Papers by Rong Li

40 papers
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
NeurST: Neural Speech Translation Toolkit (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: a toolkit for speech translation is available for free and provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation.
Approach: They propose to use NeurST to facilitate speech translation research for NLP researchers . they show experimental results for different benchmark datasets which can be regarded as reliable baselines .
Outcome: The proposed framework provides reliable benchmarks for speech translation research.
Joint Multi-modal Aspect-Sentiment Analysis with Auxiliary Cross-modal Relation Detection (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies on aspect-level sentiment analysis focus on extracting aspect terms and sentiment polarities separately.
Approach: They propose a multi-modal joint learning approach with auxiliary cross-modal relation detection for multi-dimensional aspect-level sentiment analysis.
Outcome: The proposed approach can obtain all aspect-level sentiment polarities dependent on the jointly extracted specific aspects.
Towards Controllable Speech Synthesis in the Era of Large Language Models: A Systematic Survey (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Text-to-speech (TTS) has advanced from generating natural-sounding speech to enabling fine-grained control over speech attributes.
Approach: They provide a review of controllable TTS methods from traditional control techniques to emerging approaches using natural language prompts.
Outcome: The proposed methods are based on models, strategies, and features, and summarize challenges, datasets, and evaluations.
MAVEN: A Massive General Domain Event Detection Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing datasets exhibit data scarcity and limited coverage of general-domain events.
Approach: They present a MAssive eVENt detection dataset which contains 4,480 Wikipedia documents and 168 event types.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that existing methods cannot achieve promising results on the small datasets.
Enhancing Neural Models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing work on adversarial attack to improve performance of NLSM tasks has not been done.
Approach: They propose a general two-stage training framework to enhance neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves neural models with Vulnerability via adversarial attack on NLSM datasets.
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) lag behind human performance in IRCD.
Approach: They propose a method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD.
Outcome: The proposed method can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite fewer parameters.
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information.
Approach: They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives .
Outcome: The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation.
Ciron: a New Benchmark Dataset for Chinese Irony Detection (2020.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Automatic Chinese irony detection often lacks labeled benchmark datasets . despite its pervasive nature, irony is a trope whose actual meaning differs from what is literally enunciated.
Approach: They propose to use a Chinese benchmark dataset for automatic Chinese irony detection to provide a benchmark for machine learning models.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes more than 8.7K posts, collected from Weibo, a micro blogging platform.
Counterfactual Adversarial Learning with Representation Interpolation (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models with statistical bias are prone to memorized correlations . large pre-trained models such as BERT have revolutionized the model development paradigm in natural language processing .
Approach: They propose a framework to tackle the problem from a causal perspective using a latent space interpolation approach.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that CAT achieves substantial performance improvement over SOTA across different downstream tasks, including sentence classification, natural language inference and question answering.
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data.
Approach: They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline.
Outcome: The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%.
Selecting Demonstrations for Many-Shot In-Context Learning via Gradient Matching (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-Context Learning (ICL) empowers Large Language Models for rapid task adaptation without fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a method that aligns fine-tuning gradients between entire training set and selected examples to enable in-context learning and fine-uning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms random selection on large LLMs from 4-shot to 128-shot scenarios across 9 datasets.
Cross-modal Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches for speech translation focus on using additional data from MT and automatic speech recognition (ASR).
Approach: They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method for end-to-end speech-totext translation.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on a popular benchmark MuST-C.
FinanceReasoning: Benchmarking Financial Numerical Reasoning More Credible, Comprehensive and Challenging (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Compared to existing benchmarks, FinanceReasoning provides three key advancements: (1) credibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) numerical precision; (4) complexity; (5) complexity; and (6) complexity.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) in financial numerical reasoning problems.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark exceeds existing benchmarks in 67.8% of financial concepts and formulas and is credible, comprehensive, and challenging.
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures.
Approach: They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks.
PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Question Answering (QA) is a major area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Approach: They propose a one-stop and open-source QA repository for question answering . it supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension . they say it will facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods .
Outcome: The proposed framework enables easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods.
Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on the use of multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing focus on prompts and localized feedback.
Approach: They build a controlled multi-agent sandbox that instantiates a small standup comedy community and allows it to manipu-late whether public reception is generated, logged, and fed back into later rounds.
Outcome: The proposed model improves craft/clarity and social response with occasional increases in aggressive humor.
SumCSE: Summary as a transformation for Contrastive Learning (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Sentence embedding models are typically trained using contrastive learning (CL) using human annotations directly or by repurposing other annotated datasets.
Approach: They propose to use generative language models to generate CL data using annotated data.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the previous best unsupervised method by 1.8 points and SimCSE, a strong supervised baseline by 0.3 points on the semantic text similarity (STS) benchmark.
Disentangling Preference Representation and Text Generation for Efficient Individual Preference Alignment (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Human values are inherently diverse, making it insufficient to align LLMs solely with general preferences.
Approach: They propose a flexible paradigm for individual preference alignment that disentangles preference representation from text generation in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method produces aligned quality and better than PEFT-based methods while reducing training time for each new individual preference by 80% to 90%.
EpLSA: Synergy of Expert-prefix Mixtures and Task-Oriented Latent Space Adaptation for Diverse Generative Reasoning (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for diverse generative reasoning struggle to generate multiple unique and plausible results.
Approach: They propose a model based on expert-prefix mixtures and task-oriented latent space adaptation for diverse generative reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on three types of generative reasoning tasks.
Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters.
Approach: They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios.
FocusLLM: Precise Understanding of Long Context by Dynamic Condensing (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing context condensing methods cannot accurately understand the full context, as there is a considerable amount of information loss in the condensed process.
Approach: They propose a framework to extend the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM by distilling crucial information from long sequences.
Outcome: The proposed framework extends the fixed context length of any decoder-only LLM, allowing it to focus on relevant information from very long sequences.
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem .
Approach: They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation .
Outcome: The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency.
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks.
Approach: They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies.
Outcome: The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%.
Harnessing Large Language Models for Disaster Management: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various domains, including their emerging role in mitigating threats to human life, infrastructure, and the environment during natural disasters.
Approach: They propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios to provide valuable insights for the research community and practitioners .
Outcome: The proposed taxonomy categorizes existing LLMs based on disaster phases and application scenarios.
Joint Document-Level Event Extraction via Token-Token Bidirectional Event Completed Graph (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: a joint exaction method can be used to extract document-level event records . it avoids inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods .
Approach: They propose a joint exaction method that can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues . they propose eType-Role1-Roul2 as the edge type to reveal which tokens play argument roles .
Outcome: The proposed method can avoid inefficiency and error propagation issues in traditional pipeline methods.
Incorporating Graph Attention Mechanism into Knowledge Graph Reasoning Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for learning knowledge Graphs are incomplete and therefore need well-pretraining.
Approach: They propose a deep reinforcement learning based model which incorporates LSTM and Graph Attention Mechanism as the memory components.
Outcome: The proposed model can get rid of the pretraining process and achieve state-of-the-art performance compared with the other models.
When Cantonese NLP Meets Pre-training: Progress and Challenges (2022.aacl-tutorials)

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Challenge: Cantonese is an influential Chinese variant with a large population of speakers worldwide.
Approach: This tutorial will review Cantonese's progress in linguistics and NLP . it will introduce transformer-based pre-training methods for a wide range of downstream tasks .
Outcome: This tutorial will present the main challenges for Cantonese NLP in relation to Cantonesian language idiosyncrasies of colloquialism and multilingualism.
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in multimodal recommenders lack explicit reasoning and self-awareness of uncertainty.
Approach: They propose a reasoning-augmented multimodal agent structured around a three-stage explicit reasoning pipeline.
Outcome: The proposed agent improves ranking metrics and performance on four standard recommendation tasks across five real-world datasets.
HER: Human-like Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning for LLM Role-playing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models for LLM role-playing lack high-quality datasets with explicit reasoning traces and reliable reward signals aligned with human preferences.
Approach: They propose a unified framework for cognitive-level persona simulation that strictly distinguishes characters’ first-person thinking processes from LLMs’ third-person reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the Qwen3-32B baseline model and achieves a 30.26% and 14.97% performance on the minimax benchmarks.
Leveraging Estimated Transferability Over Human Intuition for Model Selection in Text Ranking (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for text ranking are based on intuition, but their estimated transferability may not align well with the objectives of text ranking.
Approach: They propose to compute expected rank as transferability, explicitly reflecting the model’s ranking capability.
Outcome: The proposed method shows significant improvements over previous classification-oriented TE methods, human intuition, and ChatGPT with minor time consumption.
CEDAR: A Chinese Evaluation Dataset for Computational Argumentation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing debate datasets neglect important labels for argument mining, generation, and evaluation.
Approach: They propose a Chinese Evaluation Dataset for Computational Argumentation that includes key arguments and key rhetorical figures, debater roles, modal words, debate results and transcripts.
Outcome: The proposed dataset covers 600 debates about 318 topics from Chinese debate competitions.
An Examination of the Compositionality of Large Generative Vision-Language Models (2024.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on the compositionality of vision-language models (VLMs) however, the performance of GVLMs in multimodal compositional reasoning remains under-explored.
Approach: They propose a syntactical bias score to quantify GVLMs' syntaktical bias . they propose 'SADE' task to assess GVLs's robustness against inclination toward syntical correctness.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are based on evaluation metrics and current benchmarks.
ProCQA: A Large-scale Community-based Programming Question Answering Dataset for Code Search (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to code question answering use bi-modal and unimodal pretraining to align text and code representations.
Approach: They propose a modality-agnostic contrastive pre-training approach to improve alignment of text and code representations of current code language models.
Outcome: The proposed model exhibits significant performance improvements across a wide range of code retrieval benchmarks.
RoChBert: Towards Robust BERT Fine-tuning for Chinese (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT) have been proved vulnerable to adversarial texts.
Approach: They propose to fuse Chinese phonetic and glyph features into pre-trained models by using a more comprehensive adversarial graph.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in significant ways on a wide range of tasks while remaining accurate on benign texts.
STEMM: Self-learning with Speech-text Manifold Mixup for Speech Translation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn speech representations for end-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) neglect the representation discrepancy across modalities.
Approach: They propose a method to calibrate the representation discrepancy between modalities by mixing up the representation sequences of different modality inputs.
Outcome: The proposed method alleviates the cross-modal representation discrepancy and improves on a strong baseline on eight translation directions.
WACO: Word-Aligned Contrastive Learning for Speech Translation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing ST methods perform poorly when only a limited amount of parallel data are available for training.
Approach: They propose a Word-Aligned COntrastive learning method for low-resource speech-to-text translation that bridges word-level representations for both speech and text modalities via contrastive learning.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the best baseline by 9+ BLEU points with only 1-hour parallel ST data.
JailMeter: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Framework for Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Currently, evaluation criteria and methods used for jailbreak effectiveness are inconsistent.
Approach: They propose a framework to measure jailbreak effectiveness using a model that filters out jailbreak noise while preserving the original malicious question.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing evaluation methods on a challenging benchmark containing 330 human-labeled, non-rejected jailbreak instances.
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes .
Approach: They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers .
Outcome: The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models .
Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited.
Approach: They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality.

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