Papers by Licheng Yu
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
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Cheng Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Daocheng Fu, Jianbiao Mei, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Yufan Shen, Nianchen Deng, Jia Xu, Botian Shi, Yu Qiao, Haifeng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability. |
Ameli: Enhancing Multimodal Entity Linking with Fine-Grained Attributes (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that understanding attributes of mentions from text descriptions and visual images plays a vital role in multimodal entity linking. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate attributes into multimodal entity linking using a text-image-based knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach integrates attributes into disambiguation. |
Towards Provably Secure Generative AI: Reliable Consensus Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Sicheng Pan, Zhuoyu Sun, Yifei Liu, Yuhong Nie, Bo Ran, Baohan Huang, Xufeng Zhang, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo, Licheng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on generative AI security is driven by mutually reinforcing attack and defense methodologies grounded in empirical experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that uses a random sampling algorithm to control risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves robustness and utility while maintaining latency comparable to existing algorithms. |
What is More Likely to Happen Next? Video-and-Language Future Event Prediction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models cannot make multimodal commonsense predictions of future events based on video and dialogue . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to predict which event is more likely to happen in a video clip . they use a dataset with 28,726 future event prediction examples from 10,234 videos . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides a good starting point but leaves room for future work. |
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Licheng Zong, Hongru Wang, Jingyan Zhou, Jingjing Li, Yichen Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Yu Li, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches to large language models face performance limitations due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search based on Monte Carlo Tree Search and a self-rewarding paradigm to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. |
FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on multimodal fashion tasks has been limited by the data in individual benchmarks or has leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. |
| Approach: | They propose a fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs and is competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks. |
TVQA+: Spatio-Temporal Grounding for Video Question Answering (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing video QA datasets only contain QA pairs without labels for key clips or regions needed to answer the question. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that grounds evidence in both spatial and temporal domains to answer questions about videos using bounding boxes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can produce interpretable spatio-temporal attention visualizations. |
TVQA: Localized, Compositional Video Question Answering (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on image-based question-answering (QA) tasks, but little has been done on video-based QA. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale video QA dataset based on 6 popular TV shows . they provide analysis of the new dataset and trainable neural network framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 152,545 QA pairs from 21,793 clips spanning over 460 hours of video. |
AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
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Yun He, Wenzhe Li, Hejia Zhang, Songlin Li, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla, Yuanhao Xiong, Nanshu Wang, Xiaoliang Peng, Beibin Li, Shengjie Bi, Shishir G Patil, Qi Qi, Shengyu Feng, Julian Katz-Samuels, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hunter Lang, Yue Yu, Yundi Qian, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Licheng Yu, Amine Benhalloum, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Manaal Faruqui
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF) remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following abilities of large language models, achieving a 6.7% gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. |
Learning to Navigate Unseen Environments: Back Translation with Environmental Dropout (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches perform significantly worse in unseen environments compared to seen ones. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a ‘environmental dropout’ method to generate unseen triplets to generate new paths and instructions to generalize the agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on the private unseen test set and is ranked top on the leaderboard. |
HERO: Hierarchical Encoder for Video+Language Omni-representation Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | HERO is a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large-scale video+language omni-representation learning that encodes multimodal inputs in a hierarchical structure and uses Masked Language Modeling and Masked Frame Modeling to train models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks over text-based video/video-moment retrieval, video question answering (QA), Video-and-language Inference and video Captioning tasks across different domains. |
Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent debate methods rely on multiple rounds of interaction among agents to reach consensus, and the final output is decided by majority voting in the last round. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that eliminates the need for consensus among agents and reconstructs the debate phase by introducing anti-conformity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that Free-MAD significantly improves reasoning performance while requiring only a single-round debate and thus reducing token costs. |