Papers by Yanfeng Wang
HSDreport: Heart Sound Diagnosis with Echocardiography Reports (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zihan Zhao, Pingjie Wang, Liudan Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Ya Zhang, Kun Sun, Xin Sun, Xin Zhou, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for heart sound diagnosis are limited to a few fixed categories and do not utilize echocardiography reports, the gold standard in the diagnosis of related diseases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that mandates the direct utilization of heart sounds obtained from auscultation to predict echocardiography reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and existing multimodal LLMs in detecting key abnormalities in heart sounds. |
RaTEScore: A Metric for Radiology Report Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics to evaluate the quality of medical reports are limited due to the complexity of clinical free-form texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric to assess the quality of medical reports generated by AI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric is based on a medical NER dataset and trained on NER models . it aligns more closely with human preference than existing metrics, the authors show . |
AutoMedEval: Harnessing Language Models for Automatic Medical Capability Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
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Xiechi Zhang, Zetian Ouyang, Linlin Wang, Gerard De Melo, Zhu Cao, Xiaoling Wang, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Liang He
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods based on large language models (LLMs) are expensive and lack expertise due to limitations in human expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source automatic evaluation model with 13B parameters specifically engineered to measure the question-answering proficiency of medical LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses baselines in terms of correlation with human judgments. |
Pruning before Fine-tuning: A Retraining-free Compression Framework for Pre-trained Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Structured pruning is an effective technique for compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs), but it requires retraining, leading to additional computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-specific pruning framework that prunes redundant modules of pre-trained language models before fine-tuning them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework achieves higher performance on GLUE, SQUAD, WikiText-2, Wik-103, and PTB datasets while reducing the time required for fine-tuning. |
Miner: Mining Intrinsic Mastery for Data-Efficient RL in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current critic-free RL methods for large reasoning models suffer from severe inefficiency when training on positive homogeneous prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that repurposes the policy’s intrinsic uncertainty as a self-supervised reward signal, with no external supervision, auxiliary models, or additional inference cost. |
| Outcome: | Evaluated across six reasoning benchmarks on Qwen3-4B and Qwend3-8B base models, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance among the other four methods. |
DictLLM: Harnessing Key-Value Data Structures with Large Language Models for Enhanced Medical Diagnostics (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Structured data processing is a complex and complex process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures heterogeneity of structured data using large language models . they propose group positional encoding, hierarchical attention bias and optimal transport alignment layer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and few-shot GPT-4 on a medical lab report dataset. |
Self-Improvement of Non-autoregressive Model via Sequence-Level Distillation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive Transformers (NAT) models generate the entire sequence in parallel, but the multimodality problem limits their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate distilled data by the NAT model itself, eliminating the need for additional teacher networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate distilled data by the NAT model without teacher networks and adapt to different NAT models without precise adjustments. |
DICE: Structured Reasoning in LLMs through SLM-Guided Chain-of-Thought Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often prioritize reasoning over adherence to detailed instructions due to high computational costs and limited parameter access. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that guides small language models to refine LLMs’ outputs through chain-of-thought correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the average format accuracy and content correctness of LLM outputs by 35.4% and 29.4%, respectively, achieving state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance over other competitive baselines. |
SDA: Semantic Discrepancy Alignment for Text-conditioned Image Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for textconditioned image retrieval are limited due to the scale of training and the complexity of attributes in modification texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a general boosting framework to address these issues by employing semantic discrepancy alignment by formulating distance consistency and neighbor consistency between the image and text domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval performance on three prominent datasets with state-of-the-art results. |
RA2FD: Distilling Faithfulness into Efficient Dialogue Systems (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is effective but inference inefficient, while Retrieral Free Generations (RFG) are more efficient but sacrifice faithfulness. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-free model training scheme that uses a teacher-student framework to distill the faithfulness capacity of a student's knowledge-infused responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the previous SOTA RFG model on knowledge-grounded dialogue datasets by an average of 33% while improving inference efficiency. |
DSVD: Dynamic Self-Verify Decoding for Faithful Generation in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reliability of large language models often lack self-correction or use costly post-hoc verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding framework that enhances generation reliability through real-time hallucination detection and efficient error correction. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments across five benchmarks show the proposed framework improves truthfulness and factual accuracy. |
CE-VDG: Counterfactual Entropy-based Bias Reduction for Video-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce question-related bias in video-grounded dialogue generation (VDG) however, the dataset often contains inherent bias, which can cause VDG models to learn spurious correlations between questions and answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the counterfactual reasoning from the information entropy perspective to the generative task, which can effectively reduce the question-related bias in the auto-regressive generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce question-related bias in the auto-regressive generation task by using counterfactual entropy as an external loss. |
Bridging the Dynamic Perception Gap: Training-Free Draft Chain-of-Thought for Dynamic Multimodal Spatial Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for dynamic spatial reasoning are limited to text or static visual domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that augments textual reasoning chains with dynamic visual drafts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in dynamic spatial reasoning tasks. |
Towards Omni-RAG: Comprehensive Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models in Medical Applications (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to source planning fail to achieve this due to misalignment between the model’s expectation of the sources and their actual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimise large-scale medical knowledge models by combining multiple medical knowledge sources into one query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves multi-source planning performance while training a smaller model to learn source alignment. |
CF-TCIR: A Compositor-Free Framework for Hierarchical Text-Conditioned Image Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text-conditioned image retrieval use attention-driven compositors . instead, we reformulate the retrieval process as a cross-modal interaction between a synthesized image feature and its corresponding text descriptor. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositor-free framework for text-conditioned image retrieval . they propose combining a reference image and modification text to form a query tuple . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers advantages in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, and performance. |
FGraDA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation (2022.lrec-1)
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Wenhao Zhu, Shujian Huang, Tong Pu, Pingxuan Huang, Xu Zhang, Jian Yu, Wei Chen, Yanfeng Wang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Recent research on domain adaptation neglects diversity in translation within a domain . current research on NMT models considers very broad target domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained domain adaptation task for autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is compared with a dataset of Chinese-English translation tasks for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
Eliciting Medical Reasoning with Knowledge-enhanced Data Synthesis: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Approach (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance medical reasoning lack high-quality data. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical knowledge-enhanced data Synthesis and Semi-supervised Reinforcement learning framework that uses rare disease knowledge to synthesize distribution-controllable reasoning questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods across ten medical benchmarks and achieves up to 5.93% gain on rare diseases tasks. |
MedCare: Advancing Medical LLMs through Decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language understanding and generation, proving valuable especially in the medical field. |
| Approach: | They propose a medical LLM through decoupling Clinical Alignment and Knowledge Aggregation which uses a and a to encode diverse knowledge in the first stage and filter out detrimental information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves promising performance on over 20 medical tasks and specific medical alignment tasks. |
SLoRA: Balancing Plasticity and Forgetting in Large Language Models for Continual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse tasks through large-scale pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that filters noisy components from LoRA updates via subspace similarity with the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy by 12%, reduces forgetting by 29%, and filters out over 30% of LoRA parameters identified as noisy. |
FedMABench: Benchmarking Mobile GUI Agents on Decentralized Heterogeneous User Data (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Mobile GUI agents have attracted tremendous research participation recently. traditional approaches to mobile agent training rely on centralized data collection. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile GUI agents . they find that federation algorithms consistently outperform local training . |
| Outcome: | The first benchmark for federated training and evaluation of mobile GUI agents is released . it features 6 datasets with 30+ subsets, 8 federation algorithms, 10+ base models, and over 800 apps across 5 categories . |
AgentGC: Evolutionary Learning-based Lossless Compression for Genomics Data with LLM-driven Multiple Agent (2026.findings-acl)
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Sun Hui, Ding Yanfeng, Huidong Ma, Chang Xu, Keyan Jin, Lizheng Zu, Cheng Zhong, Xiaoguang Liu, Gang Wang, Wentong Cai
| Challenge: | Lossless compression has made significant advancements in Genomics Data storage, sharing and management. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent-based GD Compressor with 3 layers with a multi-agent named Leader and Worker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on existing methods with low-level modeling and limited adaptability and user-unfriendly interface. |
Cross-Modal Coreference Alignment: Enabling Reliable Information Transfer in Omni-LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs reveal systematic weaknesses in cross-modal coreference . cross-module coreference is a crucial missing piece for advancing robust omni-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal coreference problem to evaluate and enhance Omni-LLMs' reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 13 Omni-LLMs show they lack coreference-aware thinking patterns . the CROSSOMNI dataset yields significant performance gains and generalizes well to collaborative reasoning tasks. |
M3AV: A Multimodal, Multigenre, and Multipurpose Audio-Visual Academic Lecture Dataset (2024.acl-long)
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Zhe Chen, Heyang Liu, Wenyi Yu, Guangzhi Sun, Hongcheng Liu, Ji Wu, Chao Zhang, Yu Wang, Yanfeng Wang
| Challenge: | Publishing open-source academic video recordings is an emerging approach to sharing knowledge online. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal, multigenre, and multipurpose audio-visual academic lecture dataset with human annotations for multimodal content recognition and understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used for multiple audio-visual recognition and understanding tasks. |
ReflecTool: Towards Reflection-Aware Tool-Augmented Clinical Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising potential in the medical domain, assisting with tasks like clinical note generation and patient communication. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that excels at utilizing domain-specific tools within two stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the pure LLMs with more than 10 points and the well-established agent-based methods with 3 points. |
EvolveBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Temporal Awareness in LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have explored how LLMs perceive time, but they often overlook the critical aspect of knowledge utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates temporal competence along five key dimensions: Cognition, Awareness, Trustworthiness and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | EvolveBench measures temporal competence along five key dimensions: Cognition, Awareness, Trustworthiness, Understanding and reasoning. |
MatchTime: Towards Automatic Soccer Game Commentary Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing data on soccer commentary are often unsatisfactory, and the quality of existing data is often poor. |
| Approach: | They propose to manually annotate timestamps for 49 soccer matches and then use them to create a model to correct and filter existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the viewing experience of soccer and can be trained on the curated dataset. |
TurnBack: A Geospatial Route Cognition Benchmark for Large Language Models through Reverse Route (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hongyi Luo, Qing Cheng, Daniel Matos, Hari Krishna Gadi, Yanfeng Zhang, Lu Liu, Yongliang Wang, Niclas Zeller, Daniel Cremers, Liqiu Meng
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models have limited evaluation of their geospatial cognition . a unified framework for evaluating geospcial cognition in LLMs remains absent . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the geospatial route cognition of Large Language Models . they propose 'pathbuilder' tool for converting natural language instructions into navigation routes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and metrics evaluate 9 state-of-the-art LLMs on route reversal task. |
Post-decoder Biasing for End-to-End Speech Recognition of Multi-turn Medical Interview (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end (E2E) models are replacing hybrid models for automatic speech recognition tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to optimize E2E models for automatic speech recognition . they propose MED-IT, a multi-turn consultation speech dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on subsets of rare words appearing in training speech. |
KnowledgeSG: Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Text Generation with Knowledge Distillation from Server (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train large language models on private data are not effective because they rely on a local model for generation, resulting in a performance decline, or expose private data to API servers. |
| Approach: | They propose a client-server framework which enhances synthetic data quality and improves model performance while ensuring privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance and privacy while learning local knowledge from the private data with differential privacy (DP) and distilling professional knowledge from server. |
VocalNet: Speech LLMs with Multi-Token Prediction for Faster and High-Quality Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show VocalNet outperforms existing open-source speech LLMs despite limited training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable and model-agnostic training framework and a novel multi-token prediction paradigm for speech generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source speech LLMs while outperforming existing open-sourced models. |
MM-SAP: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Assessing Self-Awareness of Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in visual perception and understanding, but they also suffer from hallucinations, which limit their reliability as AI systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate self-awareness in perception for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) by integrating image information with knowledge quadrants, and propose MM-SAP to evaluate this capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark offers detailed analysis of MLLMs with self-awareness in perception. |
HeteroRAG: A Heterogeneous Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Vision Language Tasks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical large vision-language models suffer from factual inaccuracies and unreliable outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Med-LVLMs through heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
MCP-Flow: Facilitating LLM Agents to Master Real-World, Diverse and Scaling MCP Tools (2026.acl-long)
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WenHao Wang, Peizhi Niu, Zhao Xu, Zhaoyu Chen, Jian Du, Yaxin Du, Xianghe Pang, Keduan Huang, Yanfeng Wang, Qiang Yan, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) relies on few servers and lacks training support. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-agent-driven pipeline for large-scale server discovery, data synthesis, and model training that collects and filters data from 1166 servers and 11536 tools. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evidence shows that MCP-Flow generates higher quality instruction-function call pairs and higher agentic task performance than previous work. |
Synthesizing Post-Training Data for LLMs through Multi-Agent Simulation (2025.acl-long)
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Shuo Tang, Xianghe Pang, Zexi Liu, Bohan Tang, Rui Ye, Tian Jin, Xiaowen Dong, Yanfeng Wang, Siheng Chen
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework effectively generates both general and domain-specific data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent simulator that automatically generates diverse text-based scenarios, capturing a wide range of real-world human needs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms Meta’s Llama-3-8B-Instruct model on AlpacaEval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks with just 20K instruction-response pairs. |
When Seeing Is not Enough: Revealing the Limits of Active Reasoning in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of multimodal large language models focus on passive inference, where seeing is not enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate active reasoning in multimodal large language models . they propose to acquire missing evidence and iteratively refine decisions under incomplete information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on active reasoning than on passive inference settings. |
FedDQC: Data Quality Control in Federated Instruction-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Federated Learning (FL) enables privacy-preserving collaborative instruction tuning of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated instruction tuning framework with dynamic data quality control to solve this problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance on mixed-quality datasets on synthetic and real-world datasets. |
CliMedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models in Clinical Scenarios (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese medical large language models (LLMs) are underperforming on this benchmark, especially where medical reasoning and factual consistency are vital. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark with 14 expert-guided clinical scenarios to assess the medical ability of large language models across 7 pivot dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark has been validated in several ways. |