Papers by Ruoyu Li
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks. |
Mitigating Visual Knowledge Forgetting in MLLM Instruction-tuning via Modality-decoupled Gradient Descent (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Junda Wu, Yuxin Xiong, Xintong Li, Yu Xia, Ruoyu Wang, Yu Wang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Ryan A. Rossi, Lina Yao, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning and continual learning methods compress visual representations and emphasize task alignment over visual retention. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-decoupled gradient descent (MDGD) that regulates gradient updates to preserve effective rank of visual features and explicitly disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces visual forgetting and improves visual retention . it disentangles visual learning from task-specific alignment and preserves effective rank . |
TED-EL: A Corpus for Speech Entity Linking (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current entity linking tasks rely on textual information, but entities usually exist in textual, audio, and visual contexts in real-world data such as social media and video websites. |
| Approach: | They propose a speech entity linking task to recognize mentions from speech and link them to entities in knowledge bases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing models on the TED-EL dataset, scoring an F1 score of 60.68%. |
Automatic Poetry Generation with Mutual Reinforcement Learning (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for automatic poetry generation are based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) MLE-based models tend to remember common patterns of the poetry corpus, which results in loss-evaluation mismatch. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the criteria and use them as explicit rewards to guide gradient update by reinforcement learning to motivate the model to pursue higher scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model and improves on Chinese poetry. |
Crake: Causal-Enhanced Table-Filler for Question Answering over Large Scale Knowledge Base (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge base question answering lack causality modeling . previous work fails to model such causalities in their pipeline . |
| Approach: | They propose a causal-enhanced table-filler to overcome sequence-modelling issues . they propose an efficient beam-search algorithm to scale complex queries on large-scale KBs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LC-QuAD 1.0 show that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-arts by a large margin while remaining time and space efficient. |
GAVEL: Evidence-Contract Debate with Mechanized Scrutiny for Provenance-Grounded Fact-Checking (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Evidence-grounded fact-checking requires predicting claim veracity while returning faithful evidence at fine granularity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that enforces evidence grounding throughout inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves provenance-aware metrics over existing frameworks. |
A Middle Path for On-Premises LLM Deployment: Preserving Privacy Without Sacrificing Model Confidentiality (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Privacy-sensitive users require deploying large language models within their own infrastructure (on-premises) vulnerabilities in local environments can lead to unauthorized access and potential model theft. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that secures a few bottom layers in a secure environment . they propose metric to optimize trade-off between protection and customization flexibility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five models with 1.3B to 70B parameters. |
Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition of LLMs via Progressive Vocabulary Expansion (2025.acl-long)
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Jianqing Zhu, Huang Huang, Zhihang Lin, Juhao Liang, Zhengyang Tang, Khalid Almubarak, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Xiangbo Wu, Fei Yu, Junying Chen, Ma Zhuoheng, Yuhao Du, He Zhang, Saied Alshahrani, Emad A. Alghamdi, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | In the evolving landscape of large language models, the predominant focus has been on English and Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across various Arabic benchmarks. |
Unlocking Black-Box Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Zeroth-Order Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prompt optimization is an important technique for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a zeroth-order approach which enables efficient prompt tuning solely via inference APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing black-box prompt tuning methods in terms of performance and convergence speed. |
A Novel Table-to-Graph Generation Approach for Document-Level Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level relation extraction methods assume entities and their mentions are given beforehand, which is inadequate for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-to-graph generation model for joint extraction of entities and relations at document-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing methods by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art results on a document-level relation extraction dataset. |
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 . |
AceGPT, Localizing Large Language Models in Arabic (2024.naacl-long)
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Huang Huang, Fei Yu, Jianqing Zhu, Xuening Sun, Hao Cheng, Song Dingjie, Zhihong Chen, Mosen Alharthi, Bang An, Juncai He, Ziche Liu, Junying Chen, Jianquan Li, Benyou Wang, Lian Zhang, Ruoyu Sun, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Jinchao Xu
| Challenge: | Significant concerns emerge when addressing cultural sensitivity and local values. |
| Approach: | They propose a localized Large Language Model (LLM) specifically for Arabic, a language imbued with unique cultural characteristics inadequately addressed by current mainstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model sets the state-of-the-art standard for open Arabic LLMs across various benchmarks. |
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (P19-3)
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Guo Zhipeng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Maosong Sun, Wenhao Li, Cheng Yang, Jiannan Liang, Huimin Chen, Yuhui Zhang, Ruoyu Li
| Challenge: | Existing systems for automatic poetry generation are model-oriented, resulting in poor user participation. |
| Approach: | They propose a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system called Jiuge . Jiuge allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system allows users to revise unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. |
AtTGen: Attribute Tree Generation for Real-World Attribute Joint Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Attribute extraction aims to identify attribute names and the corresponding attribute values from descriptive texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified formulation for real-world attribute extraction application, where closed-world, open-world and semi-open attribute extraction tasks are modeled uniformly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on three datasets and outperformed existing methods by a large margin. |
Denoising based Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Text Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | PoDA pre-trains encoders and decoders by denoising noise-corrupted text . Unlike encoder-only or decode-only methods, it can be used for text generation tasks without using any task-specific techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) pre-training method PoDA which denoises autoencoders by denoising noise-corrupted text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model performance over strong baselines without using any task-specific techniques and significantly speed up convergence. |
TeachMaster: Generative Teaching via Code (2026.acl-industry)
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Yuheng Wang, Runde Yang, Lin Wu, Jie Zhang, Jingru Fan, Tianle Zhou, Ruoyu Fu, Huatao Li, Ruijie Shi, Siheng Chen, Weinan E, Chen Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating video content are limited by high costs and slow update cycles. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shifting educators from manual creators to high-level directors who focus on pedagogical intents while agents handle execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces production costs to 0.3% of traditional course videos and provides a robust solution for scalable education. |
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)
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Qingsong Zou, Jingyu Xiao, Qing Li, Zhi Yan, Yuhang Wang, Li Xu, Wenxuan Wang, Kuofeng Gao, Ruoyu Li, Yong Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to bypass security defenses of large language models (LLMs) are not effective, but QueryAttack can be jailbroken. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to examine generalizability of safety alignment by translating malicious queries into structured non-natural query languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve high attack success rates and jailbreak various defense methods on mainstream LLMs. |
Multi-Perspective Context Aggregation for Semi-supervised Cloze-style Reading Comprehension (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that cloze-style reading comprehension is a popular task for measuring the progress of natural language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective framework which can be seen as joint training of heterogeneous experts and aggregate context information from different perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves new state-of-the-art over previous strong baselines on a recently released cloze-test dataset. |