Papers by Siheng Li
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines. |
Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Conversational Concept Flows (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that explicitly modeling concept flows with a large commonsense knowledge graph improves response quality, but there is a gap between the knowledge graph and the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to model human conversational concept flows with a commonsense knowledge graph . they extract abundant concepts and relations from natural conversations and build a conversation-aware knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better than baselines on a large-scale reddit conversation dataset. |
LLM2: Let Large Language Models Harness System 2 Reasoning (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks substantiate the efficacy of Large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines an LLM with a process-based verifier to generate plausible candidates and provide timely process-driven feedback to distinguish desirable and undesirable outputs. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that LLM2 improves accuracy on GSM8K and self-consistency increases major@20 accuracy. |
AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models (2023.acl-short)
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Siheng Li, Cheng Yang, Yichun Yin, Xinyu Zhu, Zesen Cheng, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Existing research on information-seeking conversations is stymied by the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use autoconv for synthetic conversation generation to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and fine tune an LLM with a few human conversations to generate synthetic conversations with high quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two commonly-used datasets and alleviates the dependence on human annotation. |
CausalEval: Towards Better Causal Reasoning in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Longxuan Yu, Delin Chen, Siheng Xiong, Qingyang Wu, Dawei Li, Zhikai Chen, Xiaoze Liu, Liangming Pan
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been used for a variety of tasks, including problem-solving, decision-making, and understanding of the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a review of existing methods aimed at enhancing LMs for causal reasoning . they categorize existing methods as reasoning engines or as helpers providing knowledge or data to traditional methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than existing methods on a range of tasks. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Low-probability Tokens Sustain Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (2026.findings-acl)
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Guanhua Huang, Tingqiang Xu, Mingze Wang, Qi Yi, Xue Gong, Siheng Li, Ruibin Xiong, Kejiao Li, Yuhao Jiang, Bo Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that RLVR training is slow and results plateau as policy entropy collapses . low-probability regularization (Lp-Reg) reduces the number of low-quality exploratory tokens induced by RL training . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce RLVR over-penalization by eliminating low-probability exploratory tokens . they propose 'Low-provability Regularization' to reduce the gradual elimination of low-quality exploratory entropy tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates low-probability exploratory tokens and prevents suppression of potentially valuable low-property candidates. |
EmpHi: Generating Empathetic Responses with Human-like Intents (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing empathetic dialogue models lack emotion-dependent response generation . elaine mccartney: "i'm sorry to hear that! " |
| Approach: | They propose a model to generate empathetic responses with human-consistent intents . they aim to address the bias of the empathic intent distribution between epd models and humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in terms of empathy, relevance, and diversity on automatic and human evaluation. |
TextBind: Multi-turn Interleaved Multimodal Instruction-following in the Wild (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with instruction-following capabilities have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation-free framework for empowering large language models with instruction-following capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multi-turn multimodal instruction-response conversations from a language model. |
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. |
NewsDialogues: Towards Proactive News Grounded Conversation (2023.findings-acl)
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Siheng Li, Yichun Yin, Cheng Yang, Wangjie Jiang, Yiwei Li, Zesen Cheng, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Hot news is one of the most popular topics in daily conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where a dialogue system can lead the conversation based on key topics of the news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can lead conversations based on key topics of the news . it can also be used in information-seeking and chit-chat scenarios . |