Papers by Yang Yong

43 papers
ETAS: Zero-Shot Transformer Architecture Search via Network Trainability and Expressivity (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Transformer Architecture Search methods are limited to computer vision and natural language processing tasks.
Approach: They propose a Transformer Architecture Search proxy that measures trainability and expressivity of Transformer networks separately and integrates it into an effective regularized evolution framework to demonstrate its efficacy.
Outcome: The proposed proxy can achieve higher correlation with the true performance of Transformer networks on computer vision and natural language processing tasks.
ChunkAttention: Efficient Self-Attention with Prefix-Aware KV Cache and Two-Phase Partition (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experiments show that ChunkAttention can speed up the self-attention kernel by 3.2-4.8 compared to the start-of-the-art implementation.
Approach: They propose a prefix-aware self-attention module that can detect matching prompt prefixes across multiple requests and share their key/value tensors in memory at runtime.
Outcome: The proposed module can speed up the self-attention kernel by 3.2-4.8 compared to the start-of-the-art implementation, with the length of the system prompt ranging from 1024 to 4096.
Second-Order Unsupervised Neural Dependency Parsing (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: supervised dependency parsers can reach a very high accuracy, but they require treebanks for training.
Approach: They propose a second-order extension of unsupervised neural dependency models that incorporate grandparent-child or sibling information.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 10% improvement over the previous state-of-the-art model on the full WSJ dataset.
ReasonAny: Incorporating Reasoning Capability to Any Model via Simple and Effective Model Merging (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models with long chain-of-thought reasoning lack reasoning depth and domain-specific utility.
Approach: They propose a model merging framework that integrates reasoning with domain-specific task models.
Outcome: The proposed model merging framework outperforms state-of-the-art models while maintaining robust reasoning performance.
PAEG: Phrase-level Adversarial Example Generation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for adversarial example generation are word-level or character-level, which ignore the ubiquitous phrase structure.
Approach: They propose a phrase-level adversarial example generation framework to enhance the robustness of the translation model by adopting a sentence-level substitution strategy.
Outcome: The proposed method improves translation performance and robustness to noise on three benchmarks.
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0.
Approach: They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation.
Call Me When Necessary: LLMs can Efficiently and Faithfully Reason over Structured Environments (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown potential in reasoning over structured environments, e.g., knowledge graphs and tables.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows LLMs to efficiently and faithfully reason over structured environments.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art fine-tuned methods on three KGQA and two TableQA datasets and surpasse CWQ and WTQ methods.
Reducing Word Omission Errors in Neural Machine Translation: A Contrastive Learning Approach (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for reducing word omission errors in neural machine translation are prone to omit essential words on the source side.
Approach: They propose a contrastive learning approach to reduce word omission errors in NMT by omitting words.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves better translation performance than baseline methods on Chinese-to-English, German-to English, and Russian-toEnglish translation tasks.
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness.
SARA: Salience-Aware Reinforced Adaptive Decoding for Large Language Models in Abstractive Summarization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing decoding strategies neglect the explicit use of salient contextual information and rely on static hyperparameters to fix the balance between contextual and prior knowledge.
Approach: They propose a salience-aware reinforced adaptive decoding (SARA) which incorporates salient contextual information and allows the model to determine reliance on source document's context, salient context, and model's prior knowledge based on pointwise mutual information.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the quality and faithfulness of summaries across LLMs without modifying their weights.
Attribution-Based Analysis and Optimization of Modular Agentic Workflows (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have driven the rise of agentic workflows . yet, how can we attribute performance gains to individual upgrades and their interactions?
Approach: They propose a game-theoretic framework that models component upgrades as players and evaluates component coalitions to compute Shapley values.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides interaction-aware attribution and recommendation for model allocation under a fixed workflow structure.
FedPETuning: When Federated Learning Meets the Parameter-Efficient Tuning Methods of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research on federated learning (FL) for pre-trained language models (PLMs) with increasing concerns about data privacy, enterprises or institutions are not allowed to collect data from end devices or local clients to a centralized server for fine-tuning PLMs.
Approach: They investigate the parameter-efficient tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and develop a federated benchmark for four representative PETuning methods .
Outcome: The proposed method can defend against privacy attacks and maintain acceptable performance with reducing heavy resource consumption.
Knowledge Boundary of Large Language Models: A Survey (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) store vast amount of knowledge in their parameters, but they still have limitations in the memorization and utilization of certain knowledge.
Approach: They propose a comprehensive definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and introduce a formalized taxonomy categorizing knowledge into four distinct types.
Outcome: The proposed definition of the LLM knowledge boundary and taxonomy categorizes knowledge into four distinct types . aims to offer a comprehensive overview, facilitate access to key issues, and inspire further advancements in LLM research.
Language Constrained Multimodal Hyper Adapter For Many-to-Many Multimodal Summarization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models that share parameters neglect the language-specific knowledge learning.
Approach: They propose a language-constrained multimodal hyper adapter for multimodal summarization that integrates language-specific adapters into multilingual pre-trained backbones.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate summaries based on multimodal documents such as text and visuals, allowing people to quickly locate key information from the vast multimedia con.
Arithmetic Control of LLMs for Diverse User Preferences: Directional Preference Alignment with Multi-Objective Rewards (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on scalar rewards to capture user preferences.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates multi-objective reward modeling to represent diverse preference profiles.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance across reward objectives and targets.
ICL-Bandit: Relevance Labeling in Advertisement Recommendation Systems via LLM (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) is a common practice to enhance LLM performance on domain-specific tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages large language models to enhance query-ad relevance labeling . they identify and provide superior demonstrations for ICL, thereby improving labeling performance .
Outcome: The proposed method improves query-ad relevance labeling performance by providing demonstrations.
Balancing Speciality and Versatility: a Coarse to Fine Framework for Supervised Fine-tuning Large Language Model (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Aligned Large Language Models exhibit remarkable versatility, capable of handling diverse real-world tasks.
Approach: They propose a coarse to fine framework to fine-tune aligned Large Language Models to achieve a balance between speciality and versatility.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods across diverse tasks and model scales.
PRCA: Fitting Black-Box Large Language Models for Retrieval Question Answering via Pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are too large to be fine-tuned with budget constraints and some are only accessible via APIs.
Approach: They propose a pluggable Reward-Driven Contextual Adapter that integrates large language models as generators and trains them to refine the retrieved information.
Outcome: The proposed method improves ReQA performance on three datasets by up to 20% compared to existing methods.
CaM-HG: Causal-Enhanced MoE and Hypergraphs Network for Incomplete Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversations (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods that focus on statistical reconstruction often fail to bridge these gaps, effectively leaving semantic holes.
Approach: They propose a Causal-Enhanced Mixture-of-Experts and Hypergraph Network to bridge missing features . they use experts to synthesize missing features that are realistic and causally consistent .
Outcome: The proposed model synthesizes missing features that are realistic and causally consistent . it surpasses benchmarks on IEMOCAP, CMU-MOSI, and CMU MOSEI by 1.43% and 1.25% .
A Contextual Hierarchical Attention Network with Adaptive Objective for Dialogue State Tracking (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for dialogue state tracking ignore the slot imbalance problem and treat all slots indiscriminately, which limits the learning of hard slots.
Approach: They propose to employ a contextual hierarchical attention network to enhance the DST by learning contextual representations.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves 52.68% and 58.55% joint accuracy on multiWOZ 2.0 and MultiWOZ 2.1 datasets and significantly improves performance (+1.24% and +5.98%)
CoEvolve: Training LLM Agents via Agent-Data Mutual Evolution (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Extensive experiments on AppWorld and BFCL demonstrate consistent and significant improvements over strong base models, yielding absolute gains of 19.43%, 15.58%, and 18.14%, respectively.
Approach: They propose a framework that extracts feedback signals such as forgetting and uncertainty from rollout trajectories and utilizes them to guide LLM-based task synthesis.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on AppWorld and BFCL show that the proposed framework improves over strong base models.
CoMave: Contrastive Pre-training with Multi-scale Masking for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to extract product features from unstructured text still suffer from problems . e-commerce platforms are focusing on multi-scale values, which can be confusing .
Approach: They propose a pre-training technique to automatically obtain attribute value pairs from product descriptions to aid e-commerce.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on the existing token-level masking strategy and achieves state-of-the-art on four benchmarks.
The Agent’s First Day: Benchmarking Learning, Exploration, and Scheduling in the Workplace Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research mainly focuses on performance upper bounds in static environments, overlooking stochastic real-world deployment.
Approach: They propose a dynamic evaluation environment that simulates a "trainee" agent continuously exploring a novel setting.
Outcome: The proposed model evaluates agents in a dynamic evaluation environment that simulates a "trainee" agent continuously exploring a novel setting.
E-Verify: A Paradigm Shift to Scalable Embedding-based Factuality Verification (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing factuality verification methods follow a Decompose-Then-Verify paradigm, which improves granularity but suffers from poor scalability and efficiency.
Approach: They propose a Decompose-Embed-Interact paradigm that shifts factuality verification from costly text-level reasoning to efficient alignment in embedding space.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm shifts factuality verification from costly text-level reasoning to efficient alignment in embedding space .
Giving Control Back to Models: Enabling Offensive Language Detection Models to Autonomously Identify and Mitigate Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models often rely on specific words to predict offensive content, compromising model fairness and potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups.
Approach: They propose a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework to help models identify and mitigate biases by integrating multiple natural language processing techniques.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces false positive rate of models in in-distribution and out-of-difference tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements on larger datasets.
CANDY: Benchmarking LLMs’ Limitations and Assistive Potential in Chinese Misinformation Fact-Checking (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: CANDY is a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs) for fact-checking misinformation.
Approach: a team of researchers develop a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models in fact-checking misinformation in Chinese.
Outcome: CANDY is a benchmark to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of large language models in fact-checking misinformation in China.
Modeling LLM Unlearning as an Asymmetric Two-Task Learning Problem (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are inherently dual-use and can be leveraged for both beneficial and harmful purposes.
Approach: They propose a retention-prioritized gradient synthesis framework that decouples task-specific gradient extraction from conflict-aware combination.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves tighter alignment on WMDP Bio and RWKU benchmarks.
PolCLIP: A Unified Image-Text Word Sense Disambiguation Model via Generating Multimodal Complementary Representations (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models for word sense disambiguation lack images or senses in textual and visual datasets.
Approach: They propose a unified image-text WSD model that uses image-sense complementarity to generate visual representations for word senses and a disambiguation-oriented image-sensor dataset to provide implicit textual representations.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 2.53% F1-score increase over state-of-the-art models on Textual-WSD and 2.22% HR@1 improvement on Visual-WSS.
Don’t Just Say “I don’t know”! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies investigate ways to refuse to answer unknown questions . Large Language Models (LLMs) display a significant level of overconfidence when answering questions that they are aware of.
Approach: They propose a self-alignment method to utilize Large Language Models to enhance its response-ability to unknown questions.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to baseline methods on four types of unknown questions.
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack spatial reasoning, despite text-based CoTs . e-ViC reframes spatial intelligence as a verifiable, tool-using capability, argues a new study.
Approach: They propose a framework that moves reasoning beyond text into the visual domain . they ground reasoning in pixel-level interactions to enable human-like "look-and-confirm" strategies .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing Vision-Language Models with an average gain of 10.1%.
Revisiting Weak-to-Strong Generalization in Theory and Practice: Reverse KL vs. Forward KL (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Weak-to-strong generalization is a promising approach to guide stronger systems, but its effectiveness is constrained by the inherent imperfections of weak model supervision.
Approach: They propose a theoretically grounded approach that replaces forward KL divergence with reverse KL, which prioritizes high-confidence predictions.
Outcome: The proposed approach replaces forward KL divergence with reverse KL, reducing the influence of unreliable weak supervision.
LLMC: Benchmarking Large Language Model Quantization with a Versatile Compression Toolkit (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing quantization techniques have been categorized as 'simple' and 'highly efficient' however, their configurations vary from each other and cannot be fairly compared .
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play compression toolkit to explore the impact of quantization.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit explores the impact of quantization on large language models.
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices.
Approach: They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration .
Outcome: The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration.
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models that judge only final answers.
Approach: They summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents . goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment.
Outcome: The proposed model enables finer credit assignment, richer diagnostics, and improved robustness.
LBLLM: Lightweight Binarization of Large Language Models via Three-Stage Distillation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for implementing large language models are limited by high computational and memory requirements.
Approach: They propose a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on W2A4 quantization settings across languages.
Analyzing and Modeling LLM Response Lengths with Extreme Value Theory: Anchoring Effects and Hybrid Distributions (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches treat length as an incidental output property rather than a statistically regular phenomenon worthy of rigorous modeling.
Approach: They propose a statistical framework for modeling and controlling large language model response lengths using extreme value theory and cross-validation on Qwen and DeepSeek architectures.
Outcome: The proposed model improves tail fit and generalizability while maintaining generalizzability.
Towards Robust Neural Machine Translation (P18-1)

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Challenge: Small perturbations in the input can severely distort intermediate representations and thus impact translation quality of neural machine translation models.
Approach: They propose adversarial stability training to make encoder and decoder robust to perturbations by enabling them to behave similarly for the original input and its perturbed counterpart.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves translation quality and robustness over strong models on Chinese-English, English-German and English-French translation tasks.
Towards Understanding the Fragility of Multilingual LLMs against Fine-Tuning Attacks (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models have sparked concerns about their safety.
Approach: They propose a method to identify safety-related information in the model parameter space . they propose to use a few adversarially chosen examples to fine-tune LLMs .
Outcome: The proposed method can break safety alignment in multilingual LLMs using a few examples . it also shows that the proposed method jailbreaks LLM models adapted to new languages .
EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge evolution benchmarks are static and fail to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge.
Approach: They propose an evolving dataset that categorizes information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is auto-updatable and enables evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs.
Hate Speech Detection Based on Sentiment Knowledge Sharing (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for hate speech detection are stereotyped and biased . et al., a paper examining the effectiveness of multitask learning in hate speech recognition tasks .
Approach: They propose a hate speech detection framework based on sentiment knowledge sharing . they extract affective features of the target sentence and use sentiment features from external resources .
Outcome: The proposed model can detect hate speech over two public datasets.
An End-to-End Generative Architecture for Paraphrase Generation (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating paraphrases with linguistic knowledge are often domain specific and hard to scale, or yield inferior results.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end conditional generative architecture for generating paraphrases via adversarial training which does not depend on extra linguistic information.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on automatic metrics and human evaluations on four public datasets.
Partial Order-centered Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Few-shot Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for few-shot relation extraction are limited to labeled instances and rely on data labeling.
Approach: They propose a partial order-centered hyperbolic representation learning framework which imposes constraints on relations on instances by modeling partial order in hyperbolical space.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on three benchmark datasets on 1-shot settings lacking relation descriptions.
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages.

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