Papers by Mingyu Wang
Reinforcement Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Energy-Based Gibbs Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) offer parallel decoding and bidirectional context modeling . aligning dLLms with reinforcement learning (RL) remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a variational framework that reformulates RL for dLLMs as a distribution matching problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reformulates RL for dLLMs as a distribution matching problem. |
Disentangling Logic: The Role of Context in Large Language Model Reasoning Capabilities (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenyue Hua, Kaijie Zhu, Lingyao Li, Lizhou Fan, Mingyu Jin, Shuhang Lin, Haochen Xue, Zelong Li, Jindong Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, large language model models can be used to evaluate reasoning abilities in context-rich scenarios. |
| Approach: | They construct datasets for both propositional logic and abductive logic reasoning with four difficulty levels across 12 distinct domains based on Wikipedia categorization and those with purely abstract variables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to benchmark LLMs in real-world scenarios, but not in context-rich scenarios. |
Disentangling Memory and Reasoning Ability in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Mingyu Jin, Weidi Luo, Sitao Cheng, Xinyi Wang, Wenyue Hua, Ruixiang Tang, William Yang Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs operate as an opaque process without explicit separation between knowledge retrieval and reasoning steps, making the decision-making process unclear and disorganized. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model inference paradigm that decomposes the complex inference process into two distinct and clear actions: (1) memory recall: which retrieves relevant knowledge, and (2) reasoning: which performs reasoning steps based on the recalled knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm decomposes the inference process into two distinct and clear actions, memory and reason, guiding the model to distinguish between steps that require knowledge retrieval and those that involve reasoning. |
Mitigating Bias for Question Answering Models by Tracking Bias Influence (2024.naacl-long)
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Mingyu Ma, Jiun-Yu Kao, Arpit Gupta, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Wenbo Zhao, Tagyoung Chung, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Existing literature observes bias in question answering (QA) models, but there is no method to mitigate it. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to mitigate the bias of question answering models by observing the influence of a query instance on another instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces bias level in all 9 bias categories while maintaining comparable QA accuracy. |
TableDreamer: Progressive and Weakness-guided Data Synthesis from Scratch for Table Instruction Tuning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for table instruction tuning are limited due to limited data diversity and lack of data quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a weakness-guided data synthesis framework for table instruction tuning that explores the vast input space of table understanding tasks and then iterates through the input space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the average accuracy of Llama3.1-8B-instruct by 11.62% with 27K GPT-4o synthetic data and outperforms state-of-the-art data synthesis baselines which use more training data. |
MAssistant: A Personal Knowledge Assistant for MOOC Learners (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have experienced a rapid development since 2012 . many MOOC platforms have been launched, including Coursera1 , edX2 , and Udacity3 etc. |
| Approach: | They present a personal knowledge assistant system called MAssistant for MOOC learners . MAsistants has a large-scale concept graph built from open data . it also provides a browser extension which interacts with users during video lectures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system helps users trace the concepts they have learned in MOOCs, and to build their own concept graphs. |
Multimodal Table Understanding (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to understanding tables rely on textual inputs and table images are difficult to access in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal table understanding problem where the model needs to generate correct responses to various table-related requests based on the given table image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source MLLMs on 23 benchmarks under held-in and held-out settings. |
Instructions as Backdoors: Backdoor Vulnerabilities of Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2021) show that instruction models can be trained on crowdsourced datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. |
| Approach: | They examine security concerns of emergent instruction tuning paradigm that models are trained on crowdsourced datasets with task instructions to achieve superior performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve 90% success rate across four commonly used datasets. |
LongLeader: A Comprehensive Leaderboard for Large Language Models in Long-context Scenarios (2025.naacl-long)
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Pei Chen, Hongye Jin, Cheng-Che Lee, Rulin Shao, Jingfeng Yang, Mingyu Zhao, Zhaoyu Zhang, Qin Lu, Kaiwen Men, Ning Xie, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Han Li, Lingyun Wang
| Challenge: | LongLeader aims to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . long-constext comprehension is a key bottleneck for many use cases . |
| Approach: | They propose a leaderboard to assess different LLMs' long-context comprehension abilities . they offer open-source access to the benchmarks and maintain a dedicated website . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model assesses different LLMs on selected benchmarks and provides open-source access to the benchmarks. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
LongReD: Mitigating Short-Text Degradation of Long-Context Large Language Models via Restoration Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Data-centric NLP Backdoor Defense from the Lens of Memorization (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks pose a severe threat to the trustworthiness of DNN-based language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric defense that extends memorization definitions to fine-grained sentences . they find that duplicated sentence elements are necessary for successful backdoor attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense outperforms state-of-the-art defenses against backdoor attacks. |
From Prediction to Intervention: Personalized Meal-Level Glucose Regulation via an LLM Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to individualized glucose regulation are generic and do not account for individual-specific glucose dynamics. |
| Approach: | They propose a physio-feedback agentic loop that integrates individualized absorption modeling with dietary intervention to regulate glucose response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves prediction accuracy and reduces glucose excursions. |
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Zheshu Song, Jianheng Zhuo, Mingyu Cui, Jinpeng Li, Bo Yang, Yexing Du, Ziyang Ma, Xunying Liu, Ziyuan Wang, Ke Li, Shuai Fan, Kai Yu, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Guoguo Chen, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3. |
Nash-Pruned CredMAS: Dynamic Panel Pruning for VLM-MAS using Nash-based Selection and Doubly-Robust Credits (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are expensive due to static panel designs, where all N agents communicate at every T round. |
| Approach: | They propose an economic framework that transforms agent selection into a dynamic resource allocation game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces token consumption by over 25% on challenging benchmarks while reducing token consumption. |
ShortGPT: Layers in Large Language Models are More Redundant Than You Expect (2025.findings-acl)
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Xin Men, Mingyu Xu, Qingyu Zhang, Qianhao Yuan, Bingning Wang, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Weipeng Chen
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified significant redundancy in large language models . quantization and pruning are two methods that reduce computational resources . |
| Approach: | They propose simple pruning methods that prune redundant layers based on their BI scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning methods demonstrate superior performance over previous pruning methods. |
Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Tabular Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to extend chain-of-thought reasoning into large language models are not viable in the scenario of privatization deployment or limited resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extends chain-of-thought reasoning into tabular language models . framework coordinates two TaLMs responsible for CoT generation and answer inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art ChatGPT on the TABMWP dataset by 9.55% (82.60%92.15% in accuracy) with less parameters (0.8B). |
IM-TQA: A Chinese Table Question Answering Dataset with Implicit and Multi-type Table Structures (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks only evaluate model performance on tables with explicit table structures, which means headers are explicitly annotated and treated as model input during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a new Table Question Answering (TQA) dataset with implicit and multi-type table structures that requires the model to understand tables without directly available header annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on a dataset with implicit and multi-type table structures and can handle multi-table tables including previously neglected complex tables. |
Exploring Fine-Grained Human Motion Video Captioning (2025.coling-main)
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Bingchan Zhao, Xinyi Liu, Zhuocheng Yu, Tongchen Yang, Yifan Song, Mingyu Jin, Sujian Li, Yizhou Wang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning models fail to capture nuanced semantics of videos . existing models generate coarse descriptions of human motions, resulting in poor quality . |
| Approach: | They construct a fine-grained human motion video captioning dataset named BoFiT and a model that generates fine-grain descriptions of human motions via prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on comprehensive metrics. |
Decoding Susceptibility: Modeling Misbelief to Misinformation Through a Computational Approach (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on susceptibility to misinformation rely on self-reported beliefs, which can be subject to bias, expensive to collect, and challenging to scale for downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational approach to efficiently model users’ latent susceptibility levels by using demographic factors and political ideology as inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that political leanings and other psychological factors exhibit varying degrees of association with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. |
Speech Discrete Tokens or Continuous Features? A Comparative Analysis for Spoken Language Understanding in SpeechLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) have emerged as dominant speech processing approaches. |
| Approach: | They compare self-supervised learning-based discrete and continuous features . they compare performance across six spoken language understanding-related tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform discrete tokens and continuous features in six spoken language understanding-related tasks. |
Instructional Fingerprinting of Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) require considerable cost to train from scratch . fingerprinting is essential to protect intellectual property and to ensure downstream users and developers adhere to their license terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for fingerprinting Large language models that implants a private key into the model to generate specific text when the key is present. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method prevents publisher overclaim and maintains robustness against fingerprint guessing and parameter-efficient training. |
Quantized Can Still Be Calibrated: A Unified Framework to Calibration in Quantized Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to quantify uncertainty of large language models (LLMs) but their influence on uncertainty calibration remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an analytic method to estimate the upper bound of calibration error (UBCE) for quantized LLMs and propose a method to recover calibration errors through soft-prompt tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the calibration accuracy of quantized models on multiple datasets and LLMs. |
Weights-Rotated Preference Optimization for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Chenxu Yang, Ruipeng Jia, Mingyu Zheng, Naibin Gu, Zheng Lin, Siyuan Chen, Weichong Yin, Hua Wu, Weiping Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to align large language models with high reward hacking are limited by the complexity of the parameter space and the complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a weights-rotated preference optimization algorithm that constrains the output layer logits with the KL divergence inherited from DPO and fine-tunes the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves a 3.27-point improvement on AlpacaEval 2 and surpasses the best baseline by 6.2 to 7.5 points on MT-Bench with merely 0.015% of the trainable parameters. |
EmojiPrompt: Generative Prompt Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Communication with Cloud-based LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have substantially expanded their applicability across diverse fields, such as personalized recommendations, health report analysis, and financial decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative transformation paradigm that obfuscates user data with linguistic and non-linguistic elements before submitting it to cloud-based LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm obfuscates user private data while maintaining performance compared to the unobflated version. |
Guess What I am Thinking: A Benchmark for Inner Thought Reasoning of Role-Playing Language Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs)-based Role-Playing Language Agents (RPLAs) have attracted broad attention in various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating character thought generation using literature . they propose 'MIRROR' which generates character thoughts by retrieving memories, predicting character reactions, and synthesizing motivations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing methods in evaluating character thought generation. |
FactCG: Enhancing Fact Checkers with Graph-Based Multi-Hop Data (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prior research on training grounded factuality classification models to detect hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) has relied on public natural language inference (NLI) data and synthetic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages multi-hop reasoning on context graphs extracted from documents to generate complex multi-level claims without relying on LLMs to decide data labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4-o on the LLM-Aggrefact benchmark with much smaller model size. |
Language Prior Is Not the Only Shortcut: A Benchmark for Shortcut Learning in VQA (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qingyi Si, Fandong Meng, Mingyu Zheng, Zheng Lin, Yuanxin Liu, Peng Fu, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Visual Question Answering (VQA) models are prone to learn the shortcut solution formed by dataset biases rather than the intended solution. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset considers varying types of shortcuts by constructing different distribution shifts in multiple OOD test sets. |
Bridging Kernel Drivers and Virtual Device Models with LLM-Powered Automation (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Linux kernel device drivers are tightly coupled with hardware, making them difficult to execute and test without physical devices. |
| Approach: | They present a tool that generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |
Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection (2024.acl-long)
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Zefan Cai, Po-Nien Kung, Ashima Suvarna, Mingyu Ma, Hritik Bansal, Baobao Chang, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches on zero-shot event detection train models on datasets annotated with known event types and prompt them with unseen event definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to train models to better follow event definitions by using an automatic generated Diverse Event Definition dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three open benchmarks on zero-shot event detection. |