Papers by Gaowen Liu
How Can Input Reformulation Improve Tool Usage Accuracy in a Complex Dynamic Environment? A Study on tau-bench (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Venkatesh Mishra, Amir Saeidi, Satyam Raj, Mutsumi Nakamura, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Chitta Baral
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning and planning capabilities of large language models have enabled their potential as autonomous agents capable of tool use in dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose an input-reformulation multi-agent framework that reformulates user queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ReAct, Function Calling, and Self-Reflection in overall pass5 scores. |
FAMA: Failure-Aware Meta-Agentic Framework for Open-Source LLMs in Interactive Tool Use Environments (2026.findings-acl)
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Amir Saeidi, Venkatesh Mishra, Souradeep Mukhopadhyay, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Chitta Baral
| Challenge: | Large Language Models are being increasingly deployed as decision-making core of autonomous agents . however, in conversational benchmarks, these agents fail due to the cascading effects of incorrect decision- making . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that analyzes failure trajectories from baseline agents to identify most prevalent errors. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework improves performance over open-source LLMs . the framework can be used to build reliable, multi-turn tool-use agents . |
SEUF: Is Unlearning One Expert Enough for Mixture-of-Experts LLMs? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLMs unlearning have shown remarkable success in removing unwanted data-model influences while preserving the model’s utility for legitimate knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Selected-Expert Unlearning Framework (SEUF) that combines expert attribution and an anchor loss to ensure controlled unlearning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves forget quality and model utility by 35% on MoE LLMs across benchmarks and LLM architectures compared to standard unlearning algorithms . |
Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing (2024.naacl-short)
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Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks can cause LLMs to make wrong predictions on downstream tasks or generate harmful content misaligned with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use randomized smoothing to add noise to the input and then make predictions based on these denoised versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial perturbations for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). |
Open-world Multi-label Text Classification with Extremely Weak Supervision (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Similar single-label XWS settings cannot be easily adapted for multi-l label classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method for open-world multi-label text classification under extremely weak supervision where the user provides a brief description without any labels or ground-truth label space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits a remarkable increase in ground-truth label space coverage on various datasets. |
Investigating the Shortcomings of LLMs in Step-by-Step Legal Reasoning (2025.findings-naacl)
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Venkatesh Mishra, Bimsara Pathiraja, Mihir Parmar, Sat Chidananda, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Ali Payani, Chitta Baral
| Challenge: | Reasoning abilities of LLMs have been a key focus in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a college-level Multiple Choice Question-Answering task to identify LLM errors and evaluate their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used in detailed error analysis of reasoning chains for logic-intensive complex tasks. |
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%. |
SafeKey: Amplifying Aha-Moment Insights for Safety Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce a new paradigm of explicitly reasoning before answering, but they pose great safety risks against harmful queries and adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety aha moment that activates safety reasoning and leads to a safe response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to unseen jailbreak prompts while maintaining general abilities. |
Answer is All You Need: Instruction-following Text Embedding via Answering the Question (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for encoding instruction information fail to be sensitive to clearer criteria like “evaluate similarity based on emotion” . instead, we propose a different approach, which treats the instruction as a “question” about the input text and encodes the expected answers to obtain the representation accordingly. |
| Approach: | They propose a text embedder that captures characteristics of texts specified by user instructions clarifying the similarity criterion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following capabilities when applied to large language models and encoder-based LMs. |