Papers by Wentao Li

43 papers
FB-Bench: A Fine-Grained Multi-Task Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs’ Responsiveness to Human Feedback (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch (2026.acl-long)

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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 .
Rethinking Text-to-SQL: Dynamic Multi-turn SQL Interaction for Real-world Database Exploration (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)

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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.
MathMixup: Boosting LLM Mathematical Reasoning with Difficulty-Controllable Data Synthesis and Curriculum Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Look Less, Reason More: Rollout-Guided Adaptive Pixel-Space Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Taming LLMs with Gradient Grouping (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization (2021.findings-emnlp)

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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.
Semantic Framework based Query Generation for Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs (2022.emnlp-main)

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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.
Hallucinations as Orthogonal Noise: Inference-Time Manifold Alignment via Dynamic Contextual Orthogonalization (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Awakening Dormant Experts:Counterfactual Routing to Mitigate MoE Hallucinations (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Do LLMs Behave as Claimed? Investigating How LLMs Follow Their Own Claims using Counterfactual Questions (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Wukong-Reader: Multi-modal Pre-training for Fine-grained Visual Document Understanding (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Decoder Tuning: Efficient Language Understanding as Decoding (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Can LLMs be Good Graph Judge for Knowledge Graph Construction? (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Dynamic Model-Bank Test-Time Adaptation for Automatic Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
MorphoBench: A Benchmark with Difficulty Adaptive to Model Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Memorize Step by Step: Efficient Long-Context Prefilling with Incremental Memory and Decremental Chunk (2024.emnlp-main)

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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.
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
EPO: Explicit Policy Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.acl-long)

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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.
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-1)

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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.
MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria (2025.naacl-long)

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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.
SDPO: Segment-Level Direct Preference Optimization for Social Agents (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Training Verifier to Assessing Complex Real-World Tool-Use Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)

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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.
Generative Giants, Retrieval Weaklings: Why do Multimodal Large Language Models Fail at Multimodal Retrieval? (2026.findings-acl)

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

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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.
Self-Explanation Prompting Improves Dialogue Understanding in Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)

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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.
QAEncoder: Towards Aligned Representation Learning in Question Answering Systems (2025.acl-long)

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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.
LEASH: Adaptive Length Penalty and Reward Shaping for Efficient Large Reasoning Model (2026.acl-long)

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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.
MM-Verify: Enhancing Multimodal Reasoning with Chain-of-Thought Verification (2025.acl-long)

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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.
FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)

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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.
EthicMind: A Risk-Aware Framework for Ethical-Emotional Alignment in Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.acl-long)

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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.
HopRAG: Multi-Hop Reasoning for Logic-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
Removal of Hallucination on Hallucination: Debate-Augmented RAG (2025.acl-long)

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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.
LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
AutoUE: Automated Generation of 3D Games in Unreal Engine via Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
UniPCM: Universal Pre-trained Conversation Model with Task-aware Automatic Prompt (2024.lrec-main)

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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.
TROJail: Trajectory-Level Optimization for Multi-Turn Large Language Model Jailbreaks with Process Rewards (2026.acl-long)

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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.

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