Papers by Yaliang Li
Differential Privacy for Text Analytics via Natural Text Sanitization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text sanitization mechanisms provide low utility, as cursed by the high-dimensional text representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sanitized texts to samaritize training data . they propose to retrain and fine-tune the senitization-aware language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables privacypreserving natural language processing over the BERT language model with promising utility. |
Agentic Memory: Learning Unified Long-Term and Short-Term Memory Management for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods handle long-term memory (LTM) and short-term (STM) as separate components, relying on heuristics or auxiliary controllers, which limits adaptability and end-to-end optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates LTM and STM management directly into the agent's policy and propose 'agentic memory' to train such unified behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong memory-augmented baselines on five long-horizon benchmarks and achieves higher-quality long-term memory and more efficient context usage. |
Enhancing Tool Learning in Large Language Models with Hierarchical Error Checklists (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, but their effectiveness is often hampered by parameter mis-filling during tool calling. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical tool error checklist framework to diagnose and mitigate tool-calling errors without relying on extensive real-world interactions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves parameter-filling accuracy and tool-calling success rates compared to baseline methods. |
Knowledge Graph-Guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on RAG focus on semantic retrieval of isolated relevant chunks, which ignore their intrinsic relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes knowledge graphs to provide fact-level relationships between chunks, improving the diversity and coherence of the retrieved results. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the HotpotQA dataset and its variants demonstrate the advantages of KG2RAG compared to existing RAG-based approaches in terms of response quality and retrieval quality. |
Tunable Soft Prompts are Messengers in Federated Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to protect model privacy in federated learning (FL) are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated learning approach that provides model privacy protection via tunable soft prompts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach provides protection for the global model while reducing communication and computation costs. |
Wasserstein Selective Transfer Learning for Cross-domain Text Mining (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve the learning of data-scarce target domains have negative transfer due to the data distributions between source and target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a reinforced selector to select helpful data for transfer learning and a Wasserstein-based discriminator to maximize the distance between the selected data and target data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs better on three real-world text mining tasks. |
Factual Consistency Evaluation for Text Summarization via Counterfactual Estimation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate factual consistency in text summarization neglect the intrinsic cause of factual inconsistency or rely on auxiliary tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate the factual consistency in text summarization via counterfactual estimation, which formulates the causal relationship between source document, generated summary, and the language prior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric improves correlation with human judgments and convenience of usage on three public abstractive text summarization datasets. |
DATA-CUBE: Data Curriculum for Instruction-based Sentence Representation Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve sentence representation learning (SRL) ignore the potential interference problems across tasks and instances. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction tuning method that arranges the order of multi- task data for training to minimize interference risks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can boost the performance of state-of-the-art methods. |
Advancing Reasoning with Off-the-Shelf LLMs: A Semantic Structure Perspective (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning models suffer from hallucinations and unfaithfulness, whereas general LLMs perform suboptimal on complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure analysis method that helps LLMs better understand the question structure and guide the problem-solving process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves zero-shot performance on knowledge-intensive and mathematical tasks while demonstrating strong robustness against corrupted reasoning paths. |
CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System (2021.acl-demo)
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Kun Zhou, Xiaolei Wang, Yuanhang Zhou, Chenzhan Shang, Yuan Cheng, Wayne Xin Zhao, Yaliang Li, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Existing studies on conversational recommender systems lack a unified and standardized implementation or comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a unified framework and highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework collects 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implements 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models. |
ViFT: Towards Visual Instruction-Free Fine-tuning for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Visual instruction tuning is the predominant technology in eliciting multimodal task-solving capabilities of large vision-language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual instruction-free fine-tuning framework for large vision-language models . they require only text-only instructions and image caption data during training . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on visual instruction tuning, but requires images as input . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on several downstream benchmarks with less training data. |
LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems are Scalable Graph Generative Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiarui Ji, Runlin Lei, Jialing Bi, Zhewei Wei, Xu Chen, Yankai Lin, Xuchen Pan, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding
| Challenge: | Social graphs are mathematical structures stem from pairwise interactions between entities through nodes and edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for dynamic, text-attributed social graph generation that simulates the temporal node and edge generation processes for zero-shot social graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves macroscopic graph structure metrics by 11% . the proposed model can generate graphs with up to 100,000 nodes or 10 million edges . |
HRKD: Hierarchical Relational Knowledge Distillation for Cross-domain Language Model Compression (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown overwhelming performances on many tasks, but their large size and slow inference speed have hindered practical deployments. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical relational knowledge distillation method to capture hierarchic and domain relational information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multi-domain datasets and is highly reproducible. |
Knowledge as A Bridge: Improving Cross-domain Answer Selection with External Knowledge (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer selection are limited in domains with limited labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-aware Attentive Network framework for cross-domain answer selection that uses the knowledge base as a bridge to enable knowledge transfer from the source domain to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong competitors by a noticeable margin in cross-domain answer selection. |
Enhancing Multimodal Retrieval via Complementary Information Extraction and Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on capturing information in multimodal data that is similar to their paired texts, but often ignores the complementary information contained in multimodule data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal retrieval approach that employs Complementary Information Extraction and Alignment to capture complementary information in multimodal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant improvements over divide-and-conquer models and universal dense retrieval models. |
Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embodied reasoning are coarse-grained and expensive . branch-and-browse framework enables fine-grounded, memory-guided, and efficient multi-branch reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves task success rate of 35.8% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4% relative to state-of-the-art methods. |
Do Emergent Abilities Exist in Quantized Large Language Models: An Empirical Study (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require significant computational resources for deployment and use. |
| Approach: | They propose to use low-bit quantization methods to reduce memory footprint and increase inference rate to improve performance of Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can reduce the memory footprint and increase the inference rate of LLMs. |
Cooperative Denoising for Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for distantly supervised relation extraction suffer from noisy labeling problem, which can severely degrade its performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for distantly supervised relation extraction that leverages text corpus and knowledge graph and a cooperative module involving their mutual learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the noisy labels and achieves substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Meta-KD: A Meta Knowledge Distillation Framework for Language Model Compression across Domains (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been successful in NLP tasks, but their large size and long inference time limit their deployment in real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-teacher model that captures transferable knowledge across domains and passes it to students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distill large teacher models into small student models with guidance from the meta-teacher. |
Relabel the Noise: Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations via Cooperative Multiagents (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for entity and relation extraction require light human annotation efforts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to re-label noisy instances with a cooperative group . they use a confidence consensus module to gather the wisdom of all agents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two real-world datasets. |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
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Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
ChartThinker: A Contextual Chain-of-Thought Approach to Optimized Chart Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for chart summarization lack visual-language matching and reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which synthesizes deep analysis based on chains of thought and strategies of context retrieval to improve the logical coherence and accuracy of the generated summaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms 8 state-of-the-art models over 7 evaluation metrics and can significantly reduce time and cognitive resources required. |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
ReasoningLM: Enabling Structural Subgraph Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (KGQA) aims to find answer entities for natural language questions based on knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a subgraph-aware self-attention mechanism to imitate the graph neural network (GNN) based module to perform multi-hop reasoning on KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin even with fewer updated parameters and less training data. |
Multi-grained Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat Named Entity Recognition (NER) as a sequence labeling task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Multi-Grained Named Entity Recognition where multiple entities or entity mentions in a sentence could be non-overlapping or totally nested. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art frameworks by 4.4% in terms of the F1 score among nested/non-overlapping NER tasks. |
Profanity-Avoiding Training Framework for Seq2seq Models with Certified Robustness (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that inappropriate language can cause models to output profanity . authors propose a training framework to prevent such outputs from hurting the usability of models . |
| Approach: | proposed training framework eliminates the causes that trigger the generation of profanity . authors propose a framework that leverages a short list of profans to prevent this . |
| Outcome: | a proposed training framework can prevent models from generating profanity . the proposed framework leverages a short list of profanities examples . |
Joint Slot Filling and Intent Detection via Capsule Neural Networks (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that label slots and detect intent do not preserve hierarchical relationship between words, slots, and intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule-based neural network model which performs slot filling and intent detection via a dynamic routing-by-agreement schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than existing models and existing models on real-world datasets. |
Respecting Temporal-Causal Consistency: Entity-Event Knowledge Graph for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Standard unstructured RAG methods rely on embedding-similarity matching and lack any general mechanism to encode or exploit chronological information. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that integrates a document retrieval generator with an exter-nal document retriever to enhance the model's accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art unstructured and KG-based RAG frameworks on causal and character consistency queries. |