Papers by Dongfang Li
PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Song Dai, Yibo Yan, Jiamin Su, Zihao Dongfang, Yubo Gao, Yonghua Hei, Jungang Li, Junyan Zhang, Sicheng Tao, Zhuoran Gao, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Current physics benchmarks focus on text-only inputs or only on problem-solving . current physics reasoning benchmarks neglect critical intermediate steps of variable identification and process formulation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates multimodal large language models in physics reasoning . the benchmark measures variables, process formulations, and solution derivation . |
| Outcome: | PhysicsArena is the first multimodal physics reasoning benchmark . it evaluates MLLMs across three critical dimensions: variable identification, process formulation, and solution derivation. |
Calibration Meets Explanation: A Simple and Effective Approach for Model Confidence Estimates (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve confidence calibration of pre-trained language models are still a mystery. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages model explanations to make models less confident with non-inductive attributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves confidence calibration in all settings and reduces calibration errors when combined with temperature scaling. |
FunnelRAG: A Coarse-to-Fine Progressive Retrieval Paradigm for RAG (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely adopted in Large Language Models, but is flat and has limitations such as a significant burden on one retriever and constant granularity limits the ceiling of retrieval performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive retrieval paradigm with coarse-to-fine granularity for RAG, termed FunnelRAG, so as to balance effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves comparable retrieval performance while the time overhead is reduced by nearly 40%. |
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation datasets for large language models are limited to the English language and general domain, leading to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a medical dataset to assess the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs) . they propose to analyze medical text and generate rationales for their decisions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. |
TruthReader: Towards Trustworthy Document Assistant Chatbot with Reliable Attribution (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Document assistant chatbots are empowered with extensive capabilities by Large Language Models (LLMs) however, they suffer from hallucinations that are difficult to verify in the context of given documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a document assistant chatbot with reliable attribution that enables users to seek relevant information from given documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates answers with detailed inline citations, which can be attributed to the original document paragraphs, facilitating verification of factual consistency of the generated text. |
Towards Medical Machine Reading Comprehension with Structural Knowledge and Plain Text (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | MRC has achieved significant progress on the open domain in recent years due to large-scale pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine reading comprehension model which exploits structural medical knowledge and reference medical plain text to improve the exam's accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with a large margin and passes the exam with 61.8% accuracy rate on the test set. |
Improving Attributed Text Generation of Large Language Models via Preference Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have been widely adopted in natural language processing, yet they produce unreliable content. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the attribution task as preference learning and introduce an automatic preference optimization framework that synthesizes attribution preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art citation F1 with higher answer quality than existing methods. |
Does the Generator Mind Its Contexts? An Analysis of Generative Model Faithfulness under Context Transfer (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on examining hallucinations stemming from static input, such as in summarization or machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-augmented generator that produces information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge regardless of alterations in the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is designed to produce information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge, regardless of alterations in the context. |
Take Off the Training Wheels! Progressive In-Context Learning for Effective Alignment (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored the working mechanisms of In-Context Learning (ICL) however, they mainly focus on classification and simple generation tasks, limiting their broader application to more complex generation tasks in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Progressive In-Context Alignment method that embeds the task function learned from demonstrations into the separator token representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses vanilla ICL and achieves comparable performance to other alignment tuning methods. |
Structured Episodic Event Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to memory in Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on static Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) this lacks the cognitive organization necessary to model the dynamic and associative nature of long-term interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical framework that transforms interaction streams into structured Episodic Event Frames (EEFs) anchored by precise provenance pointers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches on LoCoMo and LongMemEval benchmarks. |
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB surpasses standard CoT in accuracy and reduces token usage, achieving stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than baselines. |
LycheeCluster: Efficient Long-Context Inference with Structure-Aware Chunking and Hierarchical KV Indexing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-based methods compromise semantic integrity through fixed-size chunking and suffer from inefficient linear scanning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that preserves local semantic coherence through boundary-aware chunking and constructs a recursive hierarchical index rooted in the triangle inequality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 3.6 end-to-end inference speedup with negligible degradation in model performance. |
SEER: Self-Aligned Evidence Extraction for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing RAG performance rely on heuristic-based augmentation . Existing approaches rely heavily on a heuriistic-driven approach, resulting in poor generalization and skews in the evidence length. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based evidence extraction learning framework that optimizes a vanilla model as an evidence extractor with desired properties through self-aligned learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the evidence length by 9.25 times and improves reliability and reliability. |
MixPAVE: Mix-Prompt Tuning for Few-shot Product Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xiaojun Quan, Fuli Feng, Yu Chen, Madian Khabsa, Sinong Wang, Zenglin Xu, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for product attribute value extraction focus on extracting values for a set of known attributes with sufficient training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning approach to extract attributes from product information using mixed prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two product benchmarks and shows parameter-efficient training and avoids model overfitting. |
Dynamic Long Context Reasoning over Compressed Memory via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models face quadratic computational costs, information forgetting, and context fragmentation . current methodologies diverge into three paradigms, each facing inherent trade-offs between Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables efficient long-context inference via chunk-wise compression and selective memory recall. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces peak GPU memory usage and speeds up inference on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks. |
Temporal Knowledge Question Answering via Abstract Reasoning Induction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new method to enhance temporal knowledge reasoning in large language models addresses this challenge . Abstract Reasoning Induction (ARI) framework provides factual knowledge support to LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose an abstract reasoning induction framework which divides temporal reasoning into two phases: Knowledge agnostic and Knowledge-based. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains on two temporal QA datasets. |
Medico: Towards Hallucination Detection and Correction with Multi-source Evidence Fusion (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs can confidently state non-existent facts rather than answering "I don't know". |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-source evidence fusion enhanced hallucination detection and correction framework that fuses evidence from multiple sources and iteratively revises the hallucinous content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects whether the generated content contains factual errors, provides the rationale behind the judgment, and iteratively revises the hallucinated content. |
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering system lack large-scale question matching corpora . lack of large-sized question matching results in problem solving . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus which is released to the public . they use a search engine to collect large-sized question pairs related to high-frequency words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrasing. |
Learning to Generate Question by Asking Question: A Primal-Dual Approach with Uncommon Word Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automatic question generation methods focus on encoding passage and answer to generate question. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic question generation approach which integrates question generation with its dual problem, question answering, into a unified primal-dual framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on SQuAD and HotpotQA benchmarks. |
Debiasing LLMs by Masking Unfairness-Driving Attention Heads (2026.findings-acl)
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Tingxu Han, Wei Song, Ziqi Ding, Ziming Li, Chunrong Fang, Yuekang Li, Dongfang Liu, Zhenyu Chen, Zhenting Wang
| Challenge: | Existing work probes when biased outputs appear, but gives little insight into the mechanisms that generate them, leaving existing mitigations largely fragile. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight debiasing framework that detects bias heads and selectively masks only those heads that activate under DA and CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces unfairness by 391.9%- 534.5% in both one- and two-turn dialogues. |
EAVE: Efficient Product Attribute Value Extraction via Lightweight Sparse-layer Interaction (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Li Yang, Qifan Wang, Jianfeng Chi, Jiahao Liu, Jingang Wang, Fuli Feng, Zenglin Xu, Yi Fang, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product attribute value require multiple extractions to obtain all corresponding values. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient product Attribute Value Extraction approach using lightweight sparse-layer interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant efficiency gains with neutral or marginal loss in performance when the context is long and number of attributes is large. |
Trigger Word Detection and Thematic Role Identification via BERT and Multitask Learning (D19-57)
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| Challenge: | Using natural language processing to discover and mine drug-related knowledge from text has been a hot topic in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained biomedical language representation model to extract mutation-disease knowledge from PubMed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches achieve 0.60 (ranks 1) and 0.25 (rank 2) on task 1 and task 2 respectively in terms of F1 metric. |
Prompt-based Text Entailment for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been applied in NLP tasks but require labeled data for downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for low-resource named entity recognition that uses prompts to get entailment scores for each candidate and inject tagging labels into prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance on the CoNLL03 dataset, and better than fine-tuned counterparts on the MIT Movie and Few-NERD datasets in low-resource settings. |