Papers by Tao Yin
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao, Zhongfen Deng, Shuaiqi Liu, Renze Lou, Henry Zou, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Nan Zhang, Mukund Srinath, Haoran Zhang, Vipul Gupta, Yinghui Li, Tao Li, Fei Wang, Qin Liu, Tianlin Liu, Pengzhi Gao, Congying Xia, Chen Xing, Cheng Jiayang, Zhaowei Wang, Ying Su, Raj Shah, Ruohao Guo, Jing Gu, Haoran Li, Kangda Wei, Zihao Wang, Lu Cheng, Surangika Ranathunga, Meng Fang, Jie Fu, Fei Liu, Ruihong Huang, Eduardo Blanco, Yixin Cao, Rui Zhang, Philip Yu, Wenpeng Yin
| Challenge: | a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities . |
| Approach: | They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities. |
SAC: Neural Speech Codec with Semantic-Acoustic Dual-Stream Quantization (2026.acl-long)
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Wenxi Chen, Ruiqi Yan, Yushen Chen, Zhikang Niu, Ziyang Ma, Xiquan Li, Yuzhe Liang, null Wenhanlin, Shunshun Yin, Ming Tao, Xinsheng Wang, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing speech codecs struggle to balance high-quality reconstruction with semantically rich representations, limiting their effectiveness in both generative and understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural speech codec with semantic-acoustic dual-stream quantization that disentangles semantic and acousian modeling into two dedicated streams. |
| Outcome: | The proposed codec outperforms state-of-the-art speech tokenizers in auto-propagating text-to-speech models. |
On the Robustness of Language Encoders against Grammatical Errors (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language encoders are effective in facilitating downstream natural language processing tasks, but they often assume training and test corpora are clean and it is unclear how the models behave when confronted with noisy input. |
| Approach: | They conduct adversarial attacks to simulate grammatical errors on clean text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better when confronted with natural grammatical errors than when faced with noisy input. |
Mitigating Lost in Multi-turn Conversation via Curriculum RL with Verifiable Accuracy and Abstention Rewards (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Li, Pei Chen, Zhenhao Zhang, Tao Yang, Xinyang Zhang, Han Li, Tianyu Cao, Ming Zeng, Zhuofeng Wu, Meng Jiang, Huasheng Li, Lihong Li, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong capabilities in single-turn instruction following but suffer from Lost-in-Conversation (LiC) when instructions are revealed progressively in multi-turn settings, models get "Lost in Conversation" |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encourages models to generate correct answers and judge solvability in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models' ability to balance problem-solving with abstention . it reduces premature answering behaviors that cause lost-in-conversation (LiC) |
UniLG: A Unified Structure-aware Framework for Lyrics Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing works ignore musical attributes hidden behind lyrics and structure of lyrics . existing works ignore structure of generated lyrics and do not consider structure of songs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for conditional lyrics generation that considers structure and relationship between lyrics and music. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the structure modeling and unifies different conditions for different types of lyrics generation. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
DeepGuard: Secure Code Generation via Multi-Layer Semantic Aggregation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can replicate insecure patterns from training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages distributed security-relevant cues by aggregating representations from multiple upper layers via an attention-based module. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the framework improves the secure-and-correct generation rate by 11.9% over baselines. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
Improving Large Language Models Function Calling and Interpretability via Guided-Structured Templates (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hy Dang, Tianyi Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Tao Yang, Pei Chen, Zhengyang Wang, Helen Wang, Huasheng Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong reasoning and tool-use capabilities, yet fail in real-world tool-interactions due to incorrect parameterization, poor tool selection, or misinterpretation of user intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum-inspired framework that leverages structured reasoning templates to guide LLMs through more deliberate step-by-step instructions for generating function calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-use errors and improves interpretability and transparency of tool-using agents. |
CodeHacker: Automated Test Case Generation for Detecting Vulnerabilities in Competitive Programming Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Language Models often lack coverage for subtle corner cases . a substantial amount of effort has been applied to address this challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adversarial test cases that expose latent vulnerabilities in code submissions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the True Negative Rate (TNR) of existing datasets and generates superior adversarial cases on liveCodeBench. |
Teaching Small Language Models Reasoning through Counterfactual Distillation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual distillation framework that leverages LLMs to generate high-quality counterfacts and utilizes multi-view CoT to enhance the diversity of reasoning samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances reasoning capabilities of large language models and is more robust to OOD data. |
Knowledge Extraction on Semi-Structured Content: Does It Remain Relevant for Question Answering in the Era of LLMs? (2026.eacl-long)
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Kai Sun, Yin Huang, Srishti Mehra, Mohammad Kachuee, Xilun Chen, Renjie Tao, Zhaojiang Lin, Andrea Jessee, Nirav Shah, Alex L Betty, Yue Liu, Anuj Kumar, Wen-tau Yih, Xin Luna Dong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on knowledge extraction for question answering questions whether it is still relevant for question answerrs. |
| Approach: | They extend an existing benchmark with knowledge extraction annotations and evaluate commercial and open-source LLMs of varying sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve high QA accuracy, but can still benefit from knowledge extraction through augmentation with extracted triples and multi-task learning. |
SentiBERT: A Transferable Transformer-Based Architecture for Compositional Sentiment Semantics (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that capture compositional sentiment semantics are difficult to handle when the sentences are complex. |
| Approach: | They propose a variant of BERT that captures compositional sentiment semantics . they demonstrate that SentiBERT can be applied to other sentiment analysis tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is better than baseline approaches in capturing negation and contrast . it can be applied to other sentiment analysis tasks and emotion classification tasks . |
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)
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Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Zhengwei Tao, Liwen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Yong Jiang, Wentao Zhang, Zhiqiang Gao
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
TransFace: Unit-Based Audio-Visual Speech Synthesizer for Talking Head Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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Xize Cheng, Rongjie Huang, Linjun Li, Zehan Wang, Tao Jin, Aoxiong Yin, Chen Feiyang, Xinyu Duan, Baoxing Huai, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for talking head translation rely on cascading, resulting in delays and cascadic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for talking head translation, TransFace, which can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate audio-visual speech into audio-visual speech in other languages. |
QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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Ming Zhong, Da Yin, Tao Yu, Ahmad Zaidi, Mutethia Mutuma, Rahul Jha, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yang Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing work on meeting summarization tasks is limited to short summaries that cover all the content of a meeting. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task that generates a single short summary of meetings based on a transcript. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. |
UniCoder: Scaling Code Large Language Model via Universal Code (2024.acl-long)
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Tao Sun, Linzheng Chai, Jian Yang, Yuwei Yin, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Bing Wang, Liqun Yang, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UniCoder with the universal code significantly outperforms the previous prompting methods by a large margin. |
| Approach: | They introduce the universal code (UniCode) as the intermediate representation of algorithm steps using conventions of programming languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous prompting methods by a large margin . the proposed model is based on a dataset of natural-language questions and code solutions . |
SEA: Supervised Embedding Alignment for Token-Level Visual-Textual Integration in MLLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuanyang Yin, Yaqi Zhao, Yajie Zhang, Yuanxing Zhang, Ke Lin, Jiahao Wang, Xin Tao, Pengfei Wan, Wentao Zhang, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) integrate visual and textual inputs, yet modality alignment remains one of the most challenging aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level supervision alignment method that enables more precise visual-text alignment during pretraining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance across various model sizes, with smaller models benefiting the most. |
SAME: Signer-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Test-Time Adaptation in Sign Language Translation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning are limited due to labeled data . existing methods require long adaptation times and batch statistics are unavailable in streaming settings . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play, signer-aware Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) TTA architecture for SLT . they use a combination of lightweight MoE modules and unsupervised regularizers to decouple domain shift . |
| Outcome: | The proposed test-time adaptation outperforms existing TTA methods in sign language translation . the proposed architecture can be used in real-world deployments without labeling . |
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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Tianbao Xie, Chen Henry Wu, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, Chien-Sheng Wu, Ming Zhong, Pengcheng Yin, Sida I. Wang, Victor Zhong, Bailin Wang, Chengzu Li, Connor Boyle, Ansong Ni, Ziyu Yao, Dragomir Radev, Caiming Xiong, Lingpeng Kong, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Tao Yu
| Challenge: | Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show . |
Mixed Distillation Helps Smaller Language Models Reason Better (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multiple step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recent NLP reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed distillation framework that distills multiple step-by-step reasoning abilities into smaller language models (SLMs) they leverage LLMs to generate multiple step by step reasoning rationales by sampling automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on SVAMP, GSM8K and ASDIV, while a single model generated by MD exceeds the comprehensive performance of two individual CoT and PoT distilled models. |
OS Agents: A Survey on MLLM-based Agents for Computer, Phone and Browser Use (2025.acl-long)
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Xueyu Hu, Tao Xiong, Biao Yi, Zishu Wei, Ruixuan Xiao, Yurun Chen, Jiasheng Ye, Meiling Tao, Xiangxin Zhou, Ziyu Zhao, Yuhuai Li, Shengze Xu, Shenzhi Wang, Xinchen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Zhaokai Wang, Kun Kuang, Tieyong Zeng, Liang Wang, Jiwei Li, Yuchen Eleanor Jiang, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guoyin Wang, Keting Yin, Zhou Zhao, Hongxia Yang, Fan Wu, Shengyu Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | a new generation of (M)LLMs is enabling the creation of superintelligent AI assistants . OS Agents can complete tasks autonomously and have the potential to significantly enhance the lives of billions of users worldwide. |
| Approach: | They propose to build OS Agents that operate within operating systems' GUIs and GUIs . they examine evaluation metrics and benchmarks to identify promising directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agents are based on operating systems (OS) and operating systems frameworks. |
Improving Speech Translation by Fusing Speech and Text (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In speech translation, multimodal data to address limitations of individual modalities has shown significant effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal model which supports three input modalities for speech, text and fused speech-text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an average of 34.0 BLEU on MuST-C, GigaST and newstest benchmark. |
BioT5+: Towards Generalized Biological Understanding with IUPAC Integration and Multi-task Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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Qizhi Pei, Lijun Wu, Kaiyuan Gao, Xiaozhuan Liang, Yin Fang, Jinhua Zhu, Shufang Xie, Tao Qin, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences. |