Papers by Siqi Bao
ChessArena: A Chess Testbed for Evaluating Strategic Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on isolated question-answering tasks that may not capture the essential aspects of strategic reasoning. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 13 large language models across over 800 games in chess . they use a chessian-based framework to test strategic reasoning and pattern recognition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance and basic understanding of large language models. |
AWARE: Agentic Knowledge Warehousing for Contextual Intelligence (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in information seeking tasks, but their knowledge is limited in coverage and timeliness. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic knowledge warehousing framework that transforms unstructured data into minimal, task-conditioned knowledge representations consumable by LLMs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GAIA, WebWalker, and BrowseComp-Plus show improvements over baselines. |
Q-TOD: A Query-driven Task-oriented Dialogue System (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pipelined task-oriented dialogue systems have difficulties adapting to unseen domains . end-to-end systems are plagued by large-scale knowledge bases in practice . |
| Approach: | They propose a query-driven task-oriented dialogue system that extracts dialogue context information into a natural language query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms strong baselines and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on three publicly available task-oriented dialogue datasets. |
Distributional Clarity: The Hidden Driver of RL-Friendliness in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RL-friendly models exhibit intra-class compactness and inter-class separation in probability assignments . under identical training, Qwen models achieve substantial gains, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to quantify distributional clarity in probability space . they show distributional clearness is a trainable property underlying RL-Friendliness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model families achieve substantial gains under identical training, while others like Llama yield limited improvements. |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
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Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Zhihua Wu, Zhen Guo, Hua Lu, Xinxian Huang, Xin Tian, Xinchao Xu, Yingzhan Lin, Zheng-Yu Niu
| Challenge: | Experimental results show PLATO-XL achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLATO-XL models with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on Chinese and English social media conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI. |
SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, but such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model’s capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables detailed characterization of large language models through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. |
Towards Boosting the Open-Domain Chatbot with Human Feedback (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for pre-training open-domain dialogue models with social media comments generate coherent replies but have difficulties producing engaging responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to boost the open-domain chatbot by leveraging human feedback and annotating the model's candidate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the open-domain chatbot by leveraging human demonstrated responses and leveraging the implicit preference in the data collection process. |
Reinforcing Agentic Search Via Reward Density Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing agentic search, but its performance is often hindered by reward sparsity . |
| Approach: | They propose a new research problem to improve the reward obtained per unit of exploration cost by using a system that decomposes long-horizon tasks into intermediate objectives and assigns process-level rewards to provide denser learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on several agentic search benchmarks and achieves comparable performance to that of advanced proprietary models. |
PLATO: Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model with Discrete Latent Variable (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training models for dialogue generation have been proven effective for a wide range of tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue generation pre-training framework that leverages bi-directional context and uni-directional characteristic of language generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on three publicly available datasets. |
Know More about Each Other: Evolving Dialogue Strategy via Compound Assessment (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate informative responses based on external knowledge are limited to singleround settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for multi-turn conversations with two dialogue agents . they propose to evaluate dialogues on informativeness and coherence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches significantly on the publicly available dataset. |
Query Enhanced Knowledge-Intensive Conversation via Unsupervised Joint Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to retrieve knowledge-intensive conversations are based on external resources such as Wikipedia databases or search engine results. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised query enhanced approach for knowledge-intensive conversations . they conduct experiments on three knowledge- intensive conversation datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs better than all unsupervised methods across three datasets and achieves competitive performance compared to supervised methods. |
PLATO-2: Towards Building an Open-Domain Chatbot via Curriculum Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | PLATO-2 is a high-quality open-domain chatbot that can generate one-to-many mappings and improve response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning process to build a high-quality open-domain chatbot . they use a coarse-grained generation model and latent variables to train a generative model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English data and can generate diverse responses and select the best response. |