Papers by Wendi Li
From Passive Metric to Active Signal: The Evolving Role of Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but unreliability remains a barrier to deployment in high-stakes domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform uncertainty from a passive diagnostic metric to an active control signal guiding real-time model behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evolution from passive diagnostic metric to active control signal is critical for high-stakes applications. |
Gradient-guided Attention Map Editing: Towards Efficient Contextual Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience “contextual hallucination” where they prioritize self-generated content over input context, leading to a disregard for pertinent details. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically adjusts attention maps to enhance contextual relevance by using a trained classifier to identify attention maps likely to induce hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucinations across open-source models on summarization and open-book QA tasks. |
Reinforcement Learning with Token-level Feedback for Controllable Text Generation (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for controllable text generation are guided by coarse-grained feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or progressions within sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning algorithm which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for controllable text generation and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise" paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve superior performance on single-attribute and multi-attract control tasks. |
Denoising Multi-Source Weak Supervision for Neural Text Classification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of deep neural networks (DNNs) for text classification problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a label denoiser which estimates the source reliability using a conditional soft attention mechanism and reduces label noise by aggregating rule-annotated weak labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on sentiment, topic, and relation classifications and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods even without labeled data. |
Heuristic-based Search Algorithm in Automatic Instruction-focused Prompt Optimization: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of automatic prompt optimization methods that explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
TREA: Tree-Structure Reasoning Schema for Conversational Recommendation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent reasoning-based models cannot fully figure out complex causal relationships between mentioned entities with external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tree structure Reasoning schEmA that constructs a multi-hierarchical scalable tree as the reasoning structure to clarify the causal relationships between mentioned entities. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two public CRS datasets show the proposed model works. |
Towards Statistical Factuality Guarantee for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in image-conditioned text generation, but hallucinated outputs pose a major barrier to their use in safety-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal-prediction-based framework that achieves finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees to the factuality of LVLM output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the error rate of LLaVa-1.5 claims from 87.8% to 10.0% while ensuring that the output is accurate. |
LAD: Learning Advantage Distribution for Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent reinforcement learning objectives focus on maximizing expected rewards, limiting diversity and exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose a distribution-matching framework that replaces advantage maximization with learning the advantage-induced distribution. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on math and code reasoning tasks show that LAD improves accuracy and diversity. |
SEE: Strategic Exploration and Exploitation for Cohesive In-Context Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing approaches separate the optimization of prompt instructions and in-context learning examples, leading to incohesive, suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines both prompt instructions and in-context learning examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods on 35 benchmark tasks. |
A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and understanding user intents is a crucial task for E-Commerce. |
| Approach: | They propose to use intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task independent of product ontologies to identify and understand user intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can't be used to strongly align user intents with products with desirable properties and recommend useful products across diverse categories. |
Uncertainty Quantification in LLM Agents: Foundations, Emerging Challenges, and Opportunities (2026.acl-long)
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Changdae Oh, Seongheon Park, To Eun Kim, Jiatong Li, Wendi Li, Samuel Yeh, Sean Du, Hamed Hassani, Paul Bogdan, Dawn Song, Sharon Li
| Challenge: | Uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models is a key building block for daily applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a general formulation of agent UQ that subsumes broad classes of existing UQ setups. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the first general formulation of agent UQ that subsumes broad classes of existing setups. |
Divide-Conquer-Reasoning for Consistency Evaluation and Automatic Improvement of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the quality and consistency of text generated by Large Language Models are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-conquer-reasoning approach to evaluate LLM-generated texts using a split-and-conquers evaluator and an automatic metric converter to facilitate this approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on multiple benchmarks and reduces 90% of output inconsistencies in one iteration. |