Papers by Junyi Li

49 papers
Learning to Imagine: Visually-Augmented Natural Language Generation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for natural language generation are pre-trained on text-only corpora, resulting in visual commonsense.
Approach: They propose a method that makes pre-trained language models learn to imagine for visually-augmented natural language generation.
Outcome: The proposed method is compatible with Transformer-based architecture.
Context-Tuning: Learning Contextualized Prompts for Natural Language Generation (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have shown that pretrained language models (PLMs) lack sufficient consideration of input semantics to generate natural language.
Approach: They propose a continuous prompting approach to fine-tune PLMs for natural language generation by modeling an inverse generation process from output to input.
Outcome: The proposed method fine-tunes only 0.12% of the parameters while maintaining good performance.
Generating Long and Informative Reviews with Aspect-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Decoding (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for review generation lack topical and syntactic characteristics of natural languages.
Approach: They propose a review generation model that uses aspect semantics, syntactic sketch, and context information to generate a sentence and corresponding words.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate long and informative review text for users given a product and her/his rating on it.
RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but struggle with complex reasoning tasks.
Approach: They propose a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide tree-based reasoning process based on LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods in large language models . iteratively plans intermediate sub-queries and answers based on the LLM itself .
FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information.
Approach: They propose a method to enhance LLMs' context awareness by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network module to maximize the likelihood of the prompt before inference .
Outcome: The proposed method improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6% and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%.
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing systems with opaque architectures are limiting deep search capabilities for web-augmented large language models.
Approach: They propose a transparent and modular multi-agent framework to democratize deep search for LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms open-source systems in deep reasoning tasks.
GrantRel: Grant Information Extraction via Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2021.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a funder name refers to an agency, organization, or program providing financial support for the research.
Approach: They propose a funding sentence classifier and a relation extraction framework to extract grant information from scientific articles.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art BERT-based RE baselines against the PubMed Central and arXiv test sets.
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Automated Essay Scoring (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to automate essay scoring (AES) use pre-trained multilingual representations and writing quality alignment to score essays in unseen languages.
Approach: They propose a novel cross-lingual scoring method using pretrained multilingual representation and writing quality alignment to represent multilingual essays.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art cross-lingual scoring performance.
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden.
Approach: They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations.
Outcome: The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets.
Beyond Fully Random Masking: Attention-Guided Denoising and Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for full-attention dLLMs rely on random masking strategies that overlook intrinsic token dependencies.
Approach: They propose an attention-guided denoising and optimization framework that aligns training and optimization with attention-derived dependencies.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on mathematical and coding benchmarks.
CiPO: Counterfactual Unlearning for Large Reasoning Models through Iterative Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to unlearning large reasoning models do not remove unwanted knowledge from CoT traces or interfere with the reasoning process.
Approach: They propose a framework that targets the CoT reasoning in Large Reasoning Models by generating a valid counterfactual reasoning trace for preference tuning.
Outcome: Experiments on large LRMs show that CiPO completely removes knowledge from the intermediate CoT steps and the final answer while preserving the reasoning abilities of LRM.
YNU-junyi in BioNLP-OST 2019: Using CNN-LSTM Model with Embeddings for SeeDev Binary Event Extraction (D19-57)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: BioNLP 2019 Shared Tasks: binary relation extraction of SeeDev task . Biological information extraction (Bio-IE) is a new field of research .
Approach: They propose to use convolutional neural networks and long short term memory networks to construct a binary relation extraction model.
Outcome: The proposed method performed well in the binary relation extraction task.
MVP: Multi-task Supervised Pre-training for Natural Language Generation (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language generation tasks.
Approach: They propose to use a large-scale natural language generation corpus to pre-train a text generation model MVP in a supervised manner.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms BART and Flan-T5 on 13 out of 17 datasets and outperformed BART by 9.3% and FlaN-T5.
Think&Cite: Improving Attributed Text Generation with Self-Guided Tree Search and Progress Reward Modeling (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are prone to hallucinations and producing factually incorrect information.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows LLMs to generate citations that provide evidence for any statement.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches on three datasets and significantly outperformed baseline approaches.
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages .
Approach: They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models .
Outcome: The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English .
PsychEval: A Multi-Session and Multi-Therapy Benchmark for High-Realism AI Psychological Counselor (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models focus on a single therapy, but complex cases require flexible strategies among various therapies.
Approach: They propose a multi-session, multi-therapy, and highly realistic benchmark . it is designed to address three key challenges: 1) can we train a highly realistic AI counselor? 2) How to systematically evaluate an AI counselor?"
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is annotated with extensive professional skills and includes over 677 meta-skills and 4577 atomic skills.
MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for memory management struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents.
Approach: They propose a framework for reasoning and agentic search that grows fine-grained memory fragments from seed tokens from queries, then retraces and deep refines the memory via a contribution function.
Outcome: Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 significantly mitigates memory dilution and more effectively activates reasoning potential of diverse LLMs.
The steerability of large language models toward data-driven personas (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models generate biased responses where opinions of certain groups and populations are underrepresented.
Approach: They propose a data-driven notion of persona that allows for a more nuanced understanding of different (latent) social groups present in the population.
Outcome: The proposed method improves model steerability by 57% over baselines.
MOOCCube: A Large-scale Data Repository for NLP Applications in MOOCs (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) are a popular educational platform for advanced research.
Approach: They propose to use MOOCCube to build a large-scale data repository of over 700 MOOC courses, 100k concepts, 8 million student behaviors with an external resource.
Outcome: The proposed datasets show that they can facilitate research in MOOCs.
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have extended context windows through scaling positional encodings and lightweight continual pre-training, but performance degradation is still not fully explored.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to reduce short-text performance degradation by minimizing distribution drift in hidden states and attention scores.
Outcome: The proposed approach minimizes the distribution discrepancy between the extended and original models while maintaining or even enhancing the model's long-context abilities.
BRIEF-Pro: Universal Context Compression with Short-to-Long Synthesis for Fast and Accurate Multi-Hop Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experiments show that BRIEF-Pro generates more concise and relevant summaries, enhancing performance across small, large, and proprietary language models.
Approach: They propose a universal, lightweight compressor that distills relevant evidence from retrieved documents into a concise summary for seamless integration into in-context RAG.
Outcome: Experiments on four open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets show that BRIEF-Pro generates more concise and relevant summaries, enhancing performance across small, large, and proprietary language models.
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for pre-training text and speech are based on unlabeled audio data.
Approach: They propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model that connects speech encoders and text decoders with a shared unit encoder.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks.
Just Go Parallel: Improving the Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have impressive translation capabilities even without being explicitly trained on parallel data.
Approach: They propose to add parallel data to enhance multilingual encoder-based and encoder decoder language models by focusing on translation and multilingual common-sense reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed methods show that adding parallel data can significantly improve LLMs’ multilingual capabilities.
UnrealLLM: Towards Highly Controllable and Interactable 3D Scene Generation by LLM-powered Procedural Content Generation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: UnrealLLM is a novel framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation.
Approach: They propose a novel multi-agent framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in technical metrics and aesthetic quality, offering unique advantages in generation scale and interactivity.
BAMBOO: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Long Text Modeling Capacities of Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing long context models suffer from performance decline when the input text exceeds their length limit.
Approach: They propose a multi-task long context benchmark to evaluate LLMs' long context ability using 10 datasets from 5 different NLP tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model covers 5 domains and core capacities of large language models.
Zero-shot Visual Question Answering with Language Model Feedback (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for knowledge-based visual question answering are based on pre-trained language models.
Approach: They propose a language model guided captioning approach that leverages a pre-trained language model to generate captions for an image to help answer a visual question.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms several competing methods on the knowledge-based VQA task and achieves comparable results to a fine-tuned VLP model.
The Dawn After the Dark: An Empirical Study on Factuality Hallucination in Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a growing number of researchers are studying the hallucination issue in large language models.
Approach: They propose a hallucination detection benchmark and a method to detect hallucines in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method detects hallucinations and mitigates them using different training stages.
Double: Breaking the Acceleration Limit via Double Retrieval Speculative Parallelism (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Parallel Speculative Decoding (PSD) has limitations due to speedup limits and high computational waste . a novel synchronous mechanism solves the Retrieval Precision-Efficiency Dilemma .
Approach: They propose a framework that combines a draft-verification-based approach with a synchronous mechanism to solve the Retrieval Precision-Efficiency Dilemma.
Outcome: The proposed framework breaks speedup limits for Speculative Decoding by overlapping draft generation with verification.
Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base (2021.emnlp-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing knowledge bases are often based on bootstrapping entities from human-curated sources such as Wikipedia.
Approach: They propose to build a knowledge base from enterprise documents with minimal human intervention by using deep learning models and classical machine learning techniques.
Outcome: The proposed system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service.
Adversarial Preference Learning for Robust LLM Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Modern language models rely on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to encourage safe behaviors, but they remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks due to three key limitations: (1) the inefficiency and high cost of human annotation; (2) the vast diversity of potential adversarials; and (3) the risk of feedback bias and reward hacking.
Approach: They propose an iterative adversarial training method that incorporates three key innovations to address these challenges.
Outcome: Experiments on Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 show that the proposed method significantly enhances robustness and reduces harmful outputs from 5.88% to 0.43%.
AutoSUIT Bench - Automated Security UnIt Test Benchmark for LLM Coding (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly on code generation tasks.
Approach: They propose to automate the vulnerability code benchmark creation with iterative auto validation.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers 232 CWE categories across C/C++, Java, and Python languages.
Experience-Driven Reflective Co-Evolution of Prompts and Heuristics for Autonomous Algorithm Design (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Combinatorial optimization has long been dominated by manually engineered heuristics, which require substantial expert intuition and implementation overhead.
Approach: They propose a framework that couples an island migration model with elite selection to maintain population diversity.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior accuracy on the Traveling Salesman and Bin Packing Problems.
Learning to Transfer Prompts for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in text generation tasks via fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a prompt-based method that learns source prompts and transfers them as target prompts to perform target generation tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used to perform text generation tasks in a transferable setting.
REAR: A Relevance-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Framework for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to extend knowledge scope of large language models (LLMs) lack internal parametric knowledge, resulting in misusing external knowledge.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented approach that provides LLMs with potentially relevant documents through a module.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on four open-domain QA tasks.
TCRA-LLM: Token Compression Retrieval Augmented Large Language Model for Inference Cost Reduction (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: ChatGPT and GPT-4 are commercial large language models (LLMs) however, they may produce vague responses or incorrect answers in certain specialized domains.
Approach: They propose a token compression scheme that uses summarization and semantic compression to reduce the token size of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces token size by doing summarization and semantic compression while reducing token size with only 1.6% accuracy drop.
HaluEval: A Large-Scale Hallucination Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing large language models (LLMs) are prone to generate hallucinations . a recent study shows that LLMs are able to generate content that conflicts with the source or cannot be verified by factual knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate the performance of large language models (LLMs) they propose to use a sample of generated and human-annotated hallucinated samples to evaluate their performance .
Outcome: The proposed framework generates and annotates hallucinated samples from ChatGPT . the results show that existing LLMs face great challenges in recognizing hallucines .
TextBox 2.0: A Text Generation Library with Pre-trained Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: TextBox 2.0 focuses on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generate text.
Approach: They propose a library that integrates pre-trained language models into 13 common text generation tasks and 83 datasets.
Outcome: The proposed library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding datasets and incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLM.
DynaQuest: A Dynamic Question Answering Dataset Reflecting Real-World Knowledge Updates (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on static datasets, preventing them from integrating real-time updates.
Approach: They propose a dynamic question-answer answering dataset reflecting real-world knowledge updates that are automatically compared between Wikipedia versions and generating question-anchor pairs based on these updates.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves LLMs' performance on time-sensitive question answering by maintaining a dynamic knowledge updating process.
LLMBox: A Comprehensive Library for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a library to facilitate the development, use, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is presented.
Approach: They propose a unified library to facilitate the development, use and evaluation of large language models (LLMs).
Outcome: The proposed library is based on extensive experiments in a variety of evaluation settings.
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data.
Outcome: The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks.
The Web Can Be Your Oyster for Improving Language Models (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained language models encode a large amount of knowledge, but knowledge is frozen at the time of training, and the models become static and limited by training data.
Approach: They propose an adaptive search engine assisted learning method that can self-evaluate the confidence level of PLM’s predictions and adaptively determine when to refer to the web for more data.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms retrieval-augmented methods on 16 knowledge-intensive tasks on a wide range of knowledge-related tasks.
ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing CoT synthesis approaches focus on simpler reasoning tasks and result in inconsistent CoT prompts.
Approach: They propose a framework for automatic generation of superior CoT prompts based on three major evolution strategies . they propose 'step-level debating' method where multiple debaters discuss each reasoning step to arrive at the correct answer.
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate superior CoT prompts from a CoT dataset.
JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, evaluation criteria and methods used for jailbreak effectiveness are inconsistent.
Approach: They propose a framework to measure jailbreak effectiveness using a model that filters out jailbreak noise while preserving the original malicious question.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods on a challenging benchmark containing 330 human-labeled, non-rejected jailbreak instances.
Think More, Hallucinate Less: Mitigating Hallucinations via Dual Process of Fast and Slow Thinking (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies have focused on the issue of hallucination in large language models.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows an explicit slow thinking generation process for mitigating hallucinations during inference.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches on English and Chinese datasets.
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on hallucination detection rely heavily on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based agent framework called HaluAgent that integrates LLMs, multi-functional toolbox and a memory mechanism for hallucination detection.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and can detect hallucinations on Chinese and English datasets.
Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models (2021.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for KG-to-text generation are based on pretrained language models.
Approach: They propose to automatically generate a text that describes the facts in knowledge graph (KG) they leverage the excellent capacities of pretrained language models (PLMs) in language understanding and generation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms all comparison methods on fully-supervised and fewshot settings.
TextBox: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Framework for Text Generation (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: TextBox is an open-source text generation framework that is modularized and extensible.
Approach: They propose to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework that implements 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets.
Outcome: The proposed framework implements 21 models on 9 benchmark datasets and is available under the Apache License 2.0 license.
ElitePLM: An Empirical Study on General Language Ability Evaluation of Pretrained Language Models (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent years have featured a trend towards Transformer based pretrained language models (PLMs) in natural language processing systems.
Approach: They propose to use four evaluation dimensions to evaluate ten widely-used PLMs . they find that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests .
Outcome: The results show that pretrained language models are good at different ability tests and have excellent transferability between tasks.
ELMER: A Non-Autoregressive Pre-trained Language Model for Efficient and Effective Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for text generation use auto-regressive (AR) methods, but inefficient inference is a problem.
Approach: They propose an efficient and effective PLM to explicitly model the token dependency during NAR text generation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on three text generation tasks while achieving 10 times faster inference speedup.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations