Papers by Tianlong Li
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
Ask-Before-Detection: Identifying and Mitigating Conformity Bias in LLM-Powered Error Detector for Math Word Problem Solutions (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of large language models (LLMs) for automatic error detection in math word problems (MWPs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates adaptive reference solutions using LLMs to enhance error detection by reducing conformity bias in MWPs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates the performance gap between conventional and alternative solutions in MWPs, especially when combined with reasoning-enhancing techniques like chain-of-thought prompting. |
DALK: Dynamic Co-Augmentation of LLMs and KG to answer Alzheimer’s Disease Questions with Scientific Literature (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Dawei Li, Shu Yang, Zhen Tan, Jae Baik, Sukwon Yun, Joseph Lee, Aaron Chacko, Bojian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Ying Ding, Huan Liu, Li Shen, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have achieved promising performances across various applications, but the challenge of integrating long-tail knowledge continues to impede the seamless adoption of LLMs in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic co-augmentation framework for the refinement of large language models and knowledge graphs in the context of Alzheimer's Disease. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to study Alzheimer's Disease (AD) using LLMs and KGs. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Human Preferences through Representation Engineering (2024.acl-long)
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Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for achieving this alignment involve employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) Existing approaches involve using RLHF to fine-tune LLMs based on human labels . however, RLRF is susceptible to instability during fine- tuning and presents challenges in implementation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune large language models with human preferences to achieve precise control of model behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that RAHF can be used to capture and manipulate representations to align with a broad spectrum of human preferences or values rather than being confined to a single concept or function. |
Parameter Efficient Multi-task Fine-tuning by Learning to Transfer Token-wise Prompts (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Tianlong Li, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Prompt tuning has been proven to be successful on various tasks by incorporating a small number of trainable parameters while freezing large pre-trained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-wise prompt tuning method that uses a bank of finer-grained soft prompt tokens to generate an instance-dependent prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs far better than full parameter fine-tuned models and achieves state-of-the-art by tuning only 0.035% parameters on 14 datasets. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
Tell Me What You Don’t Know: Enhancing Refusal Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents via Representation Space Analysis and Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenhao Liu, Siyu An, Junru Lu, Muling Wu, Tianlong Li, Xiaohua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaoqing Zheng, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Role-playing Agents (RPAs) struggle to recognize and respond to hard queries that conflict with their role-play knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight representation editing approach that conveniently shifts conflicting requests to the rejection region, thereby enhancing the model’s refusal accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves RPAs’ refusal ability of conflicting requests while maintaining their general role-playing capabilities. |
Dataset and Enhanced Model for Eligibility Criteria-to-SQL Semantic Parsing (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Clinical trials require that patients meet eligibility criteria to ensure safety and effectiveness of studies. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that includes the first-of-its-kind eligibility-criteria corpus and queries for criteria-to-sql . they propose 'neuro semantic parser' which can translate eligibility criteria to executable SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed parser outperforms existing state-of-the-art general-purpose models while highlighting the challenges presented by the new dataset. |
Task-Aware Resolution Optimization for Visual Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing visual large language models pre-assume a fixed resolution for downstream tasks, leading to sub-optimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a formula to determine the optimal resolution for a given vision-language task . they then propose 'parameter-efficient' fine-tuning technique to extend the visual input resolution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on rigorous experiments on vision-language tasks. |
Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph completion models lack textual information, which limits their performance . a plug-in-and-play approach is needed to train small models in descriptive context . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-in-and-play approach to knowledge graph completion that prompts LLMs to generate descriptive context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on Wikipedia articles and synset definitions. |
BPO: Towards Balanced Preference Optimization between Knowledge Breadth and Depth in Alignment (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is the key to the success of large language models (LLMs) in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to balance the number of prompts and responses to improve knowledge breadth and knowledge depth by introducing gradient-based clustering to estimate the knowledge informativeness and usefulness of each augmented sample. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods while maintaining training efficiency. |
Learning Flexible Large Multimodal Models with Arbitrary Modality Combinations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have potential for cross-modal understanding . but extending MLLM to handle diverse modalities introduces two challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-stage compression mechanism to reduce the number of modality tokens per modality and condense it into a single, compact token sequence. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Flex-M3 outperforms its counterpart trained on only full-modality data. |
Reducing Token Redundancy in LVLMs: A Systematic Review of Token Pruning Methods (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) excel at visual understanding but face severe computational bottlenecks when processing high-resolution images and long videos due to massive visual token counts. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy categorizing methods into vision-side, LLM-side and hybrid paradigms and analyze token selection mechanisms and pruning strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method selectively removes less informative tokens while maintaining performance. |
Is C4 Dataset Optimal for Pruning? An Investigation of Calibration Data for LLM Pruning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Abhinav Bandari, Lu Yin, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Ajay Jaiswal, Tianlong Chen, Li Shen, Ranjay Krishna, Shiwei Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to prune LLMs rely on the C4 dataset as calibration data . arithmetic datasets perform better than pre-training datasets for pruning, whereas chain-of-thought is only useful on certain tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate the selection of calibration data for LLM pruning across a wide range of datasets . they find that C4 is not the optimal calibration data, and that CoT is only useful on certain tasks. |
| Outcome: | The chosen calibration data significantly impacts the performance of pruned LLMs, the authors found . their results shed light on the importance of carefully selecting calibration data for LLM pruning . |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Privacy risks in text-only Large Language Models are well-documented, especially their tendency to memorize and leak sensitive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to assess privacy risks across multi-modal tasks and scenarios . they demonstrate how models leak sensitive data across various tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leak sensitive data embedded in images or stored in memory, exposing privacy risks. |
Glue pizza and eat rocks - Exploiting Vulnerabilities in Retrieval-Augmented Generative Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit openness of RAG models by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be exploited through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. |
Vision Language Model Helps Private Information De-Identification in Vision Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained popularity due to their ability to solve imagerelated tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance privacy awareness of visual language models . they use a specialized instruction-tuning dataset and a tailored training methodology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in handling private information. |
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. |
UPLex: Fine-Grained Personality Control in Large Language Models via Unsupervised Lexical Modulation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Tianlong Li, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Zhenghua Wang, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Personality is a crucial factor that shapes human communication patterns, thereby regulating the personalities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses an Unsupervisedly-Built Personalized Lexicon (UPL) during the decoding phase to manipulate LLM’s personality traits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can modulate the personality expression of large language models by dynamically altering their predicted probability of upcoming words in a pluggable fashion. |
OxyGent: Making Multi-Agent Systems Modular, Observable, and Evolvable via Oxy Abstraction (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing MAS frameworks lack standardized abstractions, leading to low efficiency and repetitive implementation of core functions. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source framework that encapsulates agents, tools, and reasoning flows as pluggable atomic components. |
| Outcome: | The OxyGent framework provides a robust and scalable foundation for multi-agent systems in industrial environments. |
Advancing Parameter Efficiency in Fine-tuning via Representation Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Tianlong Li, Changze Lv, Zixuan Ling, Zhu JianHao, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) has gained significant attention for its ability to achieve competitive results while updating only a small subset of trainable parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach to fine-tuning neural models that scales and biases the representation produced at each layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the number of trainable parameters by a factor of 25,700 compared to full parameter fine-tuning and by . 32 compared with LoRA. |
AnyMAC: Cascading Flexible Multi-Agent Collaboration via Next-Agent Prediction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-agent collaboration rely on static or graph-based topologies lacking flexibility and adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that rethinks multi-agent coordination through a sequential structure rather than a graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance while significantly reducing communication overhead. |
Mitigating Position Bias in Transformers via Layer-Specific Positional Embedding Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenghua Wang, Yiran Ding, Changze Lv, Yixin Wu, Tianlong Li, Zhibo Xu, Muling Wu, Tianyuan Shi, Shizheng Li, Qi Qian, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to address the "lost-in-the-middle" problem suffer from high latency or suboptimal hand-crafted scaling strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-specific positional embedding scaling method that assigns distinct scaling factors to each layer. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method mitigates positional attention bias and delivers consistent improvements across multiple long-context benchmarks. |
Revisiting Jailbreaking for Large Language Models: A Representation Engineering Perspective (2025.coling-main)
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Tianlong Li, Zhenghua Wang, Wenhao Liu, Muling Wu, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) however, limited research into the underlying mechanisms that make LLMs vulnerable to such attacks has been conducted. |
| Approach: | They propose that LLMs' self-safeguarding capability is linked to specific activity patterns within their representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be detected with a few pairs of contrastive queries, and the robustness can be manipulated by weakening or strengthening these patterns. |
Advancing MoE Efficiency: A Collaboration-Constrained Routing (C2R) Strategy for Better Expert Parallelism Design (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using Mixture-of-Experts, researchers have found that efficient MoE is difficult to achieve due to two key reasons: imbalanced expert activation and massive communication overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaboration-constrained routing strategy that encourages more specialized expert groups and leverages expert specialization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an average performance improvement of 0.51% and 0.33% on LLaMA-MoE and Qwen-MaE respectively. |
Bag of Tricks for Sparse Mixture-of-Experts: A Benchmark Across Reasoning, Efficiency, and Safety (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on isolated aspects of MoE, with conflicting conclusions . a lack of consensus on optimal design choices is limiting to specific aspects of the model. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate two popular MoE backbones across four dimensions of design choices . they find token-level routing and z-loss regularization improve reasoning performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates two popular MoE backbones on over eight metrics. |
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinhao Duan, Xinyu Zhao, Zhuoxuan Zhang, Eunhye Grace Ko, Lily Boddy, Chenan Wang, Tianhao Li, Alexander Rasgon, Junyuan Hong, Min Kyung Lee, Chenxi Yuan, Qi Long, Ying Ding, Tianlong Chen, Kaidi Xu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality. |
ORAL: Prompting Your Large-Scale LoRAs via Conditional Recurrent Diffusion (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) are limited in scalability and controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional recurrent diffusion framework that generates LoRA parameters directly . they integrate model architecture and textual task specifications to generate task-specific parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework scales to billions-of-parameter LLMs and maintains controllability. |
Promoting Data and Model Privacy in Federated Learning through Quantized LoRA (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhu JianHao, Changze Lv, Xiaohua Wang, Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Tianlong Li, Zixuan Ling, Cenyuan Zhang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing federated learning frameworks require substantial data and computational resources to develop large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that distributes a quantized version of the model’s parameters during training and combine it with a popular fine-tuning method to significantly reduce communication costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables accurate estimations for parameter updates while preventing clients from accessing a model whose performance is comparable to the centrally hosted one. |
Glider: Global and Local Instruction-Driven Expert Router (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for routing-based expert models favor generalization over performance on held-in tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a global and local instruction driven expert router that leverages recent LLMs' semantic reasoning capabilities to generate task-specific instructions from the input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves held-in performance while maintaining strong generalization on held-out tasks. |