Papers by Yafu Li
Multi-Granularity Optimization for Non-Autoregressive Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Non-autoregressive machine translation suffers severe performance deterioration due to the naive independence assumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which collects model behaviours on translation segments of various granularities and integrates feedback for backpropagation to reduce latency. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed method outperforms baseline models trained with cross-entropy loss and achieves the best performance on WMT’16 EnRo and highly competitive results on WTM’14 EnDe. |
Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit translationese errors and generate unexpected unnatural translations . Neural machine translation (NMT) has become the dominant method in machine translation research . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the prevalence of translationese in LLM-generated translations and investigate its roots during supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods reduce translationese while improving translation naturalness . the proposed methods are validated by human evaluations and automatic metrics . |
On Compositional Generalization of Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models have shown competitive performance in benchmarks such as WMT, but there are significant issues such as robustness, domain generalization, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for NMT models from the perspective of compositional generalization and quantitatively analyze the results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well under traditional metrics, but is low in out-of-domain and low-resource conditions. |
SEE: Continual Fine-tuning with Sequential Ensemble of Experts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Continual fine-tuning of large language models suffers from catastrophic forgetting . some approaches use routers to assign tasks to experts, but continual learning often requires retraining . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates routing and response mechanisms within each expert . it eliminates the need for an additional router and allows each expert to decide whether a query should be handled . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous approaches in continual fine-tuning . it can handle learning tasks and out-of-distribution instances, paving the way for distributed model ensembling. |
GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-Distribution Generalization Perspective (2023.findings-acl)
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Linyi Yang, Shuibai Zhang, Libo Qin, Yafu Li, Yidong Wang, Hanmeng Liu, Jindong Wang, Xing Xie, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have improved generalization performance but the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a benchmark for evaluating out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization in NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight the importance of OOD robustness and provide insights on how to measure it and improve it. |
Multi-LLM Collaborative Search for Complex Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with complex reasoning tasks due to the vast reasoning space inherent in the complexity and inherent ambiguities of natural languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-search-agents paradigm that integrates diverse reasoning pathways by combining independent exploration and iterative refinement among multiple LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance over single-agent and multi-agend baselines in complex mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
CoTEvol: Self-Evolving Chain-of-Thoughts for Data Synthesis in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity with markedly improved efficiency. |
Keys to Robust Edits: From Theoretical Insights to Practical Advances (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for modifying parametric memory are prone to inaccuracies due to conflicting or outdated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play module that disentangles editing keys from native model representations and dynamically adjusts keys via contrastive learning to achieve robustness-specificity balance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves over robustness tests by up to 66.4% while maintaining the success rate unaffected. |
Spotting AI’s Touch: Identifying LLM-Paraphrased Spans in Text (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on detecting (partially) AI-generated texts, but paraphrasing is commonly employed in various application scenarios for text refinement and diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for paraphrased text span detection that takes in the full text and assigns each sentence with a score indicating the paraphrasing degree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can detect paraphrased text spans within a text . it takes in the full text and assigns each sentence with a score indicating the paraphrasing degree. |
Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Modern neural machine translation models suffer limitation in compositional generalization, resulting in weakened translation performance on unseen compounds. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce categorization to the contextualized representations to improve generalization by reducing sparsity and overfitting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces compositional generalization error rates by 24% on a dedicated MT dataset. |
Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text generation models follow the sequence-to-sequence paradigm . generative grammar suggests humans generate language by learning language grammar . |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax-guided generation schema that searches the syntax tree in a top-down direction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms autoregressive baselines on paraphrase generation and machine translation. |
MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild (2024.acl-long)
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Yafu Li, Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Zhilin Wang, Longyue Wang, Linyi Yang, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on evaluating detection methods for specific domains or language models. |
| Approach: | They build a testbed to detect texts from diverse human writings and LLMs using different detection methods. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the top performing detector can identify 84.12% out-of-domain texts generated by a new LLM, indicating the feasibility for application scenarios. |
What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation? (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that non-autoregressive (NAT) methods underperform autoregressive methods (AT) however, their evaluation using BLEU has been shown to weakly correlate with human annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate four representative NAT methods using BLEU to narrow the performance gap between autoregressive and autoregressive translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods underperform NAT and autoregressive methods under more reliable evaluation metrics. |
LexMatcher: Dictionary-centric Data Curation for LLM-based Machine Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | emergence of large language models (LLMs) has brought about new opportunities for machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for data curation that supplements the infrequent senses of polysemous words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms established baselines on the WMT2022 test sets and is applicable to other pre-trained models. |
Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models: A Dynamical Systems View of Successive Paraphrasing (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for understanding iterative processes and evolution over time. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply this perspective to large language models which iteratively map input text to output text and re-express meaning with linguistic variation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reveals that paraphrases re-express meaning with linguistic variation limiting linguistic diversity . |
Consistency Regularization Training for Compositional Generalization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models have difficulty generalizing to unseen combinations of seen components. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the capability of Transformer on compositional generalization by consistency regularization training without modifying model architectures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on semantic parsing and machine translation benchmarks. |
Scaling Reasoning, Losing Control: Evaluating Instruction Following in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning-oriented models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in mathematical reasoning, but their ability to adhere to user directives remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate instruction-following in mathematical reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model degrades in instruction adherence when generation length increases, but can partially recover obedience, despite increasing generation length. |
Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation (2023.acl-long)
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Yulong Chen, Huajian Zhang, Yijie Zhou, Xuefeng Bai, Yueguan Wang, Ming Zhong, Jianhao Yan, Yafu Li, Judy Li, Xianchao Zhu, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing work on cross-lingual summarization (CLS) does not consider crosslingual sources for summarizing. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual conversation summarization benchmark that explicitly considers source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines on ConvSumX and 3 widely-used manual annotations. |
The Best of Both Worlds: Combining Parallel and Sequential Inference Scaling via Aggregation Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models achieve substantial gains with test-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They introduce a supervised fine-tuning paradigm where models synthesize multiple draft responses into a single, refined answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AFT-trained models outperform baseline models while eliminating external guidance. |
Prompt-Driven Neural Machine Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models still face various challenges including fragility and lack of style flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate prompts into neural machine translation to improve translation control and style flexibility. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method improves translation control and quality and improves human-in-the-loop translation. |