Papers by Tianqi Liu
Towards Knowledge Checking in Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Representation Perspective (2025.naacl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Bingheng Li, Yuping Lin, Tianqi Zheng, Dante Everaert, Hanqing Lu, Hui Liu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge and tend to prioritize external information over internal knowledge learned during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM representation behaviors and demonstrate the significance of using representations in knowledge checking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifiers improve performance even when dealing with noisy knowledge databases. |
Attn-GS: Attention-Guided Context Compression for Efficient Personalized LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Shenglai Zeng, Tianqi Zheng, Chuan Tian, Dante Everaert, Yau-Shian Wang, Yupin Huang, Michael J. Morais, Rohit Patki, Jinjin Tian, Xinnan Dai, Kai Guo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalize large language models (LLMs) rely on heuristic methods to compress user profiles but they ignore how LLMs process and prioritize different profile components. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention-guided context compression framework that leverages attention feedback from a marking model to mark important personalization sentences and guides a compression model to generate task-relevant compressed user contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines across tasks, token limits, and settings while reducing token usage by 50 times. |
DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Existing detectors are limited in their ability to detect large language models generated content in multilingual environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions to better align with real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
Predicting Text Preference Via Structured Comparative Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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Jing Nathan Yan, Tianqi Liu, Justin Chiu, Jiaming Shen, Zhen Qin, Yue Yu, Charumathi Lakshmanan, Yair Kurzion, Alexander Rush, Jialu Liu, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to comparative reasoning rely on pretraining or fine-tuning models at the cost of massive human annotation and computation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that prompts LLMs to generate structured intermediate comparisons by proposing aspects for comparison, followed by generating textual comparisons under each aspect. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly reduces hallucination and improves consistency across various NLP tasks. |
What’s Missing in Screen-to-Action? Towards a UI-in-the-Loop Paradigm for Multimodal GUI Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI reasoning methods rely on direct screen-based decision-making, which lacks interpretability and overlooks a comprehensive understanding of UI elements, ultimately leading to task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI reasoning paradigm that treats the GUI reasoning task as a cyclic ***Screen-UI elements-Action** process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art UI understanding performance while yielding superior results in GUI reasoning tasks. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
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Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
Hebbian-Guided Bi-Directional Rank Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a widely used method to fine-tune large language models . but its fixed-rank design cannot capture the varying importance across different layers . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bi-directionally reallocates low-rank capacity using Hebbian-inspired importance estimation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that HeBiRA improves performance over baselines. |
Multilingual Fine-Grained News Headline Hallucination Detection (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models to generate news headlines often suffer from the "hallucination" problem, where the produced headline does not fully align with the source article's content. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual, fine-grained dataset to detect news headlines in 5 languages using supervised fine-tuning techniques and coarse-to-fine prompting to boost the few-shot detection performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods boost the few-shot hallucination detection performance in terms of the example-F1 metric. |
Beyond Text: Unveiling Privacy Vulnerabilities in Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can process text, images, and audio, but they introduce privacy vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional structured prompt attack to exploit MRAG privacy vulnerabilities . they show that LMMs can generate outputs resembling retrieved content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates outputs resembling retrieved content and exposes sensitive information. |
LiPO: Listwise Preference Optimization through Learning-to-Rank (2025.naacl-long)
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Tianqi Liu, Zhen Qin, Junru Wu, Jiaming Shen, Misha Khalman, Rishabh Joshi, Yao Zhao, Mohammad Saleh, Simon Baumgartner, Jialu Liu, Peter J Liu, Xuanhui Wang
| Challenge: | Recent work on language models with curated feedback provides promising alternatives to RLHF . multiple responses can be ranked by reward models or AI feedback, but there is no study on directly fitting upon a list of responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns language models with curated human feedback . they propose SLiC and DPO as promising alternatives to traditional RLHF . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms DPO and SLiC on several preference alignment tasks with curated and real rankwise preference data. |
PLaD: Preference-based Large Language Model Distillation with Pseudo-Preference Pairs (2024.findings-acl)
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Rongzhi Zhang, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Haorui Wang, Zhen Qin, Feng Han, Jialu Liu, Simon Baumgartner, Michael Bendersky, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring expertise from large teacher models to compact student models with reduced memory footprints and inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer knowledge from large teacher models to compact student models by exploiting teacher-student capacity discrepancies to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits teacher-student capacity discrepancy to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. |
Towards Context-Robust LLMs: A Gated Representation Fine-tuning Approach (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) enhanced with external contexts face challenges in handling imperfect evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can balance internal knowledge with external contexts . they propose gating mechanisms and low-rank representation adapters to adjust hidden representations based on a lightweight intervention function . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can effectively balance internal knowledge with external context, similar to human cognitive processes. |
VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hammad Ayyubi, Tianqi Liu, Arsha Nagrani, Xudong Lin, Mingda Zhang, Anurag Arnab, Feng Han, Yukun Zhu, Xuande Feng, Kevin Zhang, Jialu Liu, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning benchmarks and models produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware . they validate the effectiveness of their approach across three video captioning models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective across three video captioning models. |
Training ELECTRA Augmented with Multi-word Selection (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing pre-training methods for NLP tasks require massive computation resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains a discriminator to detect replaced tokens and select original tokens from candidate sets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA based on multi-task learning on GLUE and SQUAD datasets. |
Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zhen Qin, Rolf Jagerman, Kai Hui, Honglei Zhuang, Junru Wu, Le Yan, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Jialu Liu, Donald Metzler, Xuanhui Wang, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Existing methods to rank documents using large language models do not understand these challenging ranking formulations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Pairwise Ranking Prompting to improve ranking performance . they propose to outperform fine-tuned baseline rankers on benchmark datasets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms supervised baselines on benchmark datasets and outperformed other LLM-based solutions by over 10% on average. |
Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Jie Ren, Tianqi Zheng, Hanqing Lu, Han Xu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing literature suggests that RAG systems may face privacy issues when the retrieval process involves private data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage synthetic data generation paradigm that uses attributes to preserve contextual information from the original data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves key contextual information from the original data while reducing privacy risks. |
Explanation-aware Soft Ensemble Empowers Large Language Model In-context Learning (2024.acl-long)
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Yue Yu, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Zhen Qin, Jing Nathan Yan, Jialu Liu, Chao Zhang, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have witnessed the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Explanation-Aware Soft Ensemble framework to empower in-context learning with Large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to enhance in-context learning on seven natural language understanding tasks and four varying-size LLMs. |