Papers by Hongcheng Liu
From Adversarial Arms Race to Model-centric Evaluation: Motivating a Unified Automatic Robustness Evaluation Framework (2023.findings-acl)
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Yangyi Chen, Hongcheng Gao, Ganqu Cui, Lifan Yuan, Dehan Kong, Hanlu Wu, Ning Shi, Bo Yuan, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing models of robustness evaluation are incomprehensive, impractical, and invalid . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automatic robustness evaluation that shifts towards model-centric evaluation to further exploit the advantages of adversarial attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a model-centric evaluation protocol and a robustness evaluation protocol. |
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongcheng Guo, Wei Zhang, Junhao Chen, Yaonan Gu, Jian Yang, Junjia Du, Shaosheng Cao, Binyuan Hui, Tianyu Liu, Jianxin Ma, Chang Zhou, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work. |
Pruning before Fine-tuning: A Retraining-free Compression Framework for Pre-trained Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning is an effective technique for compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs), but it requires retraining, leading to additional computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-specific pruning framework that prunes redundant modules of pre-trained language models before fine-tuning them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework achieves higher performance on GLUE, SQUAD, WikiText-2, Wik-103, and PTB datasets while reducing the time required for fine-tuning. |
Textual Backdoor Attacks Can Be More Harmful via Two Simple Tricks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing textual backdoor attacks are vulnerable to backdoors . researchers add extra training task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . |
| Approach: | They propose two tricks that make existing backdoor attacks much more harmful . first trick is to add an extra task to distinguish poisoned and clean data . second trick is using all the clean training data rather than the original clean data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tricks can significantly improve attack performance in three tough situations including clean data fine-tuning, low-poisoning-rate, and label-consistent attacks. |
Why Should Adversarial Perturbations be Imperceptible? Rethink the Research Paradigm in Adversarial NLP (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Textual adversarial samples are often misrepresented in research on security, evaluation, explainability, and data augmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial samples to evaluate their methods on security tasks to demonstrate the real-world concerns rather than developing impractical methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has higher practical value than the current benchmark. |
Exploring the Universal Vulnerability of Prompt-based Learning Paradigm (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based learning inherits the vulnerability from pre-training, where model predictions can be misled by inserting triggers into the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a potential solution to mitigate this vulnerability by injecting triggers into pre-trained language models using only plain text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm inherits the vulnerability from the pre-training stage . it can totally control or severely decrease the performance of prompt-based models . |
CE-VDG: Counterfactual Entropy-based Bias Reduction for Video-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce question-related bias in video-grounded dialogue generation (VDG) however, the dataset often contains inherent bias, which can cause VDG models to learn spurious correlations between questions and answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the counterfactual reasoning from the information entropy perspective to the generative task, which can effectively reduce the question-related bias in the auto-regressive generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce question-related bias in the auto-regressive generation task by using counterfactual entropy as an external loss. |
Bridging the Dynamic Perception Gap: Training-Free Draft Chain-of-Thought for Dynamic Multimodal Spatial Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic spatial reasoning are limited to text or static visual domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments textual reasoning chains with dynamic visual drafts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in dynamic spatial reasoning tasks. |
M2C: Towards Automatic Multimodal Manga Complement (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal manga analysis focuses on enhancing manga understanding with visual and textual features. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to enhance manga understanding with visual and textual features by providing a shared semantic space for vision and language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task provides a shared semantic space for vision and language understanding. |
DependEval: Benchmarking LLMs for Repository Dependency Understanding (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a benchmark is designed to evaluate the repository-level dependency understanding of large language models (LLMs) based on 2683 repositories from real-world websites. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate repository dependency understanding for large language models . DEPENDEVAL evaluates models on three core tasks across 8 programming languages . |
| Outcome: | The benchmark evaluates models on three core tasks across 8 programming languages from real-world repositories. |
Cross-Modal Coreference Alignment: Enabling Reliable Information Transfer in Omni-LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in cross-modal coreference . cross-module coreference is a crucial missing piece for advancing robust omni-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal coreference problem to evaluate and enhance Omni-LLMs' reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs show they lack coreference-aware thinking patterns . the CROSSOMNI dataset yields significant performance gains and generalizes well to collaborative reasoning tasks. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
LVP-M3: Language-aware Visual Prompt for Multilingual Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances struggle to train a separate model for each language pair, which is costly and unaffordable when the number of languages increases in the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose to train different MMT models to support translations between different languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to handle the above issues by providing a shared semantic space for multiple languages. |
m3P: Towards Multimodal Multilingual Translation with Multimodal Prompt (2024.lrec-main)
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Jian Yang, Hongcheng Guo, Yuwei Yin, Jiaqi Bai, Bing Wang, Jiaheng Liu, Xinnian Liang, LinZheng Chai, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal neural machine translation models focus on bilingual translation, but experimental results show that they outperform the text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage the multimodal prompt to guide the Multimodal Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (m3P) this framework aligns the representations of different languages with the same meaning and generates the conditional vision-language memory for translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous text-only baselines and multilingual multimodal methods by a large margin. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
MM-SAP: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Self-Awareness of Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in visual perception and understanding, but they also suffer from hallucinations, which limit their reliability as AI systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-awareness in perception for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by integrating image information with knowledge quadrants, and propose MM-SAP to evaluate this capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark offers detailed analysis of MLLMs with self-awareness in perception. |
RedOne: Revealing Domain-specific LLM Post-Training in Social Networking Services (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Fei Zhao, Chonggang Lu, null Wangyue, Zheyong Xie, Ziyan Liu, Haofu Qian, Jianzhao Huang, Fangcheng Shi, Zijie Meng, Hongcheng Guo, Mingqian He, Xinze Lyu, Zheyu Ye, Weiting Liu, Boyang Wang, Shaosheng Cao
| Challenge: | Social networking services (SNS) have experienced rapid growth, which has proposed significant challenges for platform content management and interaction quality improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-specific LLM to break the performance bottleneck of single-task baselines and establish a comprehensive foundation for social networking services. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average improvement of 14.02% across 8 major tasks and 7.56% in bilingual evaluation benchmark, compared with baseline models. |
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Noah Wang, Z.y. Peng, Haoran Que, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuhan Wu, Hongcheng Guo, Ruitong Gan, Zehao Ni, Jian Yang, Man Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Ke Xu, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Junran Peng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves role-playing abilities with 168,093 samples. |
Adaptive Token Biaser: Knowledge Editing via Biasing Key Entities (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to update parametric knowledge of large language models (LLMs) are outdated and incontext editing (KE) is not effective due to the substantial cost associated with retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a new decoding technique that enhances in-context editing (ICE) they propose to use parametric knowledge to update the models' knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves ICE performance while incurring only half the latency. |
HeteroRAG: A Heterogeneous Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Vision Language Tasks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical large vision-language models suffer from factual inaccuracies and unreliable outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
When Seeing Is not Enough: Revealing the Limits of Active Reasoning in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models focus on passive inference, where seeing is not enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate active reasoning in multimodal large language models . they propose to acquire missing evidence and iteratively refine decisions under incomplete information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on active reasoning than on passive inference settings. |
Outcome-Grounded Advantage Reshaping for Fine-Grained Credit Assignment in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo
| Challenge: | Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They introduce Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR) which redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OAR-G outperforms GRPO on a high-fidelity attribution signal and suppresses low-impact tokens while preserving the advantage mass. |