Papers by Volker Tresp
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaowen Ma, Yunpu Ma, Chenyang Lin, Sikuan Yan, Jinhe Bi, Zixuan Cao, Yijun Tian, Volker Tresp, Hinrich Schuetze
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements. |
Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Sikuan Yan, Xiufeng Yang, Zuchao Huang, Ercong Nie, Zifeng Ding, Zonggen Li, Xiaowen Ma, Jinhe Bi, Kristian Kersting, Jeff Z. Pan, Hinrich Schuetze, Volker Tresp, Yunpu Ma
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are stateless and limited by a finite context window, preventing them from maintaining knowledge across long conversations or evolving tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that empowers LLMs to actively manage external memory through two specialized agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and benchmarks across diverse question types, three benchmarks, and multiple model scales. |
LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to re-balance modalities by steering visual representations . they propose LLaVA Steering, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs a component-based architecture . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model re-balances the modalities of visual representations in large language models . the model requires 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance . |
Temporal Fact Reasoning over Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of temporal fact reasoning do not explicitly specify temporal information for each fact. |
| Approach: | They propose a new type of data structure called hyper-relational TKG to study temporal fact reasoning over HKGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two new benchmark HTKG datasets . it provides additional key-value pairs (i.e., qualifiers) for each KG fact . |
zrLLM: Zero-Shot Relational Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to forecast links on temporal knowledge graphs are embedding-based . but they face a strong challenge in modeling the unseen zero-shot relations . |
| Approach: | They propose to embed knowledge graphs (TKGF) entities and relations based on observed contexts into embedding-based methods to model unseen zero-shot relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show strong performance on traditional TKG forecasting benchmarks, but they face a strong challenge in modeling unseen zero-shot relations that have no prior graph context. |
FocalPO: Enhancing Preference Optimizing by Focusing on Correct Preference Rankings (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Efficient preference optimization algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have become a popular approach in aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference optimization variant that instead down-weighs misranked preference pairs and prioritizes enhancing the model’s understanding of pairs that it can already rank correctly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms DPO on benchmarks like Alpaca Eval 2.0 and Arena-Hard using mistral-base-7B and Llama-3-Instruct-8B with the introduced hyperparameter fixed. |
An Unsupervised Joint System for Text Generation from Knowledge Graphs and Semantic Parsing (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs (KGs) vary greatly from one domain to another, resulting in a lack of domain-specific parallel graph-text data. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach to graph-to-text generation and text-to graph knowledge extraction using WebNLG v2.1 and a new benchmark leveraging scene graphs from Visual Genome. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines on WebNLG v2.1 and a new benchmark leveraging scene graphs from Visual Genome. |
Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning: Mixture-of-Experts Demands Mixture of Adaptation Modules (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies that focus on specialized experts are not effective for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE). |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a dynamic routing mechanism among specialized experts in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) . |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on commonsense and math reasoning tasks validate the performance and efficiency of the proposed routed approach. |
GenTKG: Generative Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph with Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal relational forecasting are limited and require limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses temporal logical rule-based retrieval and parameter-efficient instruction tuning to solve temporal knowledge forecasting challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional methods in the temporal knowledge graph domain with low computation resources. |
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing agentic system generation frameworks lack autonomy, autonomy, and functionality . current frameworks are too rigid, limiting adaptability and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration . they construct agents from scratch and jointly refine functionality and coordination . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ADAS on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks on the TravelPlanner benchmark. |
Named Entity Recognition in Industrial Tables using Tabular Language Models (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Table transformers are used for encoding tabular data but are not yet used in industrial applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dedicated table data augmentation strategy based on available domain-specific knowledge graphs to enhance the performance of transformer-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and its inductive bias is vital for convergence of transformer-based models. |
DyERNIE: Dynamic Evolution of Riemannian Manifold Embeddings for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing embedding approaches for temporal knowledge graphs typically learn entity representations and their dynamic evolution in the Euclidean space. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-Euclidean embedding approach that learns evolving entity representations in a product of Riemannian manifolds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three real-world datasets showing that the embeddings on Riemannian manifolds can capture the evolution of temporal KGs. |
Multimodal Pragmatic Jailbreak on Text-to-image Models (2025.acl-long)
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Tong Liu, Zhixin Lai, Jiawen Wang, Gengyuan Zhang, Shuo Chen, Philip Torr, Vera Demberg, Volker Tresp, Jindong Gu
| Challenge: | Existing jailbreaks for diffusion-based text-to-image models generate unsafe content . experimental results show that all tested models suffer from unsafe generation . |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak that triggers diffusion-based text-to-image models to generate the image with visual text, resulting in unsafe content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates image with visual text, but the model is unsafe under such jailbreak. |
Visual Question Decomposition on Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for question decomposition focus on unimodal language models, but question decomposing capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has yet to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a finetuning dataset and a training objective for selective decomposition to enhance the model's question decomposing capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing models struggle to produce high-quality sub-questions. |
VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework VideoINSTA to leverage large language models for video understanding . they propose 'event-based temporalreasoning' and 'content-based spatial reasoning' |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks. |
METok: Multi-Stage Event-based Token Compression for Efficient Long Video Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to understand video content. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, Multi-stage Event-based Token compression framework that eliminates redundant visual tokens across three critical stages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces FLOPs and KV Cache memory consumption while maintaining comparable or even superior accuracy. |
Learning Neural Ordinary Equations for Forecasting Future Links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for temporal knowledge graphs model the temporal KGs in discrete state spaces, whereas static models model the KG in discretized state spaces. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuum model that extends the idea of neural ordinary differential equations to multi-relational graph convolutional networks and encodes both temporal and structural information into continuous-time dynamic embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on five benchmark datasets showing it can predict future links on temporal knowledge graphs. |
ECOLA: Enhancing Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhen Han, Ruotong Liao, Jindong Gu, Yao Zhang, Zifeng Ding, Yujia Gu, Heinz Koeppl, Hinrich Schütze, Volker Tresp
| Challenge: | Existing enhancement approaches cannot be applied to temporal knowledge graphs (tKGs) existing enhancement approaches assume knowledge embedding is time-independent, whereas entity embedded in tKG models evolves . |
| Approach: | They propose to use textual data to enhance temporal knowledge embedding by Enhanced Temporal Knowledge Embeddings with Contextualized Language Representations (ECOLA) to evaluate ECOLA, they introduce three new datasets for training and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves Hits@1 on the link prediction task. |
Time-dependent Entity Embedding is not All You Need: A Re-evaluation of Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion Models under a Unified Framework (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Various temporal knowledge graph (KG) completion models have been proposed . knowledge graphs are typically static and store facts in their current state . |
| Approach: | They propose to use temporal embeddings and a score function to model temporal knowledge graphs . they classify the temporal embedded methods into two classes: timestamp and time-dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform current models on ICEWS datasets with 3000 experiments and 13159 GPU hours. |