Papers by Yang Long
ASPO: Adaptive Sentence-Level Preference Optimization for Fine-Grained Multimodal Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have extended DPO to multimodal scenarios, achieving strong performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a sentence-level preference optimization technique to optimize individual sentences for more precise preference optimization without additional models or parameters. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that Adaptive Sentence-level Preference Optimization significantly improves the alignment of multimodal models. |
On Isotropy, Contextualization and Learning Dynamics of Contrastive-based Sentence Representation Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Incorporating contrastive learning objectives in sentence representation learning has yielded significant improvements on many sentence-level NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They aim to examine why contrastive learning works for learning sentence-level semantics . they interpret successes through the geometry of the representation shifts based on isotropy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on many sentence-level NLP tasks, but it is not well understood why it works. |
Pre-training Cross-Modal Retrieval by Expansive Lexicon-Patch Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent large-scale vision-language pre-training relies on image-text global alignment by contrastive learning and is further boosted by fine-grained alignment in a weakly contrastive manner for cross-modal retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose expansive lexicon-patch alignment (ELA) to align image patches with a vocabulary rather than only the words explicitly in the text for annotation-free alignment and information augmentation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on cross-modal retrieval and can learn representative fine-grained information. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers. |
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning (2026.acl-long)
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Junjie Wang, Zequn Xie, Dan Yang, Jie Feng, Yue Shen, Duolin Sun, Meixiu Long, Yihan Jiao, Zhehao Tan, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-call rounds by 20% while improving accuracy and efficiency while maintaining the same level of performance as existing models. |
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Wen Xie, Ziqi Dai, Jialong Tang, Huan Lin, Baosong Yang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Meishan Zhang, Wenjie Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
Maximizing Local Entropy Where It Matters: Prefix-Aware Localized LLM Unlearning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to machine unlearning treat all tokens indiscriminately and enforce uncertainty over the entire vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that targets the prefix in a response and minimizes uncertainty in the critical subspace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior forgetting efficacy and utility preservation compared to baselines. |
Rethinking Multi-Modal Alignment in Multi-Choice VideoQA from Feature and Sample Perspectives (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to VideoQA focus on utilizing frame- or object-level visual representations, but they neglect visual-language interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to break down video into trajectories and first leverage trajectory feature in VideoQA to enhance alignment between two modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all the state-of-the-art models on the NExT-QA benchmark. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
SPPO: Sequence-Level PPO for Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Tianyi Wang, Yixia Li, Long Li, Yibiao Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is central to aligning Large Language Models with verifiable rewards. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable algorithm that harmonizes sample efficiency with stability of outcome-based updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms standard PPO and matches the performance of computation-heavy group-based methods. |
Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou, Zengrui Jin, Guanrou Yang, Tianrui Wang, Xu Tan, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model . |
APPSI-139: A Parallel Corpus of English Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretation (2026.acl-long)
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Pengyun Zhu, Qiheng Sun, Long Wen, Yanbo Wang, Yang Cao, Junxu Liu, Deyi Xiong, Jinfei Liu, Zhibo Wang, Kui Ren
| Challenge: | a lack of high-quality English privacy policy corpus optimized for legal clarity and readability is limiting translation of privacy policies . 139 privacy policies are often considered "incomprehensible" due to technical jargon, legal language, and convoluted grammatical structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a high-quality English privacy policy corpus annotated by domain experts . they propose APPSI-139 to summarize and interpret privacy policies in English . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large language models in terms of readability and accuracy. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Robust Alignment Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations but lack robust data alignment . inherent data uncertainty renders PRVR vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities . |
| Approach: | proposed framework for partially relevant video retrieval aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be seamlessly integrated into existing architectures. |
KnowCoder: Coding Structured Knowledge into LLMs for Universal Information Extraction (2024.acl-long)
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Zixuan Li, Yutao Zeng, Yuxin Zuo, Weicheng Ren, Wenxuan Liu, Miao Su, Yucan Guo, Yantao Liu, Lixiang Lixiang, Zhilei Hu, Long Bai, Wei Li, Yidan Liu, Pan Yang, Xiaolong Jin, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | None. None.. None! |
| Approach: | None. None.. None! |
| Outcome: | None. None. No. : |
Evaluating and Improving Graph to Text Generation with Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized natural language processing due to their zero-and-short-shot capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free prompting approach for graph-to-text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves LLMs on graph-to-text generation tasks incrementally. |
RED: Unleashing Token-Level Rewards from Holistic Feedback via Reward Redistribution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
Grammar-Based Patches Generation for Automated Program Repair (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Automated program repair (APR) aims to find an automatic solution to program language bugs without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose a grammar-based rule-rule model which regards the repair process as the transformation of grammar rules and employs a tree-based self-attention approach to guarantee grammar correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a Java dataset in terms of generated code accuracy. |
Hierarchical Relation-Guided Type-Sentence Alignment for Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Distant Supervision (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Distant supervision uses triple facts to label corpus for relation extraction, leading to wrong labeling and long-tail problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to enrich distantly-supervised sentences with entity types by injecting context-free and -related backgrounds into sentences to alleviate sentence-level wrong labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on benchmarks and in overall and long-tail performance. |
Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations are labor-intensive and scarce training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations by collaborating relation-augmented attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural network improves the state-of-the-art on the NYT dataset . |
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments. |
Multi-Hop Transformer for Document-Level Machine Translation (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to document-level neural machine translation (NMT) simply introduce the representations of context sentences without explicitly characterizing the inter-sentence reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-hop Transformer which explicitly models the human-like draft-editing and reasoning process by attending to multiple antecedent sentences iteratively. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four widely used document translation tasks show that the proposed model significantly improves document-level translation performance and tackles discourse phenomena such as coreference error and the problem of polysemy. |
GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup. |
GenomeQA: Benchmarking General Large Language Models for Genome Sequence Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specialized DNA models trained for sequence prediction or evaluate biological knowledge using text-only questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate general-purpose LLMs on sequence-based genome inference tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms baseline models on sequence-based genome inference tasks. |
FinDABench: Benchmarking Financial Data Analysis Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Shu Liu, Shangqing Zhao, Chenghao Jia, Xinlin Zhuang, Zhaoguang Long, Jie Zhou, Aimin Zhou, Man Lan, Yang Chong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but their proficiency and reliability in the specialized domain of financial data analysis remain uncertain. |
| Approach: | FinDABench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the financial data analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it comprises 15,200 training instances and 8,900 test instances, all meticulously crafted by human experts. |
| Outcome: | FinDABench measures the financial data analysis capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across three dimensions: 1) Core Ability; 2) Analytical Ability; 3) Technical Ability. |
CCPrefix: Counterfactual Contrastive Prefix-Tuning for Many-Class Classification (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve pre-trained language models for many-class classification suffer from verbalizer ambiguity . a significant disparity exists between the pre-training and fine-tuning stages of the model . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to tune pre-trained language models to a broad spectrum of tasks . they use an instance-dependent soft prefix to complement language verbalizers in many-class classification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on many-class datasets. |
Focus-dLLM: Accelerating Long-Context Diffusion LLM Inference via Confidence-Guided Context Focusing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating attention importance for tokens are ineffective . dLLMs require bidirectional attention, which limits inference efficiency . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention sparsification framework for efficient long-context inference . they propose 'sink-aware pruning strategy' to accurately estimate and remove redundant computation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach offers 29 lossless speedup under 32K context length. |
Modeling Intra- and Inter-Modal Relations: Hierarchical Graph Contrastive Learning for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in Multimodal Sentiment Analysis lack a mechanism to understand complex relations between different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph contrastive learning framework for multimodal sentiment analysis that explores the relationships between modality representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in multimodal sentiment analysis on two benchmark datasets. |
Taming the Real-world Complexities in CPT E/M Coding with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Islam Nassar, Yang Lin, Yuan Jin, Rongxin Zhu, Chang Wei Tan, Zenan Zhai, Nitika Mathur, Thanh Tien Vu, Xu Zhong, Long Duong, Yuan-Fang Li
| Challenge: | Evaluation and Management (E/M) coding is performed by physicians and trained human coders who review clinical encounter notes and electronic health record data to assign appropriate codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automates evaluation and management coding tasks using the Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an increase in coding accuracy of more than 36% over a commercial CPT E/M coding system and almost 5% over our strongest single-prompt baseline. |
MedDCR: Learning to Design Agentic Workflows for Medical Coding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical coding is the process of translating unstructured clinical notes into standardized diagnostic and procedural codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed-loop framework that treats workflow design as a learning problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art workflows on benchmark datasets and produces interpretable, adaptable workflows that better reflect real coding practice. |
HTCCN: Temporal Causal Convolutional Networks with Hawkes Process for Extrapolation Reasoning in Temporal Knowledge Graphs (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) are powerful tools for storing and modeling dynamic facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hawkes process-based temporal causal convolutional network for temporal reasoning under extrapolation settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network is based on Hawkes process-based temporal causal convolutional network and captures the temporal evolution of facts. |
UniCreative: Unifying Long-form Logic and Short-form Sparkle via Reference-Free Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaolong Wei, Zerun Zhu, Simin Niu, Xingyu Zhang, Peiying Yu, Changxuan Xiao, Yuchen Li, Jicheng Yang, Zhejun Zhao, Chong Meng, Long Xia, Daiting Shi
| Challenge: | Existing alignment paradigms for creative writing use static reward signals and supervised data. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reward model that synthesizes query-specific criteria to provide fine-grained preference judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns models with human preferences across content quality and structural paradigms without supervised fine-tuning and ground-truth references. |