Papers by Wen Chang
EnvScaler: Scaling Tool-Interactive Environments for LLM Agent via Programmatic Synthesis (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are expected to be trained to act as agents in various real-world environments, but access to real systems is often restricted and manually built sandboxes are hard to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework for scalable tool-interaction environments via programmatic synthesis that synthesizes 191 environments and about 7K scenarios and applies them to Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Qwen3 series models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves LLMs’ ability to solve tasks in complex environments involving multi-turn, multi-tool interactions. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Minyi Zhao, Yi Liu, Jianfeng Wen, Boshen Zhang, Hailang Chang, Zhiheng Ouyang, Jie Wang, Wensong He, Shuigeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
FaithLM: Towards Faithful Explanations for Large Language Models (2026.eacl-long)
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Yu-Neng Chuang, Guanchu Wang, Chia-Yuan Chang, Ruixiang Tang, Shaochen Zhong, Fan Yang, Andrew Wen, Mengnan Du, Xuanting Cai, Vladimir Braverman, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) produce natural language explanations, but they lack faithfulness and do not reflect the evidence the model uses to decide. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic framework that evaluates and improves the faithfulness of LLM explanations without token masking or task-specific heuristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves faithfulness of large language models without masking or heuristics. |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
SLIP: Soft Label Mechanism and Key-Extraction-Guided CoT-based Defense Against Instruction Backdoor in APIs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing black-box instruction backdoors can detect poisoned inputs, but fail to recover correct outputs once the backdoor is activated. |
| Approach: | They propose a soft label mechanism and key-extraction-guided CoT-based defense against instruction backdoors in APIs (SLIP) they propose KCOT-based model to extract task-relevant keywords and phrases rather than only considering the single trigger or overall text semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the average attack success rate to 25.13% and improves clean accuracy to 87.15% and outperforms state-of-the-art black-box defenses. |
Injecting Salesperson’s Dialogue Strategies in Large Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent research in dialogue systems focuses on task-oriented (TOD) and open-domain (chit-chat) dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chit-chat to simulate task-oriented dialogues to train sales agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves coherence and reduces aggression, improving model learning for sales-customer interactions. |
Quantification of Large Language Model Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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Sunbowen Lee, Junting Zhou, Chang Ao, Kaige Li, Xeron Du, Sirui He, Haihong Wu, Tianci Liu, Jiaheng Liu, Hamid Alinejad-Rokny, Min Yang, Yitao Liang, Zhoufutu Wen, Shiwen Ni
| Challenge: | Existing studies have revealed the robustness degra-dation caused by data distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate and quantify model distillation . they aim to identify identity cognition contradictions and analyse multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework addresses two key aspects: (1) Identifying identity cognition contradictions to assess discrepancies in how models perceive and represent identity-related information; (2) Analyzing multi-granularity response similarities across models to measure the extent of homogenization. |