Papers by Shuaiqiang Wang
Retrieval Models Aren’t Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from inherent inabilities to interact with the physical world and access vast, up-to-date knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool retrieval benchmark for large language models (LLMs) that includes 7.6k diverse retrieval tasks and a corpus of 43k tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the heterogeneous tool retrieval benchmark, resulting in low pass rate and low retrieval quality. |
Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains, but how their safety benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety-aware reasoning paradigm that integrates a pivot token-based safety-based reasoning mechanism into LLMs’ generation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the safety of large language models against jailbreak queries while minimizing attacks and maintaining the original performance. |
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. |
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR) however, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Collaborative Ranking framework (CoRanking) for LLM-based listwise ranking based on large language models with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ranking latency by approximately 70% while improving effectiveness compared to the standalone large reranker. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
Adversarial Yet Cooperative: Multi-Perspective Reasoning in Retrieved-Augmented Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large reasoning models with retrieval-augmented generation to improve reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
MILL: Mutual Verification with Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Query Expansion (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for query expansion lack corpus-specific knowledge and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-query-document generation method that leverages large language models for mutual verification to produce diverse sub-queries and corresponding documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is fully zero-shot and extensive experiments on three public benchmark datasets demonstrate its effectiveness over existing methods. |
Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023.emnlp-main)
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Weiwei Sun, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing work utilizes generative LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. |
| Approach: | They investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR and use a test set to verify the model’s ability to rank unknown knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. |
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt. |
TP-RAG: Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Model Agents for Spatiotemporal-Aware Travel Planning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models (LLMs) focus on basic plan validity, but neglect critical aspects such as route efficiency, POI appeal, and real-time adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for retrieval-augmented, spatiotemporal-aware travel planning that integrates retrieved trajectories with LLMs’ intrinsic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves spatial efficiency and POI rationality while challenging universality and robustness due to conflicting references and noisy data. |
Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained large language models have been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance on downstream tasks, but instruction tuning may overfit them to specific task formats, compromising their generalization on unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject latent task adaptation and knowledge reinstatement into large language models to mitigate spurious correlations between inputs and targets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves generalization on in-domain and out-of-domain unseen tasks. |
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead. |
Exploring Memorization in Fine-tuned Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Yaxin Li, Jie Ren, Yiding Liu, Han Xu, Pengfei He, Yue Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiliang Tang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that pre-trained langauge models tend to memorize and regenerate segments of their pre-training corpus when prompted appropriately. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first comprehensive analysis to explore language models’ memorization during fine-tuning across tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis shows that memorization presents a strong disparity among different fine-tuning tasks. |
The Good and The Bad: Exploring Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) (2024.findings-acl)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Yiding Liu, Yue Xing, Han Xu, Jie Ren, Yi Chang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data, where data privacy is . a privacy issue that is currently under-explored, is posed by RAG. |
| Approach: | They propose to use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to facilitate language model generation with proprietary and private data where data privacy is a pivotal concern. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack methods demonstrate that RAG can mitigate the old risks, i.e., leakage of the LLMs’ training data. |
Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Evolving Memory and Self-Reflection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually incorrect information, also known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for verifiable text generation with evolving memory and self-reflection that incorporates long-term memory to retain documents and recent documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks. |
Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses, but their robustness is still far from optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage training framework that helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework improves diversity and aligns the model with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses. |
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for listwise passage ranking use sliding window approach, which is inefficient as it requires repetitive and serialized processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a listwise label construction approach and importance-aware learning objective for full ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in listwise ranking tasks. |
A Robust Semantics-based Watermark for Large Language Model against Paraphrasing (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated content use simple hashes of precedent tokens to partition vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-based watermark framework to enhance the robustness against paraphrase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is robust under different paraphrases and the semantic meaning of the sentences will be likely preserved under paraphrase. |
MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matching (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the majority of 8B competitors on three benchmarks. |
Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method (2024.naacl-long)
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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent literature reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-detection method to detect which questions an LLM does not know by combining the two components to identify whether the model generates a non-factual response to the question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect which questions an LLM does not know across factoid question-answering, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Uplift-RAG: Uplift-Driven Knowledge Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to estimate document utility rely on downstream generation performance, which conflates the influence of external documents with the intrinsic knowledge of the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose an uplift-based definition of document utility that quantifies each document’s marginal benefit over the LLM’s internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of the LLM by incorporating external retrieved documents into the model. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Entity-Centric Multimodal Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiulong Wu, Zhengliang Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference alignment methods focus on aligning model responses with human preferences while neglecting image-text modality alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose Entity-centric Multimodal Preference Optimization to improve modality alignment . they use open-source instruction datasets to automatically construct high-quality preference data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucination rates by 80.4% on Object HalBench and 52.6% on MM HalBech. |
DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue quality assessment are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset . open-domain dialogue assessment is complicated and costly, but it can be done by recruiting human evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is openly accessible at https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dialogue_quality_evaluation. |
Boosting Event Extraction with Denoised Structure-to-Text Augmentation (2023.findings-acl)
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Bo Wang, Heyan Huang, Xiaochi Wei, Ge Shi, Xiao Liu, Chong Feng, Tong Zhou, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event extraction neglect grammatical incorrectness, structure misalignment, and semantic drifting . et al., 2004; Ahn, 2006) show that the proposed method generates more diverse text representations for event extracting compared with the state-of-the-art. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for event extraction that generates additional training data and iteratively selects the effective subset from the generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more diverse representations of training data and achieves comparable results with the state-of-the-art. |
Knowledge Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation for LLM-based Recommendation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have produced significant advances in the field of recommender systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve up-to-date structure information from the knowledge graph to augment recommendations by leveraging external knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a large dataset show that the proposed method is effective in enhancing LLM-based recommendations. |
Proactive Guidance of Multi-Turn Conversation in Industrial Search (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced multi-turn conversation systems, emphasizing the need for proactive guidance to enhance users’ interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a goal-adaptive supervised fine-tuning framework that generates proactive guidance for users to click for the next turn of the conversation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 86.10% accuracy in offline evaluation (+23.95% over baseline) and 25.28% CTR in online deployment (149.06% relative improvement). |
LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Jiongnan Liu, Yutao Zhu, Shuting Wang, Xiaochi Wei, Erxue Min, Yu Lu, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM model that embeds a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches. |
KnowTuning: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yougang Lyu, Lingyong Yan, Shuaiqiang Wang, Haibo Shi, Dawei Yin, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Maarten Rijke, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are a default solution for many natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-aware fine-tuning method to improve LLMs' knowledge awareness . they propose augmentation and comparison stages to improve accuracy and reliability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more facts with less factual error rate under fine-grained facts evaluation. |
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel tool invocation framework that decomposes tasks into parallel tool-using subtasks while aggregating results for subsequent decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. |