Papers by Yang Ouyang
Task-Driven and Experience-Based Question Answering Corpus for In-Home Robot Application in the House3D Virtual Environment (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Question answering is an important part of natural language processing (NLP) |
| Approach: | They propose to use TEQA to investigate the ability of agent task experience understanding for the long-term household task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus aims to investigate the ability of task experience understanding of agents for the daily question answering scenario on the ALFRED dataset. |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
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Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
Psycholinguistic Tripartite Graph Network for Personality Detection (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on personality detection from online posts adopts multifarious deep neural networks to represent the posts and builds predictive models in a data-driven manner without the exploitation of psycholinguistic knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a psycholinguistic knowledge-based tripartite graph network, TrigNet, which consists of a tripartitic graph network and a BERT-based graph initializer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph network outperforms the existing state-of-the-art model by 3.47 and 2.10 points in average F1 on two datasets. |
Consolidation or Adaptation? PRISM: Disentangling SFT and RL Data via Gradient Concentration (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Yangou Ouyang, Xiao Ding, Hepeng Wang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing data arbitration strategies for large language model training rely on surface-level heuristics that fail to diagnose intrinsic learning needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that arbitrates data based on its degree of cognitive conflict with the model's existing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on WebShop and ALFWorld show that PRISM outperforms state-of-the-art hybrid methods while reducing computational costs by up to 3.22 . |
Do VLMs Have a Moral Backbone? A Study on the Fragile Morality of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhining Liu, Tianyi Wang, Xiao Lin, Penghao Ouyang, Gaotang Li, Ze Yang, Hui Liu, Sumit Keswani, Vishwa Pardeshi, Huijun Zhao, Wei Fan, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have advanced multimodal learning, driving progress in cross-modal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine moral robustness of vision-language models by analyzing their moral stances under multimodal perturbations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model-agnostic multimodal perturbations expose VLMs to a variety of moral vulnerabilities, including a sycophancy trade-off where stronger instruction-following models are more susceptible to persuasion. |
Beyond Similarity: A Gradient-based Graph Method for Instruction Tuning Data Selection (2025.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Li Du, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Hepeng Wang, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Dongliang Xu, Qing Yang, Dongchen Li, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for selecting training data from general datasets fail to account for the joint distribution of instructions, resulting in inefficient learning and suboptimal knowledge transfer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that constructs a mixed gradient-based instruction graph to capture the joint distribution and interdependencies among instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on domain adaptation tasks and in complex, data-scarce scenarios. |
The Shifted and The Overlooked: A Task-oriented Investigation of User-GPT Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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Siru Ouyang, Shuohang Wang, Yang Liu, Ming Zhong, Yizhu Jiao, Dan Iter, Reid Pryzant, Chenguang Zhu, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have produced models that exhibit remarkable performance across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They analyze a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations to identify a significant gap between academic research in NLP and the needs of real-world NLP applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in a large-scale collection of user-GPT conversations and identifies a significant gap between the tasks that users frequently request from LLMs and the tasks commonly studied in academic research. |
Similarity Based Auxiliary Classifier for Named Entity Recognition (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) tasks are a fundamental challenge for name recognition tasks that aim to reduce the boundary error when entities become longer. |
| Approach: | They propose a similarity based auxiliary classifier which can distinguish entity words from non-entity words by using vectors to indicate tags. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed classifier can perform better than baseline approaches. |
Causal Intervention-based Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform few-shot named entity recognition are limited and overfitting is caused by the spurious correlation resulting from the bias in selecting a few samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a causal intervention-based few-shot named entity recognition method that blocks the backdoor path between context and label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art in a few-shot named entity recognition (NER) task. |
Aligning Paralinguistic Understanding and Generation in Speech LLMs via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (2026.eacl-industry)
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Minseok Kim, Jingxiang Chen, Seong-Gyun Leem, Yin Huang, Rashi Rungta, Zhicheng Ouyang, Haibin Wu, Surya Teja Appini, Ankur Bansal, Yang Bai, Yue Liu, Florian Metze, Ahmed A Aly, Anuj Kumar, Ariya Rastrow, Zhaojiang Lin
| Challenge: | Using paralinguistic cues is challenging for speech large language models, authors say . limited training data, annotation difficulty, and models exploiting lexical shortcuts are challenges . a recent study shows that modeling paralinguistic reasoning with multitask RL improves paralinguistics understanding . |
| Approach: | They propose multi-task reinforcement learning with chain-of-thought prompting that elicits explicit affective reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves paralinguistics understanding over baselines and strong proprietary models by 8-12% on Expresso, IEMOCAP, and RAVDESS. |
MAESTRO: Meta-learning Adaptive Estimation of Scalarization Trade-offs for Reward Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Yang Zhao, Hepeng Wang, Xiao Ding, Yangou Ouyang, Bibo Cai, Kai Xiong, Jinglong Gao, Zhouhao Sun, Li Du, Bing Qin, Ting Liu
| Challenge: | Group-Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has emerged as an efficient paradigm for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs), but its efficacy is confined to domains with verifiable ground truths. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-cognitive orchestration layer that treats reward scalarization as a dynamic latent policy, leveraging the model’s terminal hidden states as 'a semantic bottleneck' . Across seven benchmarks, MAESTRO consistently outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving the efficiency advantages of GRPO. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms single-reward and static multi-objective baselines while preserving efficiency advantages. |
ResearchBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Scientific Discovery via Inspiration-Based Task Decomposition (2026.findings-acl)
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Yujie Liu, Zonglin Yang, Tong Xie, Jinjie Ni, Ben Gao, Yuqiang Li, Shixiang Tang, Wanli Ouyang, Erik Cambria, Dongzhan Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown potential in assisting scientific research, yet their ability to discover high-quality research hypotheses remains unexamined due to the lack of a dedicated benchmark. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating large language models on a sufficient set of scientific discovery sub-tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts critical components from papers across 12 disciplines with expert validation confirming its accuracy. |
Compositional Data Augmentation for Abstractive Conversation Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive conversation summarization systems rely on large-scale annotated summaries, but collecting and annotating these conversations can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating diverse and high-quality pairs of conversations and summaries by extracting conversation structures and organizing meaningful conversation snippets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on SAMSum and DialogSum datasets and achieves a 10% increase in ROUGE scores with limited data. |
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense (2025.naacl-long)
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Yang Ouyang, Hengrui Gu, Shuhang Lin, Wenyue Hua, Jie Peng, Bhavya Kailkhura, Meijun Gao, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against jailbreak attacks exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defend against jailbreak attacks by patching specific layers within large language models through self-augmented datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to previous methods. |
Beyond One-Preference-Fits-All Alignment: Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to language model alignment assume homogeneous human preferences, but actual human preferences vary widely and are hard to satisfy with a single language model. |
| Approach: | They propose an RL-free extension of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) that folds language modeling directly into reward modeling and trains language models as collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or outperforms existing methods in safety alignment and long-form question answering. |
Nature-Inspired Population-Based Evolution of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for population-based evolution of large language models is emerging . a population-driven evolution of LLMs is a key component of evolution, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for population-based evolution of large language models . they start with a population of parent LLMs and allow this population to evolve . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on 12 datasets. |
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says . |
| Approach: | They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures . |
Knowledge Representation Learning with Contrastive Completion Coding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge representation learning methods suffer from immaturity on tackling potentially-imperfect knowledge graphs and highly-imbalanced positive-negative instances during training. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for knowledge representation learning that incorporates two functional components to achieve robust embedding for each entity/relation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better convergence against state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks. |
Token-level Proximal Policy Optimization for Query Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yichen Ouyang, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Chenghua Huang, Jianfeng Liu, Bochen Pang, Yaming Yang, Yuefeng Zhan, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Weiwei Deng, Dongmei Zhang, Feng Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved search engines and recommendation systems through their text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level proximal policy optimization approach to empower LLMs to perform better in query generation through fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLMs on an open-source and industrial dataset. |
RoleLLM: Benchmarking, Eliciting, and Enhancing Role-Playing Abilities of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Noah Wang, Z.y. Peng, Haoran Que, Jiaheng Liu, Wangchunshu Zhou, Yuhan Wu, Hongcheng Guo, Ruitong Gan, Zehao Ni, Jian Yang, Man Zhang, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wanli Ouyang, Ke Xu, Wenhao Huang, Jie Fu, Junran Peng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have paved the way for complex tasks such as role-playing. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to benchmark, elicit, and enhance role-playing abilities in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves role-playing abilities with 168,093 samples. |
NiuTrans.LMT: Toward Inclusive and Scalable Multilingual Machine Translation with LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Yingfeng Luo, Ziqiang Xu, Yuxuan Ouyang, MuRun Yang, DingYang Lin, Kaiyan Chang, Tong Zheng, Bei Li, Peinan Feng, Quan Du, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Large language models have significantly advanced Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) yet scaling to many languages while maintaining robust performance across directions remains challenging. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy to reduce the number of translations in one direction . they propose auxiliary parallel sentences to promote cross-lingual transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with or better than substantially larger baselines. |
Visibility as Survival: Generalizing NLP for Native Alaskan Language Identification (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Indigenous languages are largely invisible in commercial language identification systems, a stark reality exemplified by Google Translate’s LangID tool, which excludes all 150 Indigenous languages of North America. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shows how large language models and specialized classifiers can effectively identify these languages with minimal data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that large language models and specialized classifiers can effectively identify these languages with minimal data. |