Papers by Yan Junbing
Thinking with DistilQwen: A Tale of Four Distilled Reasoning and Reward Model Series (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models, the need for efficient reasoning models has become increasingly urgent. |
| Approach: | They extend the Qwen model family by introducing four model series specifically designed for industrial applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform previous models in multiple benchmarks and provide scalable training and inference functionality on the Alibaba Cloud PAI platform. |
Enhancing Reasoning Abilities of Small LLMs with Cognitive Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to distill chain-of-thought (CoT) results from large language reasoning models (LRMs) to small models are ineffective and require substantial amount of annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Critique-Rethink-Verify system for training small language reasoning models that can be critiquized according to the cognitive capabilities of smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms other methods on challenging reasoning benchmarks. |
TRELM: Towards Robust and Efficient Pre-training for Knowledge-Enhanced Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating external knowledge into language models do not prioritize learning embeddings for entity-related tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for incorporating external knowledge into pre-training models that utilize entity-related tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces pre-training time by 50% and outperforms other KEPLMs in knowledge probing tasks and multiple knowledge-aware language understanding tasks. |
From Complex to Simple: Unraveling the Cognitive Tree for Reasoning with Small Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve complex logical reasoning problems are cumbersome for language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative methodology to construct a cognitive tree using language models . they propose to generate multiple responses by utilizing in-context examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a performance level comparable to that of GPT-3.5 . the proposed model contains fewer parameters than 5% of the model with 175B parameters . |
On the Role of Long-tail Knowledge in Retrieval Augmented Large Language Models (2024.acl-short)
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Dongyang Li, Junbing Yan, Taolin Zhang, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods focus on improving the task performance, without fine-grained process of knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects long-tail knowledge in large language models by analyzing retrieved documents and enhancing queries indiscriminately with retrieved information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves over 4x speedup in average inference time and consistent performance improvement in downstream tasks compared to existing pipelines. |
EasyDistill: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Effective Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we present EasyDistill, a comprehensive toolkit designed for effective black-box and white-box knowledge distillation (KD) of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit for effective black-box and white-box knowledge distillation (KD) of large language models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The framework offers data synthesis, supervised fine-tuning, ranking optimization, and reinforcement learning techniques specifically tailored for KD scenarios. |
Reasoning with OmniThought: A Large CoT Dataset with Verbosity and Cognitive Difficulty Annotations (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing resources often fail to provide extensive reasoning problems with coherent CoT processes distilled from multiple teacher models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale dataset featuring 2 million CoT processes generated by multiple powerful LRMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset features 2 million CoT processes and is validated by multiple powerful LRMs. |
DistilQwen2.5: Industrial Practices of Training Distilled Open Lightweight Language Models (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on distilled lightweight LLMs have focused on transferring knowledge from a larger model (the teacher) to a smaller model (sector). |
| Approach: | They propose a family of distilled, lightweight LLMs derived from Qwen2.5 models. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the distilled models have significantly stronger instruction-following capabilities than the original models. |
AgenticQwen: Training Small Agentic Language Models with Dual Data Flywheels for Industrial-Scale Tool Use (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Modern industrial applications increasingly demand language models capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a model family that trains via multi-round reinforcement learning on synthetic data and open-source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model train on synthetic and open-source data achieves strong performance on multiple agentic benchmarks and in an industrial agent system. |