Papers by Linfeng Li
Verified Critical Step Optimization for LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Critical Step Optimization (CSO) focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which focuses preference learning on verified critical steps where alternative actions demonstrably flip task outcomes from failure to success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on GAIA-Text-103 and XBench-DeepSearch while requiring supervision at only 16% of trajectory steps. |
Stop Looking for “Important Tokens” in Multimodal Language Models: Duplication Matters More (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zichen Wen, Yifeng Gao, Shaobo Wang, Junyuan Zhang, Qintong Zhang, Weijia Li, Conghui He, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Vision tokens in multimodal large language models often dominate computational overhead due to excessive length compared to linguistic modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning method which defines an importance criterion for vision tokens and prunes the unimportant vision token during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can prune 88.9% of vision tokens while maintaining comparable performance. |
Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models: Are We Solving the Right Problem? (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet suffer from severe inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune redundant tokens in MLLMs to reduce computation and storage costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational and storage costs of MLLMs by identifying redundant tokens and pruning them. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
Data Whisperer: Efficient Data Selection for Task-Specific LLM Fine-Tuning via Few-Shot In-Context Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Shaobo Wang, Xiangqi Jin, Ziming Wang, Jize Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Kaixin Li, Zichen Wen, Zhong Li, Conghui He, Xuming Hu, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Using fine-tuning on task-specific data is essential for large language models to be effective in specialized tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages few-shot in-context learning with the model to be fine-tuned. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods with a 3.1-point improvement and a 7.4 speedup on the Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using just 10% of the dataset. |
MinerU2.5: A Decoupled Vision-Language Model for Efficient High-Resolution Document Parsing (2026.acl-industry)
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Junbo Niu, Zheng Liu, Zhuangcheng Gu, Bin Wang, Linke Ouyang, Zhiyuan Zhao, Tao Chu, Tianyao He, Fan Wu, Qintong Zhang, Zhenjiang Jin, Guang Liang, Rui Zhang, Wenzheng Zhang, Yuan Qu, Zhifei Ren, Yuefeng Sun, Zirui Tang, Boyu Niu, Yuanhong Zheng, Dongsheng Ma, Ziyang Miao, Hejun Dong, Siyi Qian, Junyuan Zhang, Fangdong Wang, Jingzhou Chen, Xiaomeng Zhao, Liqun Wei, Wei Li, Shasha Wang, RuiLiang Xu, Yuanyuan Cao, Lu Chen, Qianqian Wu, Huaiyu Gu, Lindong Lu, Dechen Lin, null Shenguanlin, Xuanhe Zhou, Linfeng Zhang, Yuhang Zang, Xiaoyi Dong, Jiaqi Wang, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Pei Chu, Weijia Li, Jiang Wu, Lijun Wu, Zhenxiang Li, Guangyu Wang, Zhongying Tu, Chao Xu, Kai Chen, Bowen Zhou, Dahua Lin, Wentao Zhang, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
A Knowledge Plug-and-Play Test Bed for Open-domain Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-based open-domain dialogue generation aims to build chit-chat systems that talk to humans using mined support knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating multi-source dialogue knowledge selection and response generation using Wikipedia's wizard of Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is called multi-source Wizard of Wikipedia (Ms.WoW) it contains clean support knowledge, grounded at the utterance level and partitioned into multiple knowledge sources. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on structured tasks, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models up to 10x their size and can be scalable and effective. |
StreamMeCo: Long-Term Agent Memory Compression for Efficient Streaming Video Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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Junxi Wang, Te Sun, Jiayi Zhu, Junxian Li, Haowen Xu, Zichen Wen, Xuming Hu, Zhiyu li, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | StreamMeCo is an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework that evicts redundant memory nodes and introduces a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to mitigate performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.87 speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0% on three challenging benchmark datasets. |
GraphKV: Breaking the Static Selection Paradigm with Graph-Based KV Cache Eviction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Efficient Key-Value (KV) cache management is essential for processing long text sequences in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based framework that redefines token selection for KV cache compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used in existing KV cache eviction methods such as SnapKV and PyramidKV in a plug-and-play manner. |
Advancing Fine-Grained Visual Understanding with Multi-Scale Alignment in Multi-Modal Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Wei Wang, Zhaowei Li, Qi Xu, Linfeng Li, YiQing Cai, Botian Jiang, Hang Song, Xingcan Hu, Pengyu Wang, Li Xiao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multi-modal large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects . they use a pipeline that provides over 300K essential training data to enhance alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method effectively aligns and integrates multi-scale knowledge of objects, including texts, coordinates, and images. |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
EconProver: Towards More Economical Test-Time Scaling for Automated Theorem Proving (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently advanced the field of Automated Theorem Proving (ATP) Existing cost analyses regulate only the number of sampling passes, ignoring the substantial disparities in sampling costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two complementary methods into a unified EconRL pipeline to increase pass rates under constrained sampling passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage and sample passes while maintaining the original performance. |
MelTrim: Coarse-to-Fine Data Pruning for Speech Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Wang, Tianle Niu, Xuan Ouyang, Xintong Li, Zhengkun Ge, Yue Min, Xiaoqian Liu, Hankun Wang, Linfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Unlike image or text classification, speech classification tasks are particularly challenging due to the difficulty in capturing the acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset pruning method that coarsely filters redundant samples using DBSCAN clustering on Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 49.5% improvement in WA on the MEAD dataset and 41.9% reduction in EER on speaker identification tasks. |
Variational Graph Autoencoding as Cheap Supervision for AMR Coreference Resolution (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a way to preserve the semantic meaning of a sentence in a graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a general pretraining method that leverages any general AMR corpus and even automatically parses AMR data to achieve performance gains of up to 6% absolute F1 points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves on the previous state-of-the-art model by up to 11% F1. |
ProtoCycle: Reflective Tool-Augmented Planning for Text-Guided Protein Design (2026.findings-acl)
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Yutang Ge, Guojiang Zhao, Sihang Li, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Hanchen Xia, Guolin Ke, Linfeng Zhang, Zhifeng Gao, Yu Guang Wang
| Challenge: | Recent deep generative models have already shown encouraging * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | Recent studies show that reflection improves sequence quality and alignment while maintaining competitive foldability. |
CBLUE: A Chinese Biomedical Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2022.acl-long)
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Ningyu Zhang, Mosha Chen, Zhen Bi, Xiaozhuan Liang, Lei Li, Xin Shang, Kangping Yin, Chuanqi Tan, Jian Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Yuan Ni, Guotong Xie, Zhifang Sui, Baobao Chang, Hui Zong, Zheng Yuan, Linfeng Li, Jun Yan, Hongying Zan, Kunli Zhang, Buzhou Tang, Qingcai Chen
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |