Papers by Wentao Li
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on benchmarking LLMs in single-turn dialogues, neglecting the nuanced nature of human feedback within real-world usage scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained, multi-task benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs’ responsiveness to human feedback under real-world usage scenarios in Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that human feedback can significantly impact LLMs’ responsiveness in real-world usage scenarios. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing open-source vision language models lack high-quality training data for chart reasoning . current models are simplistic and repetitive, while associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChartVerse-8B surpasses existing models in QA and difficulty . lack of high-quality training data hampers development of open-source models . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Structured Query Language (SQL) is the cornerstone for data-driven decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to rigorously evaluate Large Language Models within a dynamic interaction framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to rigorously evaluate LLMs within a dynamic interaction framework. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis methods suffer from limited diversity and lack precise control over problem difficulty, making them insufficient for efficient training paradigms such as curriculum learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis paradigm that generates high-quality, difficulty-controllable mathematical reasoning problems through hybrid and decomposed strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms existing methods and improves mathematical reasoning abilities. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent work has shown promise by incorporating pixel-level visual information into the reasoning process, enabling VLMs to access high-resolution visual details during their thought process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically determines necessary pixel-level operations based on the input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 73.4% accuracy on HR-Bench 4K while maintaining a tool usage ratio of only 20.1%, improving accuracy and reducing tool usage by 66.5% compared to the previous methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new study presents scaling with gradient grouping (SGG) the adaptive learning rate scaling approach is based on per-parameter statistics, which incurs memory overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose an optimizer wrapper that improves adaptive learning rate estimation by dynamic grouping and group-specific scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves learning rate estimation on diverse models with different model sizes and batch sizes. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing SOTA methods for normalization rely on expert-designed rules or grammars . current methods are domain sensitive and not sufficient on emerging corpora . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates normalization rules from annotated data without expert intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing rule-based methods on the Tweets benchmark and on the TempEval-3 benchmark. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal question answering ignore intrinsic connections between events that can make them temporally related. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal question answering method that generates query graphs by exploring relevant facts of mentioned entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two benchmarks over different knowledge graphs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Hallucinations in Large Language Models persist in critical domains where generated content diverges from contextual facts or logical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate hallucinations as orthogonal noise relative to the semantic manifold of the residual stream. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior contextual faithfulness compared to state-of-the-art methods. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sparse Mixture-of-Experts models are vulnerable to hallucinations, authors say . static Top-k routing leaves "specialist experts" under-prioritized for specific tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework to awaken dormant experts . they propose 'counterfactual routing' to shift computational resources from syntax-dominant to knowledge-intensive layers . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoR improves factual accuracy by 3.1% without increasing the inference budget. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks rely on curated datasets that, once public, may be accessed by newer LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates counterfactual questions and answers from existing evaluation datasets and uses them to evaluate LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework reduces the risk of data leakage by allowing the LLMs to respond to counterfactual questions and verify their claims. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for visual document understanding lack granularity of document textlines. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised pre-training program to leverage structural knowledge nested in document textlines to achieve fine-grained alignment between visual regions and texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system performs better on various VDU tasks in English and Chinese. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt pre-trained models with parameters frozen are based on input-side adaptation, which requires thousands of API queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a model-as-a-service (MaaS) setting to provide only the inference APIs for users . they argue that input-side adaptation could be arduous due to the lack of gradient signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms with a 200x speed-up. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for converting unstructured text into structured Knowledge Graphs (KGs) have limitations such as large amount of noise, inaccurate knowledge, and hallucination . |
| Approach: | They propose a GraphJudge framework to reduce noise in real-world documents . they propose Graphjudge to fine-tune a LLM as a graph judge to enhance quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework eliminates noise in real-world documents and improves the quality of generated KGs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing ASR TTA methods struggle with instability under continual and long-term distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose a continuous adaptive model-bank framework that adapts to domain shifts in ASR test-time scenarios. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse, continuously shifting ASR benchmarks show that DMSUTA outperforms existing continual TTA baselines. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models are limited in scope and lack flexibility to adapt difficulty according to evolving reasoning capacities of models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates multidisciplinary questions to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large models and can adjust and update question difficulty based on the reasoning abilities of advanced models. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize LLM for long sequences for long documents are slow and consume memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that starts with a small memory size and gradually increases it . they propose Decremental Chunk based on Incremental Memory (IMDC) which reduces chunk size while increasing memory size . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is faster (1.45x) and reduces GPU memory consumption by 23.3% compared to fixed-size memory. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Despite the rapid advancements of Large Language Models, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect contaminated training data and diminish the contamination effect by using a to-be-released dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5% on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for strategic reasoning face challenges in adaptability, scalability, and transferring strategies to new contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit policy optimization model that provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides strategies in open-ended action space and can be plugged into arbitrary LLM agents to motivate goal-directed behavior. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English . MRC is a new field of research that aims to comprehend the context of articles and answer the questions based on them. |
| Approach: | They propose a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities to existing reading comprehension datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is composed of 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methodologies for multimodal large language models are limited in evaluating objective queries without considering real-world user experiences. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm shows that it can be used to evaluate multimodal large language models with per-sample criteria. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has proven effective in aligning LLM behavior with human preferences across various tasks, but is limited in multi-turn social interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which dynamically selects key segments within interactions to optimize multi-turn agent behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods and proprietary LLMs on the SOTOPIA benchmark and show that they can improve social intelligence. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for training effective AI agents often resort to synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for data quality control in tool-use scenarios . they construct a tool-verify dataset and release a benchmark to assess its performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct on Tool-V-Bench and the previous APIGen-MT dataset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing . |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Rapid advances in multimodal large language models have revolutionized cross-modality understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses whitening transformations to adjust MLLM representation spaces . they propose ML models that are dominated by textual semantics and visual semantics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot multimodal retrieval performance without fine-tuning efforts. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, but the vast model parameters pose challenges in downstream fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompting strategy that analyzes each dialogue utterance before task execution to enhance LLMs' comprehension in multi-turn dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms other zero-shot prompts and matches or exceeds efficacy of few-shot ones. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Modern QA systems entail retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for accurate and trustworthy responses, but the inherent gap between user queries and relevant documents hinders precise matching. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)-based approach to bridge this gap by attaching document fingerprints to the embedding to estimate the expectation of potential queries. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across diverse datasets, languages, and embedding models confirm the proposed solution is simple-yet-effective with zero additional index storage, retrieval latency, training costs, or catastrophic forgetting and hallucination issues. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to long reasoning traces are hard to tune and fail to adapt to evolving LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes the length of reasoning traces by a Lagrangian primal–dual method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the average reasoning length by 60% across diverse tasks while maintaining competitive performance. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | MM-Verifier and MM Reasoner are a powerful multimodal reasoning model . large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance across tasks spanning myriad domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which combines tree search and verification to generate high-quality chain-of-thought data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all larger models on the MathCheck, MathVista, and MathVerse benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are susceptible to undesired planning hallucinations when lacking specific knowledge for expertise-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of workflow-guided agent planning by formalizing different formats of workflow knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to improve the planning reliability of LLM-based agents by incorporating external workflow-related knowledge. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing dialogue models address empathy and ethical safety in isolation . Existing models fail to adapt their behavior as ethical risk and user emotion evolve . |
| Approach: | They propose a risk-aware framework that integrates ethical-emotional alignment in dialogue as an explicit turn-level decision problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more consistent ethical guidance and emotional engagement than baselines in ethically complex interactions. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Traditional retrieval systems focus on lexical or semantic similarity rather than logical relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RAG framework that augments retrieval with logical reasoning . hopRAG uses a retrieve-reason-prune mechanism to explore multi-hop neighbors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms conventional retrieval systems and state-of-the-art benchmarks on multi-hop QA tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | erroneous or biased retrieval can mislead generation, compounding hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-agent debates into retrieval and generation stages to improve retrieval reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval reliability, reduces hallucinations and significantly improves overall factual accuracy. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluating 52 LLMs reveals that only the strongest models maintain robust performance under increasing context lengths and format diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms compression-based approaches on tasks requiring semantic integration. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative models have motivated studies on automated game generation from natural language descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent system, AutoUE, which coordinates multiple agents to end-to-end generate 3D games, covering model retrieval, scene generation, gameplay and interaction code synthesis, and automated game testing for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system covers model retrieval, scene generation, gameplay and interaction code synthesis, and automated game testing for evaluation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that multi-task instruction tuning after pre-training greatly improves the model’s robustness and transfer ability, which is crucial for building a high-quality dialog system. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Task-aware Automatic Prompt generation (TAP) to automatically generate high-quality prompts from 15 dialog-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is robust to input prompts and capable of various dialog-related tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training multi-turn attackers to probe model safety vulnerabilities rely on turn-level optimization, which is insufficient for learning long-term attack strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning problem that optimizes the harmfulness of the final-turn response as the outcome reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves attack success rates across multiple models and benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of the proposed approach. |