Papers by Kuo Yang
Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Early fusion models with cross-attention have shown better-than-human performance on some question answer benchmarks, while it is a poor fit for retrieval since it prevents pre-computation of the answer representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised data mining method to train an efficient late fusion retrieval model by using cross-attention models with cross-references. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms retrieval models trained with gold annotations on Precision at N (P@N) and Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR). |
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (2024.acl-long)
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Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Multipanel images are a common form of visual representations, and humans can achieve approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that tests multipanel visual reasoning models with 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that challenge state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) human users can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions, compared with previous benchmarks. |
Representation Potentials of Foundation Models for Multimodal Alignment: A Survey (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | foundation models learn highly transferable representations through large-scale pretraining on diverse data. |
| Approach: | They examine the representation potentials of foundation models by examining their latent capacity to capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modalities. |
| Outcome: | The foundation models exhibit remarkable similarities across architectures and modalities, the authors show . the models can capture task-specific information within a single modality while providing a transferable basis for alignment and unification across modality. |
Revealing the Seen, Imagining the Beyond: A Survey of Image-Grounded Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shifted visual reasoning from tool-calling to end-to-end perceptionreasoning. |
| Approach: | They synthesize the emerging paradigm of Image-Grounded Chain-of-Thought (IG-CoT) they propose a method-centric taxonomy covering prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a method-centric taxonomy and benchmarks. |
AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask (2026.acl-long)
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Bohan Lin, Kuo Yang, Zelin Tan, Yingchuan Lai, Chen Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Miao Yu, Xu Wang, Yudong Zhang, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems fail to consistently outperform strong single-a agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-aggent message handoffs. |
| Approach: | They propose an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four main errors in multi-agent interactions as data gaps, signal corruption, referential drift and capacity gaps as primary sources of failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module outperforms existing systems on five benchmarks and is architecture-agnostic. |
Read Anywhere Pointed: Layout-aware GUI Screen Reading with Tree-of-Lens Grounding (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for GUI understanding ignore a key GUI-referring task: screen reading based on user-indicated points. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree-of-Lens agent that constructs a Hierarchical Layout Tree based on user input points and a GUI screenshot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can interpret the Screen Point-and-Read task on mobile, web, and operating systems. |
Hidden in Plain Sight: Reasoning in Underspecified and Misspecified Scenarios for Multimodal LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models are increasingly deployed in open-ended, real-world environments where inputs are messy, underspecified, and not always trustworthy. |
| Approach: | They evaluate multimodal large language models in real-world environments where inputs are messy, underspecified, and not always trustworthy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models fail to detect hidden issues even when they possess the necessary perceptual and reasoning skills. |
Multimodal Inconsistency Reasoning (MMIR): A New Benchmark for Multimodal Reasoning Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are predominantly trained on consistent visual-textual inputs, leaving open the question of whether they can handle semantic mismatches in layout-rich content. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodal inconsistency reasoning to assess MLLMs' ability to reason about semantic mismatches in webpages, presentation slides, and posters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in detecting inconsistencies in webpages, presentation slides, and posters while remaining vulnerable to inconsistent errors. |