Papers by Feng Yifan
Answering Ambiguous Questions through Generative Evidence Fusion and Round-Trip Prediction (2021.acl-long)
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Yifan Gao, Henghui Zhu, Patrick Ng, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos, Zhiguo Wang, Feng Nan, Dejiao Zhang, Ramesh Nallapati, Andrew O. Arnold, Bing Xiang
| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering is a task to answer questions using passages with diverse topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that aggregates evidence from multiple passages to adaptively predict a single answer or a set of question-answer pairs for ambiguous questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on AmbigQA dataset and shows competitive performance on NQ-Open and TriviaQA. |
ToolCPT: Improving Tool Utilization in LLM Agents via Continuous Pre-training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool knowledge for LLM-based agents during continuous pre-training . they curate 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on out-of-distribution tools on multiple benchmarks. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou, Ke Shi, Yifan Wang, Ran Le, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen, Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Yiming Jia, Dongsheng Wang, Tao Zhang, Lisi Chen, Yang Song, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks. |
Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuanxing Liu, Weinan Zhang, Yifan Chen, Yuchi Zhang, Haopeng Bai, Fan Feng, Hengbin Cui, Yongbin Li, Wanxiang Che
| Challenge: | E-commerce pre-sales dialogues elicit user needs and preferences for items . large language models lack domain-specific knowledge for accurate recommendations . |
| Approach: | They propose two collaboration strategies to integrate CRS and large language models in pre-sales dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be very effective in some cases, the authors say . |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Parallel sentences mining with transfer learning in an unsupervised setting (2021.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mine parallel sentences in low-resource environments are not suitable for many low-level language pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach based on transfer learning to mine parallel sentences in an unsupervised setting using bilingual corpora of low-resource language pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of mined parallel sentences at two real-world low-resource language pairs compared with previous methods. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
Gradient-Attention Guided Dual-Masking Synergetic Framework for Robust Text-based Person Retrieval (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a large-scale visionlanguage pre-training framework is limited by the scarcity of large-sized annotated vision-language data . noise-resistant data construction pipeline is needed to filter and caption web-sourced images . noisy text tokens can be a problem for fine-grained representation learning . |
| Approach: | They develop a noise-resistant data construction pipeline that leverages in-context learning capabilities of MLLMs to automatically filter and caption web-sourced images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-modal alignment by masking noisy textual tokens based on the gradient-attention similarity score. |
Bidirectional LMs are Better Knowledge Memorizers? A Benchmark for Real-world Knowledge Injection (2026.acl-long)
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Yuwei Zhang, Wenhao Yu, Shangbin Feng, Yifan Zhu, Letian Peng, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Jingbo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge injection benchmarks for large language models lack standardized testing grounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge injection benchmark that leverages recently-added and expert-curated facts from Wikipedia’s “Did You Know...” entries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reliability accuracy by 29.1%. |
Lock on Target! Precision Unlearning via Directional Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning harmful, sensitive, or outdated knowledge suffer from two critical limitations: (1) collateral forgetting, where erasing target data inadvertently removes related but desirable knowledge, and (2) generality forgetting degrades the model’s general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that identifies and leverages a targeted "unlearning direction" in the model's parameter space and selectively updates along this direction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art unlearning precision while preserving both related knowledge and general capabilities. |
BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Yunhao Feng, Yige Li, Yutao Wu, Yingshui Tan, Yanming Guo, Yifan Ding, Kun Zhai, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that provides a unified view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a unified, agent-centric view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. |
Unveiling the Art of Heading Design: A Harmonious Blend of Summarization, Neology, and Algorithm (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Creating an appealing heading is crucial for attracting readers and marketing work or products. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to measure the quality of heading generation using summarization, neology, and algorithm metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark compared 6,653 abstracts with corresponding descriptions and acronyms and found that it excels across summarization, neology, and algorithm aspects. |