Papers by Weiming Liu
MIBench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models over Multiple Images (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haowei Liu, Xi Zhang, Haiyang Xu, Yaya Shi, Chaoya Jiang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Chunfeng Yuan, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
NL-Debugging: Exploiting Natural Language as an Intermediate Representation for Code Debugging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiming Zhang, Qingyao Li, Xinyi Dai, Jizheng Chen, Kounianhua Du, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
DB-Explore: Automated Database Exploration and Instruction Synthesis for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-SQL systems that use large language models struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | a framework that aligns large language models with database knowledge is proposed . DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas . |
| Outcome: | a new framework outperforms existing text-to-SQL systems by outperforming existing systems. |
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Yizhou Liu, Yuchen Yan, Jin Ma, Xu Tan, Yao Hu, Daoxin Zhang, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% . |
Leveraging Outline-Optimized Generative Interactions and Critique for Self-Refining Outlines with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Logic-RL is a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on FreshWiki and WikiOutline . it can be iteratively applied, with improved quality continuing through three refinement rounds before diminishing returns. |
Logic: Long-form Outline Generation via Imitative and Critical Self-refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-form outline generation have low knowledge density and lack detail . retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to maintain logical coherence across retrieved information . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that mimics human writers' refinement process by mimicking outlines through imitation and critical self-refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the FreshWiki and WikiOutline datasets and establishes a coherent planning framework and structured knowledge base. |
Towards Interactivity and Interpretability: A Rationale-based Legal Judgment Prediction Framework (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-based legal judgment prediction framework that follows the judge's real trial logic and provides good interactivity and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use. |
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
SciExplore: Evaluating Autonomous Agents from Scientific Navigation to Information Integration (2026.findings-acl)
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Yinhao Tang, Youqing Fang, Yanan Sun, Wenran Liu, Weiming Zhang, Bin Liu, Kuikun Liu, Wenwei Zhang, Kai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering . SciExplore focuses on scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark assesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents in scientific research workflows. |
Unleashing the Power of LLMs in Court View Generation by Stimulating Internal Knowledge and Incorporating External Knowledge (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022. |
EvoBench: Towards Real-world LLM-Generated Text Detection Benchmarking for Evolving Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated texts rely on static benchmarks that neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the generalization of LLM-generated text detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures generalization of 14 detection methods across LLMs. |
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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Haowei Liu, Yaya Shi, Haiyang Xu, Chunfeng Yuan, Qinghao Ye, Chenliang Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Bing Li, Weiming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
Scale-VAE: Preventing Posterior Collapse in Variational Autoencoder (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Variational autoencoder (VAE) is a widely used generative model . but when employing strong autoregressive generation networks, VAE tends to converge to a degenerate local optimum known as posterior collapse. |
| Approach: | They propose a model called Scale-VAE to solve a posterior collapse problem . they use a factor to keep the posterior dimension discriminative across data instances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in density estimation and representation learning. |
Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yiquan Wu, Siying Zhou, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Yating Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the strength of both LLMs and domain-specific models in the context of precedents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. |
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
Robust Representation Learning with Reliable Pseudo-labels Generation via Self-Adaptive Optimal Transport for Short Text Clustering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to short text clustering are prone to degenerate solutions and noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to improve robustness against imbalanced and noisy data . they propose self-adaptive optimal transport and class-wise contrastive learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on eight short text clustering datasets. |
On the Vulnerability of Text Sanitization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reconstruction attacks on text sanitization are not able to accurately assess their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ASR to measure the effectiveness of reconstruction attacks to evaluate sanitization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reconstruction attacks achieve a 46.4% improvement in ASR over the state-of-the-art baseline with a privacy budget of =4.0 on the SST-2 dataset. |
Chain-of-Quizzes: Pedagogy-inspired Example Selection in In-Context-Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a powerful tool for enhancing large language models (LLMs) by mimicking the human learning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Quizzes framework that uses LLMs to answer a quiz to sift 'good' examples, combine them iteratively with the increasing complexity, and utilize a final exam to gauge the combined example chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on diverse reasoning datasets and shows that it is scalable and can be used in future research. |
ColorBrowserAgent: Complex Long-Horizon Browser Agent with Adaptive Knowledge Evolution (2026.acl-industry)
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Jihong Wang, Jiamu Zhou, Weiming Zhang, Teng Wang, Weiwen Liu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Xingyu Lou, Weinan Zhang, Huarong Deng, Jun Wang
| Challenge: | Xue et al., 2025): deploying autonomous web agents in production remains difficult due to site heterogeneity and long-horizon instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-evolving agent that can be used to automate web workflows . they use human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebArena, WebChoreAren and industrial deployment show it outperforms baselines. |
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries (2026.acl-long)
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Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang, Chang Liu, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok, Weiming Zhang, Xiaomeng Li, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
AutoTaskEval: Towards Domain-Specific and Fine-Grained Evaluation for LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Qingqing Lyu, Linjuan Wu, Yongliang Shen, Hengwei Liu, Hao Li, Shengpei Jiang, Yin Zhang, Weiming Lu
| Challenge: | Existing automated approaches operate within fixed task schemas and often fail to autonomously discover new evaluation dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework that constructs domain-specific benchmarks directly from unstructured corpora using Bloom’s Taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uncovers a broader and more fine-grained task space than expert-curated benchmarks while producing high-quality instances that preserve established model-level evaluation trends. |