Papers by Chengzhi Li
Temporal Token Matters: Investigating and Interpreting the Consistency of Temporal Ordering in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit notable deficiencies in temporal reasoning . phrasing changes can lead LLMs to produce inconsistent outputs . |
| Approach: | They investigate the mechanistic interpretability of temporal ordering within event temporal reasoning . they identify a sparse subset of attention heads that are causally responsible for reasoning outcomes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models in a variety of tasks and is validated by intervention-based experiments. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
NovBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Academic Paper Novelty Assessment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating novelty have been proposed, but there is no systematic evaluation of their ability to generate novelty evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models’ ability to generate novelty evaluations in support of human peer review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the quality of LLM-generated novelty evaluations under different prompting strategies. |
Option Symbol Matters: Investigating and Mitigating Multiple-Choice Option Symbol Bias of Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a widely used task in the evaluation of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free, causal effect driven debiasing method which intervenes the activations of identified components according to their causal effects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the aforementioned bias and improves the performance of LLMs. |
Learning to Rewrite: Generalized LLM-Generated Text Detection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing detectors for Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to generalize in open-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect LLM-generated text with exceptional generalization to unseen domains by reinforcing LLMs’ inherent rewriting tendencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods by 23.04% in AUROC, 35.10% for out-of distribution tests, and 48.66% under adversarial attacks. |
Constructing Your Model’s Value Distinction: Towards LLM Alignment with Anchor Words Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a study of large language models (LLMs) shows that they can generate outputs that are honest, positive, harmless, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that amplifies logits difference between positive and negative tokens . they propose to use the logits gap to generate positive and positive tokens after alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective alignment, but requires fewer computational resources compared to training-time alignment methods. |
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li, Yonghong Deng, Xinyue Zhang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on spatial intelligence from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence have not explored whether visual intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a linguistic perspective to investigate spatial intelligence from a theoretical perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy. |
RAFT: Realistic Attacks to Fool Text Detectors (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable fluency across tasks, but their unethical applications are unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a grammar error-free black-box attack that exploits LLM embeddings at the word-level while preserving original text quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack compromises all detectors across domains and is transferable across source models. |
Memory or Reasoning? Explore How LLMs Compute Mixed Arithmetic Expressions (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step math reasoning problems, but their internal implementation is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a "C**ausal **E**ffect **D**riven **F**ine-tuning method" to improve LLMs' reasoning ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model's reasoning ability by enhancing key components that are used to execute mixed arithmetic calculations. |
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li, Xinyue Zhang, Wenyu Gao, Jiacheng Wang, Chengzhi Li, Xiangrui Liu, Ping Jian
| Challenge: | Existing advances in Spatial Intelligence rely on vision-Language Models . however, a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models without pixel-level input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark challenges large language models to perform symbolic reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. |
Encoding Conversation Context for Neural Keyphrase Extraction from Microblog Posts (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods suffer from data sparsity problem when conducted on short and informal texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural keyphrase extraction framework for microblog posts that takes conversation context into account and uses four types of neural encoders to represent conversation context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction methods on Twitter and Weibo datasets. |