Papers by Ping Yu
DSP: Discriminative Soft Prompts for Zero-Shot Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-based methods have shown their efficacy in transferring general knowledge within pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, when applied to zero-shot entity and relation extraction, they struggle with the limited coverage of verbalizers to labels and the slow inference speed. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which reformulates zero-shot tasks into token discrimination tasks without having to construct verbalizers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two zero-shot entity recognition datasets with higher inference speed and achieves 7.5% improvement over previous state-of-the-art models on Wiki-ZSL and FewRel. |
Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Consolidation for Effective Multilingual Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual video corpus moment retrieval methods are based on a two-stream structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual video corpus moment retrieval task that uses a two-stream structure to generate a query-visual similarity and a subtitle stream exploits the query-subtitle similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on a large-scale video corpus moment retrieval dataset. |
Efficient Tool Use with Chain-of-Abstraction Reasoning (2025.coling-main)
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Silin Gao, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Ping Yu, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Olga Golovneva, Koustuv Sinha, Asli Celikyilmaz, Antoine Bosselut, Tianlu Wang
| Challenge: | Recent large language models have made progress at interpreting and executing instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to decouple general reasoning from specialized knowledge . they propose to use abstract reasoning chains and domain tools to reify each chain . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on QA and mathematical reasoning domains. |
Re-ViLM: Retrieval-Augmented Visual Language Model for Zero and Few-Shot Image Captioning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhuolin Yang, Wei Ping, Zihan Liu, Vijay Korthikanti, Weili Nie, De-An Huang, Linxi Fan, Zhiding Yu, Shiyi Lan, Bo Li, Mohammad Shoeybi, Ming-Yu Liu, Yuke Zhu, Bryan Catanzaro, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar
| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-to-text generation store all knowledge within parameters, thus requiring computational-expensive fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval-augmented Visual Language Model that stores all the knowledge within parameters and can be used to retrieve it from the external database. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly boosts performance for image-to-text generation tasks with 4x less parameters compared with baseline methods. |
Rethinking Sentiment Style Transfer (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for text style transfer are unsatisfactory. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based method to extract attribute content from sentences . they propose an efficient regularization to leverage attribute-dependent content as guiding signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a YELP and IMDB dataset and it is able to detect errors in the human evaluation. |
Inflate and Shrink:Enriching and Reducing Interactions for Fast Text-Image Retrieval (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that late-interaction methods trade off retrieval accuracy and efficiency by exploiting cross-modal interactions only in the late stage. |
| Approach: | They propose an inflating and shrinking approach to exploit cross-modal interactions . they inflate code inputs and shrink code outputs to exploit interactions progressively . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits cross-modal interactions in the late stage to achieve retrieval speed. |
Following Length Constraints in Instructions (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing instruction following models fail to follow length constraints in their evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose to train models that can be controlled at inference time with instructions containing desired length constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform standard instruction following models in length instructed evaluations. |
Beyond Query Memorization: Large Language Model Routing with Query Decomposition and Historical Matching (2026.acl-long)
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Bo Lv, Jingbo Sun, Jianwei Lv, Chen Tang, Shaojie Zhang, Nayu Liu, Guoxin Yu, Zihao Li, Qichao Zhang, Dongbin Zhao, Ping Luo, Yue Yu
| Challenge: | Existing routing methods rely on direct mapping from queries to models based on surface-level features, leading to poor generalizability on out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new routing framework that recasts the routing task as a matching process of sifting similar queries from historical logs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves matching accuracy while lowering inference costs . it decouples linguistic surface forms from task-intrinsic requirements . |
The ART of LLM Refinement: Ask, Refine, and Trust (2024.naacl-long)
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Kumar Shridhar, Koustuv Sinha, Andrew Cohen, Tianlu Wang, Ping Yu, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Mrinmaya Sachan, Jason Weston, Asli Celikyilmaz
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations and self-improve? |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning with a refinement strategy called *ART: Ask, Refine, and Trust* that asks necessary questions to decide when an LLM should refine its output and uses it to affirm or deny trust. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning with a refinement strategy achieves a performance gain of +5 points over baselines on two multistep reasoning tasks. |
ALERT: Adapt Language Models to Reasoning Tasks (2023.acl-long)
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Ping Yu, Tianlu Wang, Olga Golovneva, Badr AlKhamissi, Siddharth Verma, Zhijing Jin, Gargi Ghosh, Mona Diab, Asli Celikyilmaz
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown increasing in-context learning capabilities with scaling up the model and data sizes. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and suite of analyses to evaluate reasoning skills of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model compares pre-trained and fine-tuned models on tasks that require reasoning skills to solve. |
V-MAGE: A Game Evaluation Framework for Assessing Vision-Centric Capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Linjie Li, Zhengyuan Yang, Ping Yu, Alex Jinpeng Wang, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Lijuan Wang
| Challenge: | Existing static image-text benchmarks are insufficient for evaluating multimodal large language models’ dynamic perception and interactive reasoning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a game-based evaluation framework to assess multimodal large language models’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically assesses MLLMs’ visual reasoning in dynamic, continuous-space environments. |
URG: A Unified Ranking and Generation Method for Ensembling Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rank and generate large language models have limited performance due to time-intensive nature of ranking process and lack of error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly ranks the outputs of Large Language Models and generates fine-grained fusion results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on ranking and generation tasks. |
PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation against Retrieval Corruption (2026.findings-acl)
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Xue Tan, Yi Zheng, Chang Huo, Yunruo Zhang, Yu Liu, Hao Luan, Zhuyang Yu, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
TVWorld: Foundations for Remote-Control TV Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large vision–language models focuses on point-and-click interaction, while remote-control interaction is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a topology-aware training framework that injects topology awareness into LVLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 68.3% success rate on TVWorld-N, surpassing closed-source benchmarks and state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks show that existing agents lack topology awareness for focus-based, long-horizon TV navigation. |
Document Classification for COVID-19 Literature (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a global pandemic has made it more important than ever to quickly and accurately retrieve relevant scientific literature for effective consumption by researchers in a wide variety of fields. |
| Approach: | They analyze a LitCovid dataset to find out how classification models can help organize COVID-19 research papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all baseline models on the LitCovid dataset . it also outperformed BioBERT and other models with micro-F1 and accuracy scores of 86% and 75% . |
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)
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Bowen Li, Wenhan Wu, Ziwei Tang, Lin Shi, John Yang, Jinyang Li, Shunyu Yao, Chen Qian, Binyuan Hui, Qicheng Zhang, Zhiyin Yu, He Du, Ping Yang, Dahua Lin, Chao Peng, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing. |
TAeKD: Teacher Assistant Enhanced Knowledge Distillation for Closed-Source Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have produced impressive results in the field of Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (MNMT). |
| Approach: | They propose a Teacher Assistant enhanced Knowledge Distillation method to augment knowledge transfer capacity from closed-source MNMT models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art KD methods on both WMT22 and FLORES-101 test sets. |
Cross-lingual Cross-modal Pretraining for Multimodal Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent pretrained vision-language models have achieved impressive performance on cross-modal retrieval tasks in English. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to learn cross-lingual cross-modal representations for matching images and captions in multiple languages using an annotated corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive performance on two multimodal multilingual image caption benchmarks: Multi30k with German captions and MSCOCO with Japanese captions. |
CharTide: Data-Centric Chart-to-Code Generation via Tri-Perspective Tuning and Inquiry-Driven Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Kuang He, Jiayi Hu, Ping Yu, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Peng Hou, Anxiang Zeng, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to chart-to-code generation are constrained by data-centric limitations . authors present a new framework that redesigns both training and alignment data . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric framework that redesigns both training and alignment data for chart-to-code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source baselines and is competitive with GPT-5. |
ChartAssistant: A Universal Chart Multimodal Language Model via Chart-to-Table Pre-training and Multitask Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Charts are an effective tool for understanding data patterns, but their combination of graphical elements and textual components poses challenges for general-purpose multimodal models. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart-based vision-language model for universal chart comprehension and reasoning that leverages a dataset of chart-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art charts with zero-shot setting on various chart tasks. |
Whether LLMs Know If They Know: Identifying Knowledge Boundaries via Debiased Historical In-Context Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active retrieval (AR) rely on training classification models or using the confidence of the model’s answer to determine knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify knowledge boundaries in active retrieval by retrieving historical queries as high-confidence in-context examples. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four QA benchmarks show that DH-ICL achieves performance comparable to full retrieval on LLaMA with only half the number of retrievals, without any additional training. |
SciImpact: A Multi-Dimensional, Multi-Field Benchmark for Scientific Impact Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on scientific impact prediction has focused on citation counts and its variants, leaving limited evaluation of models’ capability to reason about other dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, multi-dimensional benchmark for scientific impact prediction spanning 19 fields. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms larger models and close-source models in a wide range of fields and measures of scientific impact across 19 fields. |
Beyond prompting: Making Pre-trained Language Models Better Zero-shot Learners by Clustering Representations (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot text classification involve heavy human engineering or complicated self-training pipelines. |
| Approach: | They propose to fit unlabeled text with a Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Model and use class names to cluster them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms prompt-based methods on topic and sentiment datasets and outperformed previous studies significantly on unbalanced datasets. |