Papers by Hongru Liang
GMH: A General Multi-hop Reasoning Model for KG Completion (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs are incomplete with many facts missing, causing performance bottlenecks in many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general multi-hop reasoning task that can be formulated as a search process and can be extended to long-distance reasoning scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines in short and long distance reasoning scenarios. |
SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive View (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | despite the potential of large language models, it is difficult to fully count on them in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model analyzes how LLMs perform during the comprehension process from a cognitive perspective. |
TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuheng Lu, Qian Yu, Hongru Wang, Zeming Liu, Wei Su, Yanping Liu, Yuhang Guo, Maocheng Liang, Yunhong Wang, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic and interconnected nature of real-world digital environments, authors show . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the transferability of GUI agents across three key dimensions . transBench includes 15 app categories with diverse functionalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that existing GUI agents struggle to adapt to dynamic, interconnected environments. |
MlingConf: A Comprehensive Study of Multilingual Confidence Estimation on Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Boyang Xue, Hongru Wang, Rui Wang, Sheng Wang, Zezhong Wang, Yiming Du, Bin Liang, Wenxuan Zhang, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM confidence estimations in languages other than English have been limited to English. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question-related language to prompt LLMs to assess their confidence in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on question-related language prompts for LS tasks, while English exhibits notable linguistic dominance in confidence estimations. |
Fact-Tree Reasoning for N-ary Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) tasks focus on binary facts, but neglect n-ary facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new fact-tree reasoning framework that transforms the question into a fact tree and performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs iterative fact reasoning on the fact tree to infer the correct answer. |
Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs generate responses based on the dialogue context, overlooking the underlying linguistic cues about the user status exhibited in the context. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic cue-based chain-of-thoughts method which enhances the LLMs inference with an intermediate reasoning step to find cues exhibited in the dialogue. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard prompting methods on in-depth dialogue questions and linguistic cues exhibited in the context. |
Strength Lies in Differences! Improving Strategy Planning for Non-collaborative Dialogues via Diversified User Simulation (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Non-collaborative dialogue agents are expected to engage in strategic conversations with diverse users, and this poses two main challenges for existing dialogue agents: 1) the inability to integrate user-specific characteristics into the strategic planning; 2) the difficulty of training strategic planners that can be generalized to diverse users. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a user-aware strategic planning module and a population-based training paradigm into a non-collaborative dialogue agent for securing a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to achieve a mutual agreement that leans favorably towards the system's objectives. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Tong Zhang, Peixin Qin, Yang Deng, Chen Huang, Wenqiang Lei, Junhong Liu, Dingnan Jin, Hongru Liang, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Large language models are used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models using a well-organized taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a well-organized taxonomy and compares it with other models. |
NL ⇒ Schedule: Evaluate Multitask Scheduling Capability of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for scheduling from natural language descriptions rely on experts with limited scheduling skills and domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate a feasible schedule from natural language descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more robust performance than six state-of-the-art LLM+solver methods. |
BAR: A Backward Reasoning based Agent for Complex Minecraft Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on forward reasoning based planning, but this paradigm doesn't work well for complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose a task into easily executed steps by planning and use a backward reasoning based agent to make the planning starting from the terminal state. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and the proposed modules in a virtual environment that simulates complex tasks based on real-world scenarios. |
Listening to Patients: Detecting and Mitigating Patient Misreport in Medical Dialogue System (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Medical Dialogue Systems (MDSs) aim to provide automated healthcare support through natural language interactions between patients and system agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that detects misreports and mitigates them by generating controlled clarifying questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect misreports and mitigate them through generating controlled clarifying questions. |
Well Begun is Half Done: Generator-agnostic Knowledge Pre-Selection for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge selection methods are costly to learn and difficult to interpret when errors arise in the generated responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a generator-agnostic knowledge selection method to select context-related knowledge among different knowledge structures and variable knowledge requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can select knowledge accurately in advance and reduce learning, adjustment, and interpretation burden of later models. |
JTAV: Jointly Learning Social Media Content Representation by Fusing Textual, Acoustic, and Visual Features (C18-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies on learning social media content focus on single modal or bi-modal learning, but this approach is non-trivial and challenging because content is multi-modal and involves several types of data, including text, audio, and image. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine textual, acoustic, and visual information to learn social media content by fusing them jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on real-world datasets by a large margin. |
Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that ChatGPT has limitations such as failing to ask clarifying questions to ambiguous queries or refusing problematic user requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger proactivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains to trigger the proactivity of LLM-based proactive dialogue systems. |
SELF-GUARD: Empower the LLM to Safeguard Itself (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have investigated methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs) safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, which activate the LRM’s capabilities against jailbreak. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety training approach that integrates safety training and safeguards to train the LLM to perform harmfulness detection on its own outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces harmful output and adds a [harmful] or [harmless] tag to the end of the LLM's response. |
PAGED: A Benchmark for Procedural Graphs Extraction from Documents (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for extraction of procedural graphs from documents are not solving the task well. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test automatic extraction of procedural graphs from documents . they involve three advanced large language models and enhance them with a novel self-refine strategy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically examines the progress of current methods and explores the potential of emerging large language models (LLMs) on this task. |
Knowing-how & Knowing-that: A New Task for Machine Comprehension of User Manuals (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for machine reading comprehension of user manuals have trouble answering complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowing-how & knowing-that task that requires the model to answer factoid-style, procedure-style and inconsistent questions about user manuals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can answer factoid-style, procedure-style and inconsistent questions about user manuals. |
Towards Effective Automatic Debt Collection with Persona Awareness (2023.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing debt collection agents fail to tailor strategies to debtor personas, leading to ineffective collection. |
| Approach: | They present a commercial practice on debt collection agents that organizes debtor personas into a taxonomy and constructs a persona-aware conversation dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent increases recovery rate by 3.31% and collects additional 100K RMB after two months of testing. |
JoTR: A Joint Transformer and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dialogue Policy Learning (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wai-Chung Kwan, Huimin Wang, Hongru Wang, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Dialogue policy learning (DPL) aims to determine an abstract representation (also known as action) to guide what the response should be. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint Transformer-based model that generates a token-grained policy that allows more dynamic dialogue action generation without the need for predefined action candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models showing improvements of 9% and 13% in success rate and 34% and 37% in diversity of dialogue actions across two benchmark dialogue modeling tasks. |
CARE: A Clue-guided Assistant for CSRs to Read User Manuals (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current solutions don't fit the online custom service scenarios well due to the lack of attention to user questions and possible responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a clue-guided assistant for customer service representations (CSRs) that can provide accurate responses and explicitly show explainable paths about how to arrive at these responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed assistant can reduce CSRs' reading burden and keep high service quality, in particular with >35% decrease in time spent and keeping a >0.75 ICC score. |
Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularization (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on developing persona consistent dialogue models . order sensitivity affects the quality and consistency of generated response . |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework to improve persona consistent dialogue response generation by concatenating persona texts and dialogue history as a single input sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on the Persona-Chat dataset and shows that it is more robust under different persona orders and more consistent with the persona profile. |