Papers by Junlin Li
Towards LLM-powered Attentive Listener: A Pragmatic Approach through Quantity Self-Repair (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Quantity Maxims dictates that human speakers aim for optimal quantity of information during conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use heuristic path-finding to enable decoder-only LLMs to travel among multiple "Q-alternatives" and search for optimal quantity in coordination with a conversation goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques are based on heuristic path-finding and can be used to construct human-like, user-centered conversation agents. |
Multimodal Reasoning with Multimodal Knowledge Graph (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal reasoning with large language models (LLMs) often suffers from hallucinations and the presence of deficient or outdated knowledge within LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal reasoning method that leverages multimodal knowledge graphs to learn rich and semantic knowledge across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on multimodal question answering and multimodal analogy reasoning tasks while training on only a small fraction of parameters. |
Be Helpful but Don’t Talk too Much - Enhancing Helpfulness in Conversations through Relevance in Multi-Turn Emotional Support (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a helpful speaker should maintain an "effect-effort" tradeoff for a conversation to help and support . a study aimed to cultivate the awareness of "optimal relevance" into the cognitive process of conversation agents . |
| Approach: | They integrate the "Cognitive Relevance Principle" into emotional support agents . they found that the "relevance principle" is effective in generating human-like, helpful, harmless conversations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves human-likedness and support in multi-turn conversations . the source code will be available at https://github.com/CN-Eyetk/VLESA-ORL.git . |
AMO-Bench: Large Language Models Still Struggle in High School Math Competitions (2026.findings-acl)
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Junlin Liu, Shengnan An, Shuang Zhou, Dan Ma, Yehao Lin, Xinxuan Lv, Xuanlin Wang, Xiaoyu Li, Ziwen Wang, Xuezhi Cao, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for mathematical reasoning are becoming less effective due to performance saturation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a mathematical reasoning benchmark with Olympiad difficulty to evaluate top-tier LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are cross-validated by experts to meet IMO difficulty standards and entirely original problems to prevent performance leakages from data memorization. |
Facilitating Cross-lingual Transfer of Empathy through Language-independent Latent Diffusion: A Case Study in Chinese (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing human empathy data are limited to English . a new study examines the pragmatic transferability of empathy across languages . |
| Approach: | a team of researchers integrate language-independent diffusion processes to facilitate the cross-lingual transfer of empathy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method demonstrates that empathy can be transferred across languages without compromising linguistic naturalness. |
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangyang Zhong, Yanmei Gu, Zhengqing Zang, Xiaomeng Li, Yuqi Ding, Xibei Jia, Yuting Shen, Zhenzhong Lan, Liwang Zhu, Weiping Liu, Junlin Zhou, Haisheng Liu, Zhong Xin Yu, Pengxin Luo, Donglian Qi, Yunfeng Yan, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding. |
| Approach: | They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss. |
Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks. |
D-QRELO: Training- and Data-Free Delta Compression for Large Language Models via Quantization and Residual Low-Rank Approximation (2026.findings-acl)
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Junlin Li, Shuangyong Song, Guodong DU, Ngai Wong, Xuebo Liu, Yongxiang Li, Min Zhang, Jing Li, Xuelong Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuned large language models fail on fine-scale datasets . large data scale amplifies delta parameter magnitude, singular values, and entropy, causing compression errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a training- and data-free delta compression method that captures dominant delta structure and compensates residual low-rank approximation to recover fine-grained details from smaller residual error. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on large-scale datasets on dense and MoE architectures. |
Lending Eyesight to Language Models: Modeling and Probing Human scanpath through Transformer Decoder (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Decoded language models have shown to exhibit striking parallels with human cognitive processes. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module that transforms an autoregressive language model into an autorregressive eye model and probes it through a linguistic model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can be used to model human-like gaze shifts in language models. |
Collaborative Multi-Agent Scripts Generation for Enhancing Imperfect-Information Reasoning in Murder Mystery Games (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Vision-language models have shown impressive capabilities in perceptual tasks . however, they degrade in complex multi-hop reasoning under multi-player game settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for evaluating and synthesizing role-driven game scripts . they use curated and synthetic datasets to model uncertainty and deception . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts the performance of VLMs in narrative reasoning and hidden fact extraction under uncertain, adversarial, and socially complex conditions. |
Multi-Modality Expansion and Retention for LLMs through Parameter Merging and Decoupling (2025.acl-long)
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Junlin Li, Guodong Du, Jing Li, Sim Kuan Goh, Wenya Wang, Yequan Wang, Fangming Liu, Ho-Kin Tang, Saleh Alharbi, Daojing He, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a cornerstone in artificial intelligence due to their exceptional performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that integrates existing MLLMs for effective multimodal expansion while retaining their original performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities while retaining original performance. |
Emstremo: Adapting Emotional Support Response with Enhanced Emotion-Strategy Integrated Selection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Emstremo aims to achieve strategic control of emotional alignment by perceiving and responding to the user’s emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate strategies and emotions into a conversational emotional support agent called Emstremo that aims to achieve strategic control of emotional alignment by perceiving and responding to the user’s emotions. |
| Outcome: | Emstremo achieves strategic control of emotional alignment by perceiving and responding to the user’s emotions. |
From Personal to Collective: On the Role of Local and Global Knowledge in LLM Personalization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are the backbone of modern AI systems supporting a wide range of applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local–Global knowledge framework that augments user-specific signals with a global knowledge encoding collective behavioral trends. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five personalization benchmarks. |
Vocabulary Hijacking in LVLMs: Unveiling Critical Attention Heads by Excluding Inert Tokens to Mitigate Hallucination (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are capable of processing visual inputs, but are susceptible to hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to localize and localize specific visual tokens, which are defined as **Inert Tokens**, across layers, revealing a rigid semantic collapse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the likelihood of LVLMs being hijacked by visual inputs while maintaining general capabilities. |