Papers by Haitao Li
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Critical Step Optimization (CSO) focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. |
Integrating User History into Heterogeneous Graph for Dialogue Act Recognition (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models cannot fully recognize the specific expressions given by users due to the informality and diversity of natural language expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Heterogeneous User History graph convolution network which utilizes the user’s historical answers grouped by DA labels as additional clues to recognize the DA label of utterances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets and shows that it integrates user’s historical answers. |
SelfRACG: Enabling LLMs to Self-Express and Retrieve for Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Qian Dong, Jia Chen, Qingyao Ai, Hongning Wang, Haitao Li, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Yiqun Liu, Shaoping Ma
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented code generation methods fail to accurately fetch the knowledge required for code generation for consecutive code fragments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that enables large language models to Self-express their information needs to enhance retrieval-augmented code generation methods. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that SelfRACG can retrieve external knowledge that better aligns with the LLM’s own information needs, resulting in superior generation performance compared to vanilla RACG. |
CLINE: Contrastive Learning with Semantic Negative Examples for Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are vulnerable to simple perturbations, causing poor robustness . recent studies show that adversarial training is useless or harmful for the model to detect these semantic changes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial training to improve the robustness of pre-trained models . they propose to construct negative examples with similar and opposite semantics . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach improves on sentiment analysis, reasoning, and reading comprehension tasks. |
A Knowledge Plug-and-Play Test Bed for Open-domain Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-based open-domain dialogue generation aims to build chit-chat systems that talk to humans using mined support knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multi-source dialogue knowledge selection and response generation using Wikipedia's wizard of Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is called multi-source Wizard of Wikipedia (Ms.WoW) it contains clean support knowledge, grounded at the utterance level and partitioned into multiple knowledge sources. |
Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the learning of data-scarce target domains have negative transfer due to the data distributions between source and target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a reinforced selector to select helpful data for transfer learning and a Wasserstein-based discriminator to maximize the distance between the selected data and target data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on three real-world text mining tasks. |
Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on structured tasks, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models up to 10x their size and can be scalable and effective. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
Beyond Experience Retrieval: Learning to Generate Utility-Optimized Structured Experience for Frozen LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are largely static and often redo reasoning or repeat mistakes. Prior experience reuse relies on external retrieval, which is similarity-based, can introduce noise, and adds latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight plug-in that stores experience in its parameters and generates a structured, instance-tailored experience entry in a single forward pass to guide a frozen LLM executor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show consistent accuracy gains across executors with low overhead. |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)
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Shaoting Tan, Ning Liu, Yuntao Du, Shuyue Wei, Wu Shuai, Qian Li, Yanyu Xu, Wei Zhang, Lizhen Cui, Haitao Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation . |
| Outcome: | GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50–68% to 79–93% while reducing test costs by 20–54%. |
ReStyle-TTS: Relative and Continuous Style Control for Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent controllable zero-shot text-to-speech systems can synthesize speech for unseen speakers from a short reference audio clip, but they also inherit the speaking style present in the reference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables continuous and reference-relative style control in zero-shot text-to-speech systems by combining style-specific LoRAs with Orthogonal LoRA Fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the model's dependence on reference style while preserving text fidelity while maintaining intelligibility and speaker timbre. |
CalibraEval: Calibrating Prediction Distribution to Mitigate Selection Bias in LLMs-as-Judges (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations of large language models demonstrate that they improve performance in a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a label-free method for mitigating selection bias during inference by reformulating debiasing as an optimization task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates selection bias and improves performance compared to existing methods. |
Chinese Relation Extraction with Multi-Grained Information and External Linguistic Knowledge (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chinese relation extraction suffer from segmentation errors and ambiguity of polysemy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-grained lattice framework for Chinese relation extraction . they incorporate word-level information into character sequence inputs to avoid segmentation errors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three real-world datasets in distinct domains. |
LegalAgentBench: Evaluating LLM Agents in Legal Domain (2025.acl-long)
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Haitao Li, Junjie Chen, Jingli Yang, Qingyao Ai, Wei Jia, Youfeng Liu, Kai Lin, Yueyue Wu, Guozhi Yuan, Yiran Hu, Wuyue Wang, Yiqun Liu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing general-domain benchmarks do not capture complexity of real-world judicial cognition and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLM Agents in the legal domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 17 corpora from real-world legal scenarios and provides 37 tools for interacting with external knowledge. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding requires mapping natural language instructions to precise pixel coordinates due to visually homogeneous elements and dense layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace static consistency strategies with a learnable selection mechanism that selects the optimal target by critiquing its own proposals rendered on the screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves both grounding and critiquing capabilities over 6 benchmarks. |
Learning from the Dictionary: Heterogeneous Knowledge Guided Fine-tuning for Chinese Spell Checking (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yinghui Li, Shirong Ma, Qingyu Zhou, Zhongli Li, Li Yangning, Shulin Huang, Ruiyang Liu, Chao Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng
| Challenge: | Chinese Spell Checking (CSC) aims to detect and correct Chinese spelling errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which renders Chinese Spell Checking model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework renders the CSC model to learn heterogeneous knowledge from the dictionary in terms of phonetics, vision, and meaning. |
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Xu Han, Guangwei Xu, Xiaobin Wang, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Hong-Gee Kim
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios. |
EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) Existing cost analyses regulate only the number of sampling passes, ignoring the substantial disparities in sampling costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two complementary methods into a unified EconRL pipeline to increase pass rates under constrained sampling passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
Fast-R2D2: A Pretrained Recursive Neural Network based on Pruned CKY for Grammar Induction and Text Representation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chart-based models have shown great potential in unsupervised grammar induction, running recursively and hierarchically, but requiring O(n3) time-complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-guided pruning method that scales to large language model pretraining by introducing a heuristic pruning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves grammar induction quality and achieves competitive results in downstream tasks. |
Event Detection with Trigger-Aware Lattice Neural Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Event detection is a key part of event extraction, but there are two issues with word-based models in languages without natural delimiters, such as Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can solve the problem of word- trigger mismatch . they also use an external knowledge base to model polysemous characters and words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets and outperformed previous state- of-the art methods significantly. |
Chinese Court Simulation with LLM-Based Agents System (2026.findings-acl)
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Kaiyuan Zhang, Jiaqi Li, Yueyue Wu, Haitao Li, Cheng Luo, Shaokun Zou, Yujia Zhou, Weihang Su, Yiqun Liu, Qingyao Ai
| Challenge: | Existing studies have neglected the systematic design and procedure evaluation of court simulations, which are critical to the credibility and usage of court simulators in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a court simulation paradigm based on the real-world procedure structure of Chinese courts and a framework that focuses on both legal judgment prediction and court procedure analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms judges and lawyers from the real trials in many aspects. |
LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks, such as MMLU, C-Eval, and GSM8K, evaluate models by posing a variety of problems, including problems about mathematics, science, law, and general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark which assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |
Fusion or Defusion? Flexible Vision-and-Language Pre-Training (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to vision-and-language pretraining (VLP) lack effectiveness and efficiency in downstream multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible vision-and-language pre-training model by incorporating cross-modal fusions into a dual-encoder architecture and a cross-module knowledge transfer strategy to guide the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is well-equipped with effectiveness and efficiency compared with other strong VLP models. |