting in Large Language Models (LLMs) to examine their impact on hallucination detection methods.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly affects the internal states and token probability distributions of the LLM.
VisPCO: Visual Token Pruning Configuration Optimization via Budget-Aware Pareto-Frontier Learning for Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for visual token pruning rely on predefined configurations without determining whether they achieve optimal performance.
Approach: They propose a framework that formulates visual token pruning as a Pareto configuration optimization problem to automatically identify optimal configurations.
Outcome: The proposed framework approximates the empirical Pareto frontier obtained through grid search and generalizes well across pruning methods and VLM architectures.
DP3: Differentially Private Prompt Perturbation for Multi-turn LLM Inference (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used for text understanding and generation . existing methods that assume single-turn interactions break down in multi-turn settings .
Approach: They propose a differentially private prompt perturbation framework for multi-turn LLM inference . DP3 constructs a perturbation mapping table to reuse perturbations for recurring tokens .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces privacy costs and degrades cross-turn semantic coherence . it also provides a context-aware utility function to maintain semantic consistency across turns .
CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing studies on conversational recommender systems lack a unified and standardized implementation or comparison.
Approach: They propose to use a unified framework and highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs.
Outcome: The proposed framework collects 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implements 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models.
PBI-Attack: Prior-Guided Bimodal Interactive Black-Box Jailbreak Attack for Toxicity Maximization (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to jailbreak Large Vision Language Models do not consider interaction between images and text.
Approach: They propose a prior-guided bimodal interactive black-box jailbreak attack for toxicity maximization that exploits the interaction of images and text.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art jailbreak methods in black box scenarios and in closed-source LVLMs.
Breaking the Generator Barrier: Disentangled Representation for Generalizable AI-Text Detection (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: a rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) generate text that increasingly resembles human writing . this makes it difficult to capture subtle cues that distinguish AI-generated content from human-written content .
Approach: They propose a framework that disentangles AI-detection semantics from generator-aware artifacts by latent encoding and perturbation-based regularization.
Outcome: The proposed framework disentangles AI-detection semantics from generator-aware artifacts on 20 representative LLMs across 7 categories.
KELE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structured Socratic Teaching with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Socratic teaching places high demands on teachers’ expertise and real-time feedback capabilities, making it difficult to scale in large educational settings.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework for structured Socratic teaching with LLMs that integrates a structured SocRule and a consultant-teacher collaborative teaching mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in natural language generation and dialogue comprehension in the classroom.
MoE-I2: Compressing Mixture of Experts Models through Inter-Expert Pruning and Intra-Expert Low-Rank Decomposition (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: emergence of Mixture of Experts (MoE) LLMs has significantly advanced the development of language models.
Approach: They propose a two-stage compression method tailored for Mixture of Experts to reduce the model size and decrease the computational cost.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces model size and improves inference efficiency while maintaining performance in various zero-shot tasks.
Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent retrieval-augmented generation approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries.
Approach: They propose a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability . they find different retrievers exhibit distinct optimal query styles .
Outcome: The proposed method improves training stability and improves retrieval-aware systems.
VTechAGP: An Academic-to-General-Audience Text Paraphrase Dataset and Benchmark Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing text simplification and paraphrase datasets focus on sentence-level translation.
Approach: They propose a novel academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset . they also propose DSPT5 dynamic soft prompt generative language model .
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first academic-to-general-audience text paraphrase dataset . it is based on document-level these and dissertation abstract pairs from 8 colleges .
The Right Time Matters: Data Arrangement Affects Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing work on instruction tuning has focused on task level, without considering that tasks are artificially defined and, to LLMs, merely consist of tokens and representations.
Approach: They propose a training data arrangement framework that allows for continual learning and loss reduction.
Outcome: The proposed framework promotes continual learning and loss reduction on unseen tasks.
PsyMem: Fine-grained Psychological Alignment and Explicit Memory Control for Advanced Role-Playing LLMs (2026.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing role-playing models rely on superficial textual descriptions or simplistic metrics, inadequately modeling both intrinsic and extrinsic character dimensions.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates fine-grained psychological attributes and explicit memory control for role-playing.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in human-likeness and character fidelity.
InCharacter: Evaluating Personality Fidelity in Role-Playing Agents through Psychological Interviews (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on knowledge and linguistic patterns of characters.
Approach: They propose to evaluate character fidelity of role-playing agents with psychological scales . they propose to use psychological scale to measure personality traits of RPAs based on personality traits.
Outcome: The proposed model reproduces character fidelity with psychological scales and shows that it is effective in measuring personality traits.
Auto-Stega: An Agent-Driven System for Lifelong Strategy Evolution in LLM-Based Text Steganography (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: prevailing methods rely on hand-crafted or pre-specified strategies and struggle to balance efficiency, imperceptibility, and security, particularly at high embedding rates.
Approach: They propose an agent-driven self-evolving framework that is the first to realize self-changing steganographic strategies by automatically discovering, composing, and adapting strategies at inference time.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves 42.2% perplexity and 1.6% anti-steganalysis performance over SOTA methods at high embedding rates.
MTAVG-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Multi-Talker Dialogue-Centric Audio-Video Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for text-to-audio-video (T2AV) generation are largely designed for human-recorded videos or single-speaker settings.
Approach: They propose a failure-driven diagnostic benchmark for multi-talker dialogue-centric audio-video generation.
Outcome: The benchmark evaluates multi-speaker dialogue generation at four levels: audio-visual signal fidelity, temporal attribute consistency, social interaction, and cinematic expression.
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation.
Approach: They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP.
LCDS: A Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary Generation System Supporting Source Attribution and Expert Review (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating inaccurate discharge summary content or fabricating information without valid sources.
Approach: They propose a tool for empowering LLMs with Logic-Controlled Discharge Summary generation.
Outcome: The proposed tool identifies the writing logic of discharge summaries and integrates it with EMRs to generate silver discharge summararies.
R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: RAG systems that integrate external knowledge with Large Language Models often become bottlenecks due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning.
Approach: They propose a model that integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers.
Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large vision–language models suffer from object-existence hallucinations when multi-step deliberation decouples from visual evidence.
Approach: They propose a framework that allocates visual computation by uncertainty . they propose highlighting retains global context, while selective zoom-in performs local verification.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces the complexity of multimodal reasoning by minimizing the operator trade-off.
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence.
Approach: They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model.
SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese take external input or just heuristic rules.
Approach: They propose to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into Chinese language models by using a specialized graph convolutional network.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on three human-annotated datasets.
Harnessing Negative Signals: Reinforcement Distillation from Teacher Data for LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in model distillation show that data from advanced reasoning models can effectively train smaller student models.
Approach: They propose a method to use both positive and negative distilled reasoning traces to maximize LLM reasoning performance in offline settings.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods in the distillation context.
Conformal Event Prediction with Temporal Knowledge Graph (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Current event prediction methods lack rigorous uncertainty quantification, which limits their reliability for decision-making.
Approach: They propose a conformal prediction framework that applies conformal predictions to event prediction to address this challenge.
Outcome: The proposed framework guarantees coverage while improving efficiency on three public datasets.
RemoteRAG: A Privacy-Preserving LLM Cloud RAG Service (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to generate factually incorrect or purely fictional responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination.
Approach: They propose to use remote RAG to protect user query from privacy leakage . they introduce (n,)-DistanceDP to characterize privacy leakages of user query .
Outcome: The proposed solution can resist embedding inversion attacks while achieving no loss in retrieval under various settings.
Enrich, Aggregate, and Generate: Three-stage Biomedical Data-to-Text Generation Using Large Language Models in Low-resource Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Biomedical data-to-text generation is a branch of Natural Language Generation, aiming at generating textual natural language descriptions that can fluently and precisely describe the structured data.
Approach: They propose an LLM framework that can be used to generate textual natural language descriptions using in-context learning.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides good interpretability and superior performance on the BioLeaflets dataset.
Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem.
Approach: They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself.
HiddenGuard: Fine-Grained Safe Generation with Specialized Representation Router (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current alignment approaches rely on refusal alignment to avoid harmful content . large language models are often overly cautious or overlook subtle harmful content.
Approach: They propose a framework for fine-grained safe generation in Large Language Models that enables real-time, token-level harmfulness detection and redaction without loss in capability.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves over 90% in F1 score for detecting and redacting harmful content while preserving overall utility and informativeness of the model’s responses.
LogToP: Logic Tree-of-Program with Table Instruction-tuned LLMs for Controlled Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing LLMs are difficult to achieve satisfactory results in table-related tasks.
Approach: They propose to develop a specialized logical table-to-text generation model that can be used for table-related tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a Logic2Text dataset.

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