Papers by Mingyang Li
Butterfly Effects in Toolchains: A Comprehensive Analysis of Failed Parameter Filling in LLM Tool-Agent Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | emergence of tool agent paradigm has broadened capability boundaries of the Large Language Model (LLM) but effectiveness of tool agents limited due to parameter failure during execution . |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter failure taxonomy to investigate parameter failure . they propose suggestions for standardizing tool return formats and improving error feedback mechanisms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a tool agent invocation chain and a mainstream tool agent . it shows that parameter name hallucination failure stems from inherent limitations . |
From Allies to Adversaries: Manipulating LLM Tool-Calling through Adversarial Injection (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Toolcalling has changed Large Language Model (LLM) applications by integrating external tools, but it also introduces new security vulnerabilities, particularly in the tool scheduling mechanisms of LLM, which have not been extensively studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits vulnerabilities in Large Language Models through adversarial tool injection to execute privacy theft, launch denial-of-service attacks, and manipulate business competition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits vulnerabilities in LLM tool-calling systems through adversarial tool injection. |
Repairing Catastrophic-Neglect in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models via Attention-Guided Feature Enhancement (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-Image Diffusion models generate high-quality images from textual descriptions, but they often produce images that do not fully align with the input prompts, resulting in semantic inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated repair approach to address catastrophic-neglect in T2I DMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10.1%-16.3% higher Correct Rate in image generation compared to baselines. |
Evaluation and LLM-Guided Learning of ICD Coding Rationales (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the explainability of ICD coding rely on attention-based rationales and qualitative assessments conducted by physicians. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the explainability of rationales in ICD coding using a multi-granular rationale-annotated dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the explainability of rationales in ICD coding by using human-annotated rationale-announced rationale models. |
FastCuRL: Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Stage-wise Context Scaling for Efficient Training R1-like Reasoning Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Improving training efficiency remains a challenge in large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum RL framework with stage-wise context scaling to improve RL training efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning models on five benchmarks and achieves 49.6% accuracy on AIME 2024. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
Play Guessing Game with LLM: Indirect Jailbreak Attack with Implicit Clues (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak attacks primarily utilize scenario camouflage techniques, however their explicit mention of malicious intent will be easily recognized and defended by LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose an indirect jailbreak attack approach, Puzzler, which can bypass LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can bypass the LLM’s defensive strategies and obtain malicious response by implicitly providing LLMs with some clues about the original malicious query. |
Mimicking the Familiar: Dynamic Command Generation for Information Theft Attacks in LLM Tool-Learning System (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to attack Large Language Model (LLM) tool-learning systems are black-box oriented and rely on static commands that cannot adapt flexibly to the changes in user queries and the invocation chain. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic attack comment generation approach for information theft attacks in LLM tool-learning systems that mimics the familiar by inferring the information utilized by upstream tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines with +13.2% ASRTheft and can be generalized to new tool-learning systems to expose their information leakage risks. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yin Hua, Zhiqiang Liu, Mingyang Chen, Zheng Fang, Chi Man Wong, Lingxiao Li, Chi Man Vong, Huajun Chen, Wen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing foundation models for general knowledge graph reasoning have focused on their structural aspects, with most efforts restricted to in-KG tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional encoding architecture that bridges the gap between textual and structural modalities, enabling seamless integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on 28 datasets and is generalized to out-of-KG tasks. |
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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Linzhuang Sun, Mingyang Chen, Hao Liang, Tianpeng Li, Zhou Yijie, Chenzheng Zhu, Tianyu Guo, Huanyao Zhang, Jingxuan Wei, Bihui Yu, Fan Yang, Wentao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Are All Prompt Components Value-Neutral? Understanding the Heterogeneous Adversarial Robustness of Dissected Prompt in LLMs (2026.eacl-long)
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Yujia Zheng, Tianhao Li, Haotian Huang, Tianyu Zeng, Jingyu Lu, Chuangxin Chu, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Qian Xiong, Yuyao Ge, Mingyang Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies treat prompts as flat text, overlooking their internal structure, and different components within a prompt contribute unequally to robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes prompts into functional components and a method that selectively modifies components to expose component-wise vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exposes component-wise vulnerabilities while ensuring linguistic plausibility through perplexity-based filtering. |
One Shot Dominance: Knowledge Poisoning Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Xiaojun Jia, Junjie Wang, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Yang Liu, Qing Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge poisoning attacks against RAG systems require multiple poisoned documents or can only function effectively on simplistic queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a more realistic knowledge poisoning attack that poisons only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves success by poisoning only a single document while remaining effective for complex multi-hop questions involving complex relationships between multiple elements. |
COMPASS: Enhancing Agent Long-Horizon Reasoning with Evolving Context (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-horizon tasks that require sustained reasoning and multiple tool interactions remain challenging for LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that separates tactical execution, strategic oversight, and context organization into three specialized components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 20% relative to baselines on GAIA, BrowseComp, and Humanity’s Last Exam tasks. |
Retrieval Augmented Generation or Long-Context LLMs? A Comprehensive Study and Hybrid Approach (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent LLMs like Gemini-1.5 and GPT-4 show exceptional capabilities to understand long contexts directly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that routes queries to RAG or LC based on model self-reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the computation cost while maintaining a comparable performance to RAG. |
All Changes May Have Invariant Principles: Improving Ever-Shifting Harmful Meme Detection via Design Concept Reproduction (2026.acl-long)
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Ziyou Jiang, Mingyang Li, Junjie Wang, Yuekai Huang, Jie Huang, Zhiyuan Chang, Zhaoyang Li, Qing Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for harmful meme detection only learn the combination of harmful elements and lack understanding of these implicit expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects harmful memes by replicating the design concept of malicious users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the highest accuracy with 81.1% and has slight accuracy decreases when generalized to type-shifting and temporal-evolving memes. |
Knowledge Graph Pooling and Unpooling for Concept Abstraction (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) aims to embed entities and relations as vectors in a continuous space. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with KG Pooling and unpooling and Contrastive Learning to abstract and encode latent concepts for better KG prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on link prediction task. |
Know Thy Enemy: Securing LLMs Against Prompt Injection via Diverse Data Synthesis and Instruction-Level Chain-of-Thought Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhiyuan Chang, Mingyang Li, Yuekai Huang, Ziyou Jiang, Xiaojun Jia, Qian Xiong, Junjie Wang, Zhaoyang Li, Qing Wang
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM)-integrated applications face security vulnerabilities from prompt injection (PI) attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a model enhancement method that synthesizes diverse training data and employs instruction-level chain-of-thought fine-tuning to enable LLMs to effectively identify and reject malicious instructions regardless of their source or position in the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in three critical dimensions while maintaining utility performance without degradation. |
SAGE: Synergistic Adaptive Gating of Experts for Hateful Video Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hateful video detection rely on multimodal feature fusion . existing methods rely only on blind feature mixing, which leads to feature dilution . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from blind feature mixing to decision-level arbitration . it instantiates disentangled experts to rigorously preserve modality-specific semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on HateMM and MultiHateClip benchmarks. |
Aligning Large Language Models for Controllable Recommendations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature focuses on integrating domain-specific knowledge into LLMs to enhance accuracy using a fixed task template. |
| Approach: | They propose a collection of supervised learning tasks augmented with labels derived from a conventional recommender model to improve LLMs’ proficiency in adhering to recommendation-specific instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the capability of LLMs to respond to instructions within recommender systems, reducing formatting errors while maintaining a high level of accuracy. |
MiMoTable: A Multi-scale Spreadsheet Benchmark with Meta Operations for Table Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for table reasoning are incomplete due to the complexity of the tables and user questions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-scale spreadsheet benchmark with Meta operations for Table reasoning that incorporates two key features and a new criterion with six categories of meta operations for measuring the difficulty of each question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Claude-3.5-Sonnet with 77.4% accuracy on the existing benchmarks. |
Bridging the Preference Gap between Retrievers and LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on retrievers and LLMs treat them as separate components . a novel bridge model is proposed to optimize the relationship between the retriever and the LLM . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that chains together supervised and reinforcement learning to train a bridge model that optimizes the connection between the retriever and the LLM. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model optimizes the connection between the retriever and the LLM. |
SSR-Zero: Simple Self-Rewarding Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in machine translation, but most MT-specific LLMs rely heavily on external supervision during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework for machine translation that is reference-free and relies solely on self-judging rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs and larger general LLM models on English Chinese translation benchmarks and performs competitively with leading closed-source systems. |
Route Sparse Autoencoder to Interpret Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract interpretable and monosemantic features in large language models . prior work focused on feature extraction from a single layer, failing to capture activations that span multiple layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a routing mechanism with a shared SAE to efficiently extract features from multiple layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts features from multiple layers while incurring minimal parameter overhead while achieving high interpretability and flexibility. |