Papers by Wenjun Li
End-to-End Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction with Graph Convolutional Network (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims to extract emotion expressions and their corresponding causes in a document simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to model pair-level contexts so that to capture dependency information among local neighborhood candidate pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts emotion-cause pairs and their causes from documents . it is based on a benchmark Chinese emotion-case pair extraction corpus . |
Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems have attracted significant attention for their potential to act as medical assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that emulates clinicians' diagnostic reasoning processes and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates appropriate responses that relies on abductive and deductive diagnostic reasoning analyses and aligns with clinician preferences through thought process modeling. |
Subtle Errors in Reasoning: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing (2025.acl-long)
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Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| 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. |
On the Consistency of Commonsense in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of commonsense for large language models focus on downstream knowledge tasks, failing to probe whether LLMs truly understand and utilize knowledge or merely memorize it. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically construct a large benchmark named CoCo which measures LLMs’ knowledge memorization, comprehension, and application and examines the consistency between these tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically assesses LLMs’ knowledge memorization, comprehension, and application and examines the consistency between these tasks. |
Acquisition and Application of Novel Knowledge in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for constructing new datasets rely on timestamps or simple templates that do not accurately reflect the real world. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge dataset construction approach that simulates biological evolution using knowledge graphs to generate synthetic entities with diverse attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms knowledge augmentation methods by 3.3%-38%. |
ORGAN: Observation-Guided Radiology Report Generation via Tree Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| 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. |
Revisiting Large Language Models as Zero-shot Relation Extractors (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) transfer well to new tasks out-of-the-box . relationship extraction (RE) involves a certain degree of labeled or unlabeled data even under zero-shot setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple prompt recursively using LLMs to transform RE inputs to QA format . they propose qq prompting and qt prompting to improve their results . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on different model sizes, benchmarks and settings. |
Soft Knowledge Prompt: Help External Knowledge Become a Better Teacher to Instruct LLM in Knowledge-based VQA (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on improving prediction performance and reliability of LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to actively extract valuable information from the knowledge to produce a latent vector as a soft prompt, which is fused with the image embedding to form a knowledge-enhanced context to instruct LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on knowledge-based VQA benchmarks. |
RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
Medical Dialogue Generation via Dual Flow Modeling (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical dialogue systems (MDS) aim to provide patients with medical services, such as diagnosis and prescription. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Flow enhanced Medical (DFMed) dialogue generation framework that extracts the medical entities and doctor's dialogue acts used in the dialogue history and models their transitions with an entity-centric graph flow and a sequential act flow. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exceeds baselines in both automatic and manual evaluations on two datasets. |
STELLA: A Multimodal LLM for Protein Functional Annotation via Unified Sequence-Structure Encoding (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongwang Xiao, Wenjun Lin, Xi Chen, Hui Wang, Kai Chen, Jiashan Li, Yuancheng Sun, Sicheng Dai, Boya Wu, Qiwei Ye
| Challenge: | a multimodal protein language model (LLM) integrates sequence, structure, and function into functional annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal protein language model that synergistically aligns bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synergizes bimodal representations with the textual modality to advance protein functional annotation. |
DS-MHP: Improving Chain-of-Thought through Dynamic Subgraph-Guided Multi-Hop Path (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graph methods lack adaptability in knowledge-intensive tasks with multiple entities and implicit multi-hop relations. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot framework to enhance LLM reasoning in multi-entity relation tasks. |
| Outcome: | DS-MHP outperforms baselines and state-of-the-art methods on 12 datasets spanning commonsense, logical, symbolic, and arithmetic reasoning. |
Diagram-Driven Course Questions Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinyu Zhang, Lingling Zhang, Yanrui Wu, Muye Huang, Wenjun Wu, Bo Li, Shaowei Wang, Basura Fernando, Jun Liu
| Challenge: | Visual Question Generation (VQG) research focuses on natural images while neglecting diagrams, a critical component of educational materials. |
| Approach: | They propose a diagram-driven course questions generation task to generate diagram-relevant questions for specific courses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on DiagramQG while maintaining strong generalizability across natural image datasets. |
Joint Learning for Emotion Classification and Emotion Cause Detection (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using a unified framework, we propose a joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network-based joint approach for emotion classification and emotion cause detection which captures mutual benefits across the two sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can capture mutual benefits across two sub-tasks on Chinese microblogs. |
MultiConIR: Towards Multi-Condition Information Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xuan Lu, Sifan Liu, Bochao Yin, Yongqi Li, Xinghao Chen, Hui Su, Yaohui Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Xiaoyu Shen
| Challenge: | MultiConIR is a benchmark designed to evaluate retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates retrieval and reranking models under nuanced multi-condition query scenarios across five domains. |
ODD: A Benchmark Dataset for the Natural Language Processing Based Opioid Related Aberrant Behavior Detection (2024.naacl-long)
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Sunjae Kwon, Xun Wang, Weisong Liu, Emily Druhl, Minhee Sung, Joel Reisman, Wenjun Li, Robert Kerns, William Becker, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Opioid related aberrant behaviors (ORABs) present novel risk factors for opioid overdose. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a biomedical natural language processing benchmark dataset to classify ORABs from patients’ EHR notes into nine categories: confirmed aberrant behavior, suggested aberrant behaviors, Opioids, indication, diagnosed opioid dependency, Benzodiazepines, medication changes, and Central Nervous System-related. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms two state-of-the-art models in most categories and the gains are especially higher among uncommon classes. |
Eval-RAR: Evaluation-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation fail to provide explicit supervision for internal reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose an Evaluation-driven Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning framework that uses reinforcement learning and a fine-grained evaluation reward to optimize the process. |
| Outcome: | Eval-RAR outperforms existing methods on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop tasks. |
ICON: Improving Inter-Report Consistency in Radiology Report Generation via Lesion-aware Mixup Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| 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. |
LLM-Guided Semantic-Aware Clustering for Topic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that topic modeling is competitive compared to closed-source methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised topic modeling method that combines LLMs with clustering to improve topic generation and distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods that utilize GPT-4 on topic alignment and exhibits competitive performance compared to Neural Topic Models on topic quality. |
Boosting Textural NER with Synthetic Image and Instructive Alignment (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a key task reliant on textual data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transform NER into a multimodal task by using images from the internet as auxiliaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses all text-only baselines and improves F1 score by 1.4% to 2.3% on prominent MNER datasets. |
Giving Control Back to Models: Enabling Offensive Language Detection Models to Autonomously Identify and Mitigate Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models often rely on specific words to predict offensive content, compromising model fairness and potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups. |
| Approach: | They propose a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework to help models identify and mitigate biases by integrating multiple natural language processing techniques. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces false positive rate of models in in-distribution and out-of-difference tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements on larger datasets. |
RAR2: Retrieval-Augmented Medical Reasoning via Thought-Driven Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on refining queries without modeling the reasoning process, limiting their ability to retrieve and integrate clinically relevant knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework that improves Reasoning-Augmented Retrieval and Retri-Agmented Reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms RAG baselines on biomedical question answering datasets. |
Learning to Align Multi-Faceted Evaluation: A Unified and Robust Framework (2025.findings-acl)
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Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Yi Cheng, Wenjun Hou, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
| 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. |
Adaptive Tool Use in Large Language Models with Meta-Cognition Trigger (2025.acl-long)
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Wenjun Li, Dexun Li, Kuicai Dong, Cong Zhang, Hao Zhang, Weiwen Liu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research expands the tool arrays of large language models (LLMs), but the necessity of using these tools is often overlooked, leading to indiscriminate tool invocation. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognition proxy proxy for LLMs self-assessment of their capabilities, reflecting the model’s awareness of its own limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is fine-tuned-free and costs minimal. |
TinyAlign: Boosting Lightweight Vision-Language Models by Mitigating Modal Alignment Bottlenecks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuanze Hu, Xinyu Wang, Zhichao Yang, Gen Li, Ye Qiu, Zhaoxin Fan, Yifan Sun, Wenjun wu, Jin Dong, Xiaotie Deng
| Challenge: | Lightweight Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are indispensable for resource-constrained applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves context from a memory bank to enhance alignment . they propose EMI-based approach to align vision and language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training loss, accelerates convergence, and enhances task performance with negligible computational overhead. |
Unlocking Instructive In-Context Learning with Tabular Prompting for Relational Triple Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relational triple extraction (RTE) are unnatural and recast RTE tasks to text-to-text prompting formats. |
| Approach: | They propose a tabular prompting for RTE which frames RTE task into a table generation task and propose an instructive in-context learning which only selects and annotates samples considering triple semantics in massive unlabeled samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed prompting for RTE with TableIE achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to other methods . the proposed prompts are based on off-the shelf LLMs and are scalable to multiple scenarios . |
Semantic-Eval : A Semantic Comprehension Evaluation Framework for Large Language Models Generation without Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as key drivers of progress in the field of natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses LLM-generated text based on semantic understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional evaluation metrics and lags behind GPT-4. |
Unlocking the Planning Capabilities of Large Language Models with Maximum Diversity Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to generate valid plans in the automated planning domain due to weak System 2 competencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which uses a random sampling method to select diverse and representative data to enhance sample efficiency and the model’s generalization capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods across scales and multiple benchmark domains. |
RADAR: Enhancing Radiology Report Generation with Supplementary Knowledge Injection (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance radiology report generation overlook the knowledge already embedded within the models, leading to redundant information integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing radiology report generation with supplementary knowledge injection that leverages both internal and external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on MIMIC-CXR, CheXpert-Plus, and IU X-ray show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs in both language quality and clinical accuracy. |