Papers by Wenjie Liu

Cross-Domain Fake News Detection based on Dual-Granularity Adversarial Training (2025.coling-main)

Challenge:	Existing studies on temporal reasoning models neglect the explainable reasoning processes underlying the results.
Approach:	They propose a structure-aware generative framework that integrates Graph structures with text for Explainable TEmporal Reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while also demonstrating robust generalization capabilities.

Copied to clipboard

Wenjie Wei, Yanyue Zhang, Jinyan Li, Panfei Liu, Deyu Zhou

SMiLE: Schema-augmented Multi-level Contrastive Learning for Knowledge Graph Link Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to detect fake news in unseen domains are limited by domain-specific training.
Approach:	They propose a cross-domain fake news detection method based on adversarial training . they use a document-level and entity-level model to generate domain-independent representations .
Outcome:	The proposed method can detect fake news in unseen domains with the help of pre-trained language models.

Copied to clipboard

Miao Peng, Ben Liu, Qianqian Xie, Wenjie Xu, Hua Wang, Min Peng

Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods for linking knowledge graphs lack contextual information in entity neighborhoods, which leads to false prediction results.
Approach:	They propose a Schema-augmented Multi-level contrastive LEarning framework to conduct knowledge graph link prediction using a knowledge graph schema.
Outcome:	The proposed framework is based on a knowledge graph schema and is compared against state-of-the-art datasets.

Copied to clipboard

Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li

ORGAN: Observation-Guided Radiology Report Generation via Tree Reasoning (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve applying preference learning to step-wise solution pairs, but they overlook critical subtle errors.
Approach:	They propose a preference learning framework that injects predefined subtle errors into pivotal tokens to construct hard pairs for error mitigation.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework improves on Qwen2-7B-Instruct and MATH with 4.5K training samples.

Copied to clipboard

Wenjun Hou, Kaishuai Xu, Yi Cheng, Wenjie Li, Jiang Liu

Deja vu: Contrastive Historical Modeling with Prefix-tuning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Existing methods to generate radiology reports only rely on high-level plans, but they lack important information.
Approach:	They propose an Observation-guided radiology Report Generation framework which generates free-text descriptions for a set of radiographs.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods regarding text quality and clinical efficacy.

Copied to clipboard

Miao Peng, Ben Liu, Wenjie Xu, Zihao Jiang, Jiahui Zhu, Min Peng

Structured Data in NLP

Challenge:	Existing text-based methods for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning struggle to balance textual knowledge and temporal information with expensive purpose-built training strategies.
Approach:	They propose a Contrastive historical modeling framework with prefix-tuning for TEmporal Reasoning that feeds history-contextualized text into the pseudo-Siamese encoders to strike a textual-temporal balance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves superior performance on four transductive and three few-shot inductive TKGR benchmarks.

Personalized Text Generation with Contrastive Activation Steering (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Jinghao Zhang, Yuting Liu, Wenjie Wang, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Liang Wang, Tat-Seng Chua

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing approaches to personalized text generation rely on retrieval-augmented generation and parameter-efficient fine-tuning.
Approach:	They propose a training-free framework that disentangles and represents personalized writing style as a vector in LLM’s activation-space.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 8% relative improvement in personalized generation while reducing storage requirements by 1700 over PEFT method.

RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Wenjie Li, Jiang Liu

MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent studies have focused on producing concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that determine the severity of diseases.
Approach:	They propose a model that generates precise radiology reports via dynamic disease progression reasoning by combining historical and spatiotemporal information.
Outcome:	Experiments on two publicly available datasets show the proposed model can generate precise and accurate radiology reports with dynamic disease progression reasoning.

Copied to clipboard

Junfeng Fang, Shuai Zhang, Chang Wu, Zhengyi Yang, Zhiyuan Liu, Sihang Li, Kun Wang, Wenjie Du, Xiang Wang

FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs.
Approach:	They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.
Outcome:	The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair.

Copied to clipboard

Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Rui Wang, Linchen Zhu, Jin Xu, Wenjie Liu, Linquan Liu, Xiang-Yang Li, Tao Qin, Edward Lin, Tie-Yan Liu

PEToolLLM: Towards Personalized Tool Learning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence.
Approach:	They propose a fast correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy.
Outcome:	The proposed model can reduce the word error rate (WER) with multiple candidates by 3.2% and 2.6%.

Copied to clipboard

Qiancheng Xu, Yongqi Li, Heming Xia, Fan Liu, Min Yang, Wenjie Li

Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing tool learning studies focus on general-purpose tool-use capability, but ignore the importance of personalized tool-user preferences.
Approach:	They propose a framework to adapt Large Language Models to personalized tool learning task, which is trained through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization.
Outcome:	Extensive experiments on PEToolBench show that the proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in the personalized tool learning task.

Copied to clipboard

Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li, Jiashuo Wang, Ruihui Zhao, Bang Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Yefeng Zheng

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing research on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which is over-simplified and has limited support for multi-turn systems.
Approach:	They propose a multi-turn ES conversation system that uses lookahead heuristics to estimate future user feedback after using particular strategies.
Outcome:	The proposed system significantly outperforms baselines in both dialogue generation and strategy planning.

Prompt Chaining or Stepwise Prompt? Refinement in Text Summarization (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Shichao Sun, Ruifeng Yuan, Ziqiang Cao, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft.
Approach:	They propose to use Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompting to perform iterative refinement . they propose to combine the two methods to produce a more favorable outcome .
Outcome:	The proposed methods can improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process . the results show that the prompt chaining method produces a more favorable outcome .

Controllable LLM Reasoning via Sparse Autoencoder-Based Steering (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Yi Fang, Wenjie Wang, Mingfeng Xue, Boyi Deng, Fengli Xu, Dayiheng Liu, Fuli Feng

Can Graph Descriptive Order Affect Solving Graph Problems with LLMs? (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods struggle to control fine-grained reasoning strategies due to conceptual entanglement in LRMs’ hidden states.
Approach:	They propose to decompose strategy-entangled hidden states into a disentangled feature space by using Sparse Autoencoders to identify the few strategy-specific features from the vast pool of SAE features.
Outcome:	The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 15% in control effectiveness.

Copied to clipboard

Yuyao Ge, Shenghua Liu, Baolong Bi, Yiwei Wang, Lingrui Mei, Wenjie Feng, Lizhe Chen, Xueqi Cheng

OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning and logical deduction.
Approach:	They conduct the first comprehensive analysis of how the order of graph descriptions impacts LLM performance.
Outcome:	The results show that graph descriptions significantly improve LLMs’ comprehension of graph structures, and the robustness of LLM models to graph description order varies across different tasks.

Copied to clipboard

Yuxiang Zheng, Shichao Sun, Lin Qiu, Dongyu Ru, Cheng Jiayang, Xuefeng Li, Jifan Lin, Binjie Wang, Yun Luo, Renjie Pan, Yang Xu, Qingkai Min, Zizhao Zhang, Yiwen Wang, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024).
Approach:	They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers.
Outcome:	OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge.

ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency in Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mixup Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Yan Hu, Wenjie Li, Jiang Liu

Text Generation

Challenge:	Existing approaches to radiology report generation lack inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants.
Approach:	They propose a method which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation by extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics.
Outcome:	The proposed system captures similarities in semantically equivalent lesions and can be used to generate reports for two semantically identical cases.

Length Controlled Generation for Black-box LLMs (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Yuxuan Gu, Wenjie Wang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Kun Zhu, Lei Huang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua

HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing length control methods involve fine-tuning the parameters of LLMs, which is inefficient and suboptimal for practical use.
Approach:	They propose an iterative sampling framework that regulates LLMs to generate length-constrained text without modifying the underlying parameters.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves 100% success rates on Llama3.1 tasks with minimal additional computational overhead.

Copied to clipboard

Xiaoyuan Li, Moxin Li, Rui Men, Yichang Zhang, Keqin Bao, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing studies show that large language models are robust in commonsense reasoning . however, some variations in questions can lead to incorrect responses .
Approach:	They propose a large-scale bilingual benchmark consisting of 11,200 cases . they conduct extensive experiments on 41 representative LLMs .
Outcome:	The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the robustness of large language models in commonsense reasoning.

MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Xiaoyuan Li, Keqin Bao, Yubo Ma, Moxin Li, Wenjie Wang, Rui Men, Yichang Zhang, Fuli Feng, Dayiheng Liu

E-Verify: A Paradigm Shift to Scalable Embedding-based Factuality Verification (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in complex reasoning tasks.
Approach:	They propose to use a multi-turn reasoning evaluation framework to cover multi-turn interactions with the environments of large language models.
Outcome:	The proposed framework covers diverse reasoning capabilities, fine-grained difficulty granularity, and necessitates multi-turn interactions with the environments.

Copied to clipboard

Zeyang Liu, Jingfeng Xue, Xiuqi Yang, Wenbiao Du, Jiarun Fu, Junbao Chen, Wenjie Guo, Yong Wang

RiskLab: A Controlled Toolkit for Probing Emergent Risks in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-demo)

Challenge:	Existing factuality verification methods follow a Decompose-Then-Verify paradigm, which improves granularity but suffers from poor scalability and efficiency.
Approach:	They propose a Decompose-Embed-Interact paradigm that shifts factuality verification from costly text-level reasoning to efficient alignment in embedding space.
Outcome:	The proposed paradigm shifts factuality verification from costly text-level reasoning to efficient alignment in embedding space .

Copied to clipboard

Yu Jiang, Wenjie Wang, Yue Huang, Yanbo Wang, Zhenhong Zhou, Xiuying Chen, Yang Liu, Pin-Yu Chen, Wei Wang, Xiangliang Zhang

MMAPG: A Training-Free Framework for Multimodal Multi-hop Question Answering via Adaptive Planning Graphs (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have accelerated deployment of multi-agent systems for complex tasks.
Approach:	They propose an open-source toolkit for instantiating, probing, and measuring emergent risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems under controlled conditions.
Outcome:	The proposed toolkit is based on a structured topology–environment–protocol–agent–task quintuple enabling reproducible studies of how communication structure, coordination mechanisms, and incentives shape system-level risks.

Copied to clipboard

Yiheng Hu, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Qian Fu, Wenjie Zhang, Liming Zhu

Towards Dynamic Theory of Mind: Evaluating LLM Adaptation to Temporal Evolution of Human States (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing multimodal question answering models rely on sequential retrieval and reasoning, but this single-path paradigm makes them vulnerable to errors due to misleading intermediate steps.
Approach:	They propose a multimodal multi-hop question answering framework guided by an Adaptive Planning Graph . they propose modality-specific strategies that dynamically adapt to distinct data types .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing models that rely on training.

Copied to clipboard

Yang Xiao, Jiashuo Wang, Qiancheng Xu, Changhe Song, Chunpu Xu, Yi Cheng, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu

Linguistics & Cognitive NLP

Challenge:	Existing benchmarks assess basic Theory of Mind abilities but neglect temporal evolution of mental states in real-world social contexts.
Approach:	They propose a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate Large Language Models' ability to understand and track the temporal progression of mental states across interconnected scenarios.
Outcome:	The proposed benchmarks underperform humans by 44.7% and show that they can model the dynamic nature of human mental states better than existing models.

Unlocking Efficiency in Large Language Model Inference: A Comprehensive Survey of Speculative Decoding (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Heming Xia, Zhe Yang, Qingxiu Dong, Peiyi Wang, Yongqi Li, Tao Ge, Tianyu Liu, Wenjie Li, Zhifang Sui

Self-Improvement Towards Pareto Optimality: Mitigating Preference Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have a high inference latency stemming from autoregressive decoding.
Approach:	They propose a novel decoding paradigm that drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . they aim to provide a catalyst for further research on Speculative Decoding .
Outcome:	The proposed method drafts multiple tokens and verifies them in parallel . it can be used to accelerate inference in large language models.

Copied to clipboard

Moxin Li, Yuantao Zhang, Wenjie Wang, Wentao Shi, Zhuo Liu, Fuli Feng, Tat-Seng Chua

The Critique of Critique (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing approaches to optimize large language models with human preferences suffer from preference conflicts in the data.
Approach:	They propose to construct Pareto-optimal responses to resolve preference conflicts by using a self-improving DPO framework that enables LLMs to self-generate and select Paret-optimized responses.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves superior Pareto Front performance over baselines on two datasets.

Copied to clipboard

Shichao Sun, Junlong Li, Weizhe Yuan, Ruifeng Yuan, Wenjie Li, Pengfei Liu

Challenge:	MetaCritique builds specific quantification criteria to evaluate the quality of critique . a systematic method to evaluate critique is lacking.
Approach:	They propose a critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which builds specific quantification criteria and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score.
Outcome:	The proposed method can achieve near-human performance across 16 datasets.

The Evolution of Thought: Tracking LLM Overthinking via Reasoning Dynamics Analysis (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Zihao Wei, Liang Pang, Jiahao Liu, Wenjie Shi, Jingcheng Deng, Shicheng Xu, Zenghao Duan, Jingang Wang, Fei Sun, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng

Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Explicit reasoning trajectories increase performance but often trigger overthinking . despite its importance, this study examines how each step of reasoning affects the final outcome .
Approach:	They propose a Reasoning Completion Point Detector that detects the RCP by monitoring rank dynamics of termination tokens.
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces token usage by up to 44% while preserving accuracy.

Copied to clipboard

Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Yi Cheng, Wenjun Hou, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li

Robustness in NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods for fine-tuning open-source LLMs are limited to text-based analysis under predefined general criteria.
Approach:	They propose a framework that fine-tunes LLMs to replicate the evaluation explanations and judgments of proprietary models.
Outcome:	The proposed evaluation framework outperforms existing fine-tuned evaluation methods in effectiveness and robustness.

Pre-trained Language Model with Prompts for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Wenjie Xu, Ben Liu, Miao Peng, Xu Jia, Min Peng

A Survey on Open Information Extraction from Rule-based Model to Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph completion (TKGC) focus on extracting information from timestamps and insufficiently utilizing implied information in relations.
Approach:	They propose a temporal knowledge graph completion model with prompts that converts quadruples into pre-trained language inputs and prompts to make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information.
Outcome:	The proposed model can make coherent sentences with implicit semantic information.

Copied to clipboard

Liu Pai, Wenyang Gao, Wenjie Dong, Lin Ai, Ziwei Gong, Songfang Huang, Li Zongsheng, Ehsan Hoque, Julia Hirschberg, Yue Zhang

TInR: Exploring Tool-Internalized Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is a key NLP task aimed at extracting structured information from unstructured text sources.
Approach:	They propose to categorize OpenIE into rule-based, neural, and pre-trained large language models and discuss each within a chronological framework.
Outcome:	The paper categorizes OpenIE approaches into rule-based, neural, and pre-trained large language models, discussing each within a chronological framework.

Copied to clipboard

Qiancheng Xu, Yongqi Li, Fan Liu, Hongru Wang, Min Yang, Wenjie Li

Mask the Correct Tokens: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Error Correction (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Existing methods rely on external tool documentation during reasoning, leading to tool mastery difficulty, tool size constraints, and inference inefficiency.
Approach:	They propose a tool-internalized reasoning framework for unified reasoning and tool usage that integrates external tools into Large Language Models (LLMs) to address these issues, they propose 'tool-internet-based' reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed method achieves superior performance across in-domain and out-of-domain settings, highlighting its effectiveness and efficiency.

Copied to clipboard

Kai Shen, Yichong Leng, Xu Tan, Siliang Tang, Yuan Zhang, Wenjie Liu, Edward Lin

Parallel Test-Time Scaling for Latent Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Text error correction methods usually use the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentences through the decoder.
Approach:	They propose a method to correct errors in text sequences by randomly masking out the correct tokens in the source sentence.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves accuracy on Mandarin and English datasets with autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models.

Copied to clipboard

Runyang You, Yongqi Li, Meng Liu, Wenjie Wang, Liqiang Nie, Wenjie Li

HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Parallel test-time scaling is a pivotal approach for enhancing large language models.
Approach:	They propose two uncertainty-inspired stochastic strategies for parallel test-time scaling for latent reasoning models and a Latent Reward Model for aggregation.
Outcome:	The proposed model scales well with compute and enables effective trajectory selection.

Copied to clipboard

Xingyu Tan, Xiaoyang Wang, Qing Liu, Xiwei Xu, Xin Yuan, Liming Zhu, Wenjie Zhang