Papers by Chenyang Yang
Optimizing Deeper Transformers on Small Datasets (2021.acl-long)
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Peng Xu, Dhruv Kumar, Wei Yang, Wenjie Zi, Keyi Tang, Chenyang Huang, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Simon J.D. Prince, Yanshuai Cao
| Challenge: | a common belief that training deep transformers from scratch requires large datasets is wrong . however, with proper initialization and optimization, the benefits of very deep transformer can carry over to challenging tasks with small datasets. |
| Approach: | They train 48 layers of transformers from pre-trained RoBERTa and 24 relation-aware layers from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance on a text-to-sql parsing benchmark . it uses 24 fine-tuned layers from pre-trained RoBERTa and 24 relation-aware layers from scratch . |
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future (2023.emnlp-main)
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Linyi Yang, Yaoxian Song, Xuan Ren, Chenyang Lyu, Yidong Wang, Jingming Zhuo, Lingqiao Liu, Jindong Wang, Jennifer Foster, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing literature on the generalization of machine learning models to out-of-distribution data is lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose to present the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed survey provides the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
PLACES: Prompting Language Models for Social Conversation Synthesis (2023.findings-eacl)
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Maximillian Chen, Alexandros Papangelis, Chenyang Tao, Seokhwan Kim, Andy Rosenbaum, Yang Liu, Zhou Yu, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Currently, collecting high quality conversational data is expensive and infeasible for many applications . a promising direction is to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose to use expert-written conversations as in-context examples to generate synthetic dialogues by prompting large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is generalizable to multi-party conversations, compared to human-collected conversations. |
What Prompts Don’t Say: Understanding and Managing Underspecification in LLM Prompts (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Under-specified prompts are 2x as likely to regress across model or prompt changes, authors show . eliot safina: a lack of explicit prompts can cause frustrations and failures . |
| Approach: | They propose requirements-aware prompt optimization mechanisms that improve performance by 4.8% over baselines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanisms improve prompt performance by 4.8% over baselines. |
Exploiting Rich Textual User-Product Context for Improving Personalized Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Typical approaches do not exploit the potential of historical reviews or do not make full use of user/product associations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use historical reviews to initialize user and product representations and incorporate textual associations via a user-product cross-context module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on IMDb, Yelp and Longformer benchmarks. |
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%. |
Beyond Testers’ Biases: Guiding Model Testing with Knowledge Bases using LLMs (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Chenyang Yang, Rishabh Rustogi, Rachel Brower-Sinning, Grace Lewis, Christian Kaestner, Tongshuang Wu
| Challenge: | Identifying what to test is a step that is largely ignored and poorly supported. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive tool that supports requirements elicitation for guiding model testing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can help practitioners test models in real-world settings . |
SPHERE: An Evaluation Card for Human-AI Systems (2025.findings-acl)
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Dora Zhao, Qianou Ma, Xinran Zhao, Chenglei Si, Chenyang Yang, Ryan Louie, Ehud Reiter, Diyi Yang, Tongshuang Wu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods and standards for human-AI systems are unclear, especially for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation card SPHERE which provides a template for evaluation protocols . they outline current evaluation practices and areas for improvement . |
| Outcome: | The evaluation card provides a template for designing evaluation protocols . it outlines current evaluation practices and areas for improvement . |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
SeedBench: A Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Seed Science (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Ying, Zihong Chen, Zhefan Wang, Wanli Jiang, Chenyang Wang, Zhonghang Yuan, Haoyang Su, Huanjun Kong, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
| Challenge: | Seed science is essential for modern agriculture, but its application in seed science remains limited due to a shortage of experts and limited availability of online resources. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 26 leading large language models and compare them against a set of benchmarks . they find that there is a gap between the power of LLMs and real-world seed science problems . |
| Outcome: | The new seed benchmark highlights the gap between the power of large language models and real-world seed science problems. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
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Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks. |
cAST: Enhancing Code Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Structural Chunking via Abstract Syntax Tree (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing line-based chunking heuristics often break semantic structures, splitting functions or merging unrelated code. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware method that breaks large AST nodes into smaller chunks . this method generates self-contained, semantically coherent units across programming languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts Recall@5 by 4.3 points on RepoEval retrieval and Pass@1 by 2.67 points on SWE-bench generation. |
ProSparse: Introducing and Enhancing Intrinsic Activation Sparsity within Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Chenyang Song, Xu Han, Zhengyan Zhang, Shengding Hu, Xiyu Shi, Kuai Li, Chen Chen, Zhiyuan Liu, Guangli Li, Tao Yang, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Activation sparsity is a promising paradigm for accelerating model inference . few large language models achieve high activation spar and comparable performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to achieve activation sparsity and acceleration in large language models . they introduce ReLU activation and adopt progressive sparse regularization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high activation sparsity and comparable model performance. |