Papers by Dongnan Liu
Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models to Discern Causal Links Across Modalities (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs lack robustness in multimodal causal reasoning compared to their performance in textual settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning benchmark that leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
Enhancing Advanced Visual Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models’ advanced reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-modal in-context learning methodology to enhance LLMs’ contextual understanding and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance among all visual reasoning tasks and achieves a 'higher level of accuracy' than previous models. |
Progressive Planning and Reinforced Reasoning: Large Language Model-Guided Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-hop question answering lack effective intermediate guidance and policy networks focus on local neighborhood information, making it difficult to anticipate the long-term consequences of decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that converts decomposed sub-question sequences into stepwise decision guidance and a structure-aware lookahead policy network to enhance the agent's global state awareness and decision foresight in complex environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods while showing strong generalization. |
RWKV-CLIP: A Robust Vision-Language Representation Learner (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Using large image-text datasets, large-scale image-data sets have been used for visionlanguage pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can combine and refine information from web-based image-text pairs, synthetic captions, and detection tags. |
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)
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Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect. |