Papers by Sijia Yang
DialGuide: Aligning Dialogue Model Behavior with Developer Guidelines (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Prakhar Gupta, Yang Liu, Di Jin, Behnam Hedayatnia, Spandana Gella, Sijia Liu, Patrick Lange, Julia Hirschberg, Dilek Hakkani-Tur
| Challenge: | Dialogue models are able to generate fluent and interesting responses, but they can be difficult to control and may produce non-engaging, unsafe results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for controlling dialogue model behavior using natural language rules, or guidelines, which provide information about the context they are applicable to and what should be included in the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective in three open-domain dialogue response generation tasks and is consistent with the developer's expectations and intent. |
Beyond Demographics: Aligning Role-playing LLM-based Agents Using Human Belief Networks (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Krirk Nirunwiroj, Zach Studdiford, Agam Goyal, Vincent Frigo, Sijia Yang, Dhavan Shah, Junjie Hu, Timothy Rogers
| Challenge: | Existing large language models can be prompted to role-play as individuals with particular demographic traits, but results are often human-like. |
| Approach: | They found that seeding LLM-based agents with a single belief improved alignment . they say that role-playing based on demographic information does not improve alignment a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LLM alignment with human behavior . seeding agents with a single belief improves alignment for topics related to the belief network . |
Advancing the Robustness of Large Language Models through Self-Denoised Smoothing (2024.naacl-short)
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Jiabao Ji, Bairu Hou, Zhen Zhang, Guanhua Zhang, Wenqi Fan, Qing Li, Yang Zhang, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Shiyu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks can cause LLMs to make wrong predictions on downstream tasks or generate harmful content misaligned with human values. |
| Approach: | They propose to use randomized smoothing to add noise to the input and then make predictions based on these denoised versions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods in both empirical and certified robustness in defending against adversarial perturbations for both downstream tasks and human alignments (i.e., jailbreak attacks). |
ReasonRec: A Reasoning-Augmented Multimodal Agent for Unified Recommendation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihua Zhang, Mingfu Liang, Jiyan Yang, Rong Jin, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Luke Simon, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen, Xi Liu
| 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. |
Persuasion for Good: Towards a Personalized Persuasive Dialogue System for Social Good (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Persuasion agents are a form of communication that can be used to change people's opinions and actions for social good. |
| Approach: | They designed an online persuasion task where one participant was asked to persult the other to donate to a specific charity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system could change people's opinions and actions for social good. |
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiaokang Zhang, Sijia Luo, Bohan Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jing Zhang, Yang Li, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-Li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | TableLLM is a robust large language model capable of handling tabular data manipulation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a distant supervision method for training which includes a reasoning process extension strategy and a cross-way validation strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has 8 billion parameters and is capable of handling tabular data tasks. |
Simulating Opinion Dynamics with Networks of LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-naacl)
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Yun-Shiuan Chuang, Agam Goyal, Nikunj Harlalka, Siddharth Suresh, Robert Hawkins, Sijia Yang, Dhavan Shah, Junjie Hu, Timothy Rogers
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simulating opinion dynamics often over-simplify human behavior . authors propose refining LLMs with real-world discourse to better simulate evolution of beliefs . |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to simulate opinion dynamics in groups of simulated agents . they found that LLM agents produce more accurate information than ABMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to better simulate opinion dynamics in real-world discourses. |