Papers by Tianyang Liu
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou, Zhen Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhengzhong Liu, Haojian Jin, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | closed-ended question-based benchmarks struggle with saturation as newer models emerge . crowd-sourced leaderboards rely on costly and slow human judges . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages collective intelligence from all large language models to evaluate each other. |
| Outcome: | a new framework enables a democratic, pairwise evaluation of all large language models . it achieves 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost. |
Neutralizing Bias in LLM Reasoning using Entailment Graphs (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a foundational understanding task in language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to construct counterfactual reasoning data and fine-tune LLMs to reduce attestation bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces hallucinations from attestation bias on original and bias-neutralized datasets while keeping hypotheses unchanged. |
HiEdit: Lifelong Model Editing with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong model editing apply parameter perturbations to static and dense layers for all instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that identifies the most knowledge-relevant layers for each editing instance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the performance of the competitive RLEdit by 8.48% with perturbing only half of the layers per edit. |
Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization Enables Tuning-free Self-Alignment of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations on eight recent LLMs reveal that DRPO significantly enhances alignment performance, enabling base models to outperform their SFT/RLHF-tuned counterparts. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free approach to self-alignment called Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization (DRPO) it leverages a dynamic rewarding mechanism to identify and rectify alignment weaknesses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and is highly adaptable to various alignment challenges. |
Explicit Inductive Inference using Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer a signifi- cant performance drop when entailment labels disagree with the attestation label of hypothesis H. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that exploits an LLM's attestation bias to do explicit inductive inference . they transform a premise into attested alternatives and aggregate the results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the performance of large language models on inference tasks and alleviates the attestation bias. |
SHIELD: Evaluation and Defense Strategies for Copyright Compliance in LLM Text Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but have raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight, real-time defense mechanism to prevent the generation of copyrighted text by evaluating methods and testing attack strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense significantly reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests. |
SaySelf: Teaching LLMs to Express Confidence with Self-Reflective Rationales (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to elicit confidence from large language models are limited to binary or inaccurate group-level confidence estimates. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that teaches LLMs to express more fine-grained confidence estimates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training framework reduces the confidence calibration error and maintains the performance of the model. |
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)
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Xi Xiao, Chenrui Ma, Yunbei Zhang, Chen Liu, Zhuxuanzi Wang, Yanshu Li, Lin Zhao, Guosheng Hu, Tianyang Wang, Hao Xu
| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
RAG4ITOps: A Supervised Fine-Tunable and Comprehensive RAG Framework for IT Operations and Maintenance (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved the open-domain QA’s performance, but how to efficiently handle enterprise-exclusive corpora and build domain-specific QA systems are still not studied for industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general and comprehensive framework based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and facilitate the whole business process of establishing QA systems for IT operations and maintenance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior results on two kinds of QA tasks. |
Code to Think, Think to Code: A Survey on Code-Enhanced Reasoning and Reasoning-Driven Code Intelligence in LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Dayu Yang, Tianyang Liu, Daoan Zhang, Antoine Simoulin, Xiaoyi Liu, Yuwei Cao, Zhaopu Teng, Xin Qian, Grey Yang, Jiebo Luo, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent breakthrough models like OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1 show powerful task-solving capabilities, particularly advances in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose future research directions that may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed research may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence. |
Personalized Question Answering with User Profile Generation and Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models are prone to providing “midguy” answers regardless of users’ knowledge background, thereby failing to meet each user’s personalized needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate personalized answers with LLMs based on users’ past question-answering records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates personalized answers based on user's past question-answering records. |
Rethinking Tabular Data Understanding with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for table structure normalization to improve model performance . they propose aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways to improve performance based on textual and symbolic reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on symbolic reasoning tasks with textual reasoning slightly outperforming symbolic reasoning on tables. |
How Does NLP Benefit Legal System: A Summary of Legal Artificial Intelligence (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Legal Artificial Intelligence (LegalAI) focuses on applying artificial intelligence to help legal tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce the history, current state, and future directions of research in LegalAI . they illustrate the tasks from the perspectives of legal professionals and NLP researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can reduce heavy and redundant work for legal professionals . it can also provide a reliable reference to those who are not familiar with the legal domain . |