Papers by Haochen Liu
Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods assume that large language models have a complete understanding of their environment, overlooking potential gaps in their grasp of actual world dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that discovers world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, verifies the correctness of these dynamics, and evolves new, advanced dynamics tailored to the current situation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework discovers, verifies, and evolves world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, and compares the automatically generated dynamics with human-annotated world dynamics. |
On the Role of Entity and Event Level Conceptualization in Generalizable Reasoning: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, Applications, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Haochen Shi, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Liyu Zhang, Wei Fan, Jiaxin Bai, Haoran Li, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Conceptualization is a fundamental element of human cognition and plays a pivotal role in generalizable reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized. |
| Outcome: | The proposed categorization of different types of conceptualizations into four levels based on the types of instances being conceptualized . |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that AI is unfair in many real-world applications such as computer vision and recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark dataset to study the fairness of dialogue systems to understand their bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce the bias in dialogue systems significantly. |
Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to foster AI agent development in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables AI agents to engage in Jubensha games autonomously. |
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to QA fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) however, current QA synthesis protocols introduce noise from the CSKB and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model’s ability to generalize. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts and mislabeled or false-negative options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches while using only 33% of the synthetic data. |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios. |
AbsPyramid: Benchmarking the Abstraction Ability of Language Models with a Unified Entailment Graph (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhaowei Wang, Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Sehyun Choi, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing language models only touch nouns or verbs within simplified events or specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an entailment graph that collects abstract knowledge for 3 components of diverse events to comprehensively evaluate the abstraction ability of language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs across two previous abstraction tasks. |
QFinZero: A Unified Financial Toolchain for LLM-Based Trading Agents (2026.acl-demo)
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Haochen Luo, Yifan LI, Ho Tin Ko, An Binh Minh, Junjie Xu, Tang Pok Hin, Wang Chak Wong, Gao Yuan, Zhengzhao Lai, Yuan Zhang, Chen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing trading systems rely on fragmented and task-specific APIs, resulting in inconsistent schemas and limited reproducibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified trading environment for large language model (LLM) agents that standardizes three core capabilities . they argue that such a standardized trading environment is essential for scalable research on LLM-based financial agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed trading environment reduces engineering overhead and supports reproducible evaluation through comprehensive logging and deterministic replay. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph Relational Reasoning via Subgraph Adaptation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to predict unseen triplets from knowledge graphs are limited by spurious information in KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adapts contextualized graphs to subgraphs generated from support and query triplets to perform the prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts more comprehensive information from support triplets while minimizing spurious information when predicting query triplet. |
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yingjia Wan, Haochen Tan, Xiao Zhu, Xinyu Zhou, Zhiwei Li, Qingsong Lv, Changxuan Sun, Jiaqi Zeng, Yi Xu, Jianqiao Lu, Yinhong Liu, Zhijiang Guo
| Challenge: | Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines. |
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Conversational Semantic Role Labeling (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2021: conversational semantic role labeling is under-explored in non-Chinese languages due to the lack of multilingual CSRL annotations for the parser training. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that implicitly learns conversational structure-aware representations with hierarchical encoders and elaborately designed pre-training objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on English CSRL tests by large margins . it will facilitate the research of non-Chinese dialogue tasks which suffer from ellipsis and anaphora . |
Evaluating and Mitigating Inherent Linguistic Bias of African American English through Inference (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that NLP models trained on standard English produce biased outcomes against underrepresented English varieties. |
| Approach: | They propose a morphosyntactically-informed rule-based translation method that uses a greedy algorithm to debiase NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large language models while maintaining or improving the prediction performance. |
Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation in Education (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we propose a novel Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation Network (PMFGN) that generates personalized feedback for teachers to evaluate assignments involving multimodal inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Personalized Multimodal Feedback Generation Network (PMFGN) that generates personalized feedback for teachers to evaluate assignments involving multimodal inputs such as images, audios, and texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on real-world K-12 education data and detailed ablation experiments to deepen understanding of the proposed framework. |
LegalDrill: Diagnosis-Driven Synthesis for Legal Reasoning in Small Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Tianchun Li, Haochen Liu, Vishwa Pardeshi, Xingchen Wang, Tianci Liu, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Jing Gao
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are promising for real-world deployment but struggle with high-stakes legal reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic-driven synthesis framework that extracts and refines reasoning trajectories from a capable teacher via fine-grained prompting and a self-reflective verification is employed to adaptively select the most effective data for the SLM student. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts and refines reasoning trajectories from a capable teacher via fine-grained prompting, then a self-reflective verification is employed to adaptively select the most effective data for the student. |
Knowledge Graph-Enhanced Large Language Models via Path Selection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown unprecedented performance in various real-world applications, but they are known to generate factually inaccurate outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate external knowledge extracted from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) they propose to generate scores for knowledge paths with input texts via latent semantic matching. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of a framework to extract knowledge from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) incorporating external knowledge has become a promising strategy to improve the factual accuracy of LLM-generated outputs. |
ProxyQA: An Alternative Framework for Evaluating Long-Form Text Generation with Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Zhan Shi, Lu Xu, Zhili Liu, Yunlong Feng, Xiaoguang Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Linqi Song
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models are labor-intensive and lack efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework dedicated to assessing long-text generation that includes in-depth human-curated meta-questions spanning various domains . they use a set of proxy-quests with pre-annotated answers to assess the content's quality by incorporating the generated texts as contextual background. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the quality of long-text content by matching it with references through human evaluation or automated metrics. |
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)
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Baixuan Xu, Weiqi Wang, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Huihao Jing, Tianqing Fang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Changlong Yu, Zheng Li, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Long Chen, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods. |
Self-training Strategies for Sentiment Analysis: An Empirical Study (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Sentiment analysis is a crucial task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage a small amount of labeled and unlabeled data to train models with self-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of small language models in several few-shot settings while reducing the cost of annotations. |
Mitigating Gender Bias for Neural Dialogue Generation with Adversarial Learning (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that dialogue systems trained on human conversation data are biased and can produce responses that reflect people’s gender prejudice. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial learning framework Debiased-Chat to train dialogue models free from gender bias while keeping their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces gender bias in dialogue models while maintaining the response quality. |
CANDLE: Iterative Conceptualization and Instantiation Distillation from Large Language Models for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Chunyang Li, Haochen Shi, Wenxuan Ding, Baixuan Xu, Zhaowei Wang, Jiaxin Bai, Xin Liu, Cheng Jiayang, Chunkit Chan, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generalize commonsense reasoning lack instantiated knowledge and require pre-built concept taxonomies and annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that iteratively performs contextualized conceptualization and instantiation over commonsense knowledge bases by instructing large language models to generate both types of knowledge with critic filtering. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that distilling CANDLE on student models provides benefits across three downstream tasks. |
Question-Aware Knowledge Graph Prompting for Enhancing Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models require costly fine-tuning or retrieve noisy KG information. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate KG-based input embedding prefixes as soft prompts but fail to account for question relevance, resulting in noisy prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple datasets. |
The Authors Matter: Understanding and Mitigating Implicit Bias in Deep Text Classification (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on text classification have focused on the bias towards the individuals mentioned in the text content. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate implicit bias in text classification models based on demographic attributes of authors . they propose to use this framework to train deep text classifiers to make predictions on the right features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models significantly in fairness and performance. |
Toward Annotator Group Bias in Crowdsourcing (2022.acl-long)
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Haochen Liu, Joseph Thekinen, Sinem Mollaoglu, Da Tang, Ji Yang, Youlong Cheng, Hui Liu, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Annotator group bias is a common problem in crowdsourcing, but is often overlooked . |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic framework to capture annotator group bias using an extended Expectation Maximization algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can model annotator group bias over competitive datasets and demonstrate that it is effective over multiple datasets. |
OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning . however, there is n'a unified understanding regarding the impact of various components on task performance . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that delineates the core components essential for embodied learning tasks . they integrate a multi-agent design into the Planner component of their LLM-centric architecture . |
| Outcome: | OPEx delineates the core components essential for solving embodied learning tasks . integrating a multi-agent design into the Planner component of the LLM-centric architecture further elevates performance. |