Papers by Wenhan Liu
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR) however, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Collaborative Ranking framework (CoRanking) for LLM-based listwise ranking based on large language models with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces ranking latency by approximately 70% while improving effectiveness compared to the standalone large reranker. |
RL-Guider: Leveraging Historical Decisions and Feedback for Drug Editing with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | RLs can be used to refine drugs by iterative conversations with domain experts . existing methods do not leverage past knowledge, but human experts develop intuition over time through historical experience . |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement-learning agent to provide suggestions to large language models . RL-Guider leverages the “world-level” knowledge of LLMs and historical feedback . |
| Outcome: | a new reinforcement-learning agent improves the performance of large language models . the proposed agent leverages the “world-level” knowledge of LLMs and historical feedback . |
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker. |
Sub-network Discovery and Soft-masking for Continual Learning of Mixed Tasks (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Continual Learning (CL) have limited KT and catastrophic forgetting . a new method overcomes CF by isolating the knowledge of each task . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to overcome catastrophic forgetting and encourage knowledge transfer . they propose to discover a sub-network for each task and a soft-masking mechanism to preserve the previous knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in classification, generation, information extraction and their mixture. |
Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrievers for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rely on similarity-based retrievers, but similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented-generation retriever that integrates reasoning with retrieval . they use local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retriever outperforms existing retrievers on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop searches. |
Feedback to Reasoning: LLM-Assisted Molecular Optimization with Domain Feedback and Historical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenhan Gao, Xiran Fan, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Jiarui Sun, Yuzhong Chen, Menghai Pan, Mahashweta Das, Yi Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for molecular optimization do not leverage domain feedback and historical knowledge with reasoning traces and chemical insights. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational molecular optimization pipeline that enables LLMs to accumulate and retrieve past actions, rationales, and feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms LLMs from passive text generators into agentic experts that learn both actions and reasoning from experience. |
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for listwise passage ranking use sliding window approach, which is inefficient as it requires repetitive and serialized processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a listwise label construction approach and importance-aware learning objective for full ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in listwise ranking tasks. |
TriPlay-RL: Tri-Role Self-Play Reinforcement Learning for LLM Safety Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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Zhewen Tan, Wenhan Yu, Jianfeng Si, Tongxin Liu, Kaiqi Guan, Huiyan Jin, Jiawen Tao, Xiaokun Yuan, Xiangzheng Zhang, Duohe Ma, Tong Yang, Lin Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to safety alignment of large language models rely on costly manual annotations or human review. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop reinforcement learning framework called TriPlay-RL that enables iterative collaboration among three roles with near-zero manual annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 20%–50% improvement in adversarial effectiveness while preserving high output diversity while achieving 10%–30% gains in safety performance without degrading general reasoning capability. |
Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models (2024.naacl-long)
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Wenhan Xiong, Jingyu Liu, Igor Molybog, Hejia Zhang, Prajjwal Bhargava, Rui Hou, Louis Martin, Rashi Rungta, Karthik Abinav Sankararaman, Barlas Oguz, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, Yashar Mehdad, Sharan Narang, Kshitiz Malik, Angela Fan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Mike Lewis, Sinong Wang, Hao Ma
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly deployed and continue to evolve through scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train strong long-context LLMs that are capable of utilizing massive context windows of up to 32,000 tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on long-context benchmarks with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that is free of expensive annotations. |
Text-guided 3D Human Generation from 2D Collections (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | 3D human modeling is used for engaging interaction in gaming, film, and animation. however, the customization of characters is crucial for creativity and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a 3D human generation using fashion descriptions to enhance 3D geometry transformation and fine-grained consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate a 3D human, guided by a fashion description, with high efficiency. |