Papers by Yao Shi

44 papers
RiOT: Efficient Prompt Refinement with Residual Optimization Tree (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for automatic prompt optimization face two challenges: lack of diversity and semantic drift.
Approach: They propose a framework for automatic prompt optimization that iteratively refines prompts through text gradients and selects the best prompt using perplexity.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing prompt optimization methods and manual prompting on commonsense, mathematical, logical, temporal, and semantic reasoning benchmarks.
TR-Rules: Rule-based Model for Link Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph Considering Temporal Redundancy (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models suffer from temporal redundancy when leveraged under dynamic settings.
Approach: They propose a temporal knowledge graph extrapolation method which solves temporal redundancy issues by using cyclic rules to capture more information lurking in TKGs.
Outcome: The proposed model captures more information lurking in TKGs, and also mines and properly leverages acyclic rules, which has not been explored by existing models.
LLM-Powered Benchmark Factory: Reliable, Generic, and Efficient (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using generic and efficient benchmark generators, human annotators are limited by inefficiency . current benchmark generator methods rely on seed signals, leading to long cycles and high costs .
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs as generic benchmark generators and integrate them as BenchMaker.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to human-annotated benchmarks on most metrics.
EventRAG: Enhancing LLM Generation with Event Knowledge Graphs (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to text generation often neglect event structures that shape real-world narratives.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates structured event semantics with iterative retrieval and inference to enhance text generation.
Outcome: Experiments on UltraDomain and MultiHopRAG show that the proposed framework outperforms baseline RAG systems in generation effectiveness, logical consistency, and multi-hop reasoning accuracy.
Program Transfer for Answering Complex Questions over Knowledge Bases (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Program induction for complex questions over knowledge bases relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs for the given KB, but the gold program annotations are usually lacking, making learning difficult.
Approach: They propose an approach to leverage program annotations on rich KBs as external supervision signals to aid program induction for low-resourced KB.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionSP.
Enhancing Tool Learning in Large Language Models with Hierarchical Error Checklists (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, but their effectiveness is often hampered by parameter mis-filling during tool calling.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical tool error checklist framework to diagnose and mitigate tool-calling errors without relying on extensive real-world interactions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves parameter-filling accuracy and tool-calling success rates compared to baseline methods.
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data (2024.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: i-Code V2 is one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data.
Approach: They propose to create a model that can generate natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data.
Outcome: i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks.
InsBank: Evolving Instruction Subset for Ongoing Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies emphasize that quality and diversity of instruction data are more crucial than quantity, highlighting the need to select diverse, high-quality subsets to reduce training costs.
Approach: They propose to use a continuously updated repository to integrate the latest valuable instruction data with a progressive evolution framework to evolve InsBank over time.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in InsBank evolution and extracts budget-specific subsets.
Why Supervised Fine-Tuning Fails to Learn: A Systematic Study of Incomplete Learning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Incomplete learning is widespread and heterogeneous in large language models . authors identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between SFT supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies within SFT data, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns.
Approach: They propose a diagnostic-first framework that maps incomplete learning to causes . they identify five recurrent sources of incomplete learning: missing prerequisite knowledge, conflicts between supervision and pre-training knowledge, internal inconsistencies, left-side forgetting during sequential fine-tuning, and insufficient optimization for rare or complex patterns.
Outcome: The proposed framework maps incomplete learning to causes using observable training and inference signals.
DIDS: Domain Impact-aware Data Sampling for Large Language Model Training (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches for optimizing domain-level sampling strategies struggle with maintaining intra-domain consistency and accurately measuring domain impact.
Approach: They propose to use a Fisher-Information Matrix-guided metric to measure domain impact to ensure intra-domain consistency and accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 3.4% higher average performance while maintaining comparable training efficiency.
code-transformed: The Influence of Large Language Models on Code (2026.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using Large Language Models, code generation capabilities have transformed programming practices.
Approach: They analyze 20,000 GitHub repositories linked to arXiv papers published between 2020 and 2025 . they identify measurable trends in the evolution of coding style that align with LLM-generated code .
Outcome: The proposed study examines 20,000 GitHub repositories linked to arXiv papers . it finds that LLMs influence code style, and that they can be observed in real-world code .
Benchmarking and Learning Real-World Customer Service Dialogue (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks and training pipelines for industrial intelligent customer service (ICS) focus on task completion and tool correctness.
Approach: They propose a benchmark-to-optimization loop that bridges offline gains to deployment . they propose OlaMind, which distills reusable reasoning patterns from expert dialogues .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark surpasses GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro on OlaBench . it delivers an average +23.67% issue resolution and -6.6% human transfer rate versus baseline .
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting.
Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Filling (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing joint models for intent detection and slot filling show insufficient robustness . however, some small changes of inputs can fool the models to produce wrong predictions .
Approach: They propose a joint adversarial training model that generates adversarials to attack the joint model and trains the model to defend against the adversarial examples.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves significantly higher scores and improves robustness on two datasets.
EducationQ: Evaluating LLMs’ Teaching Capabilities Through Multi-Agent Dialogue Framework (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as educational tools, yet evaluating their teaching capabilities remains challenging due to the resource-intensive nature of teacher-student interactions.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent dialogue framework that efficiently assesses teaching capabilities through simulated dynamic educational scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms open-source models on 1,498 questions across 13 disciplines and 10 difficulty levels on 1,400 questions.
Think-Search-Patch: A Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Framework for Repository-Level Code Repair (2025.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models suffer from multiple-file coding scenarios with strong inter-file dependencies . experimental results show that large language models exhibit inadequate performance in multi-file scenarios .
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for repository-level code repair . they use a dataset to generate standardized patches based on the key snippets .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and repair success on SWE-bench Lite . it surpasses models with larger size in managing extensive code contexts and fixing bugs spanning across multiple files.
SiMFy: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for temporal knowledge graph reasoning suffer from low training efficiency and insufficient generalization ability.
Approach: They propose a temporal knowledge graph reasoning approach that uses multilayer perceptron to model the structural dependencies of events and adopts a fixed-frequency strategy to incorporate historical frequency during inference.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance with faster convergence speed and better generalization ability.
Towards Less Generic Responses in Neural Conversation Models: A Statistical Re-weighting Method (D18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that Sequence-to-sequence models tend to generate generic/dull responses .
Approach: They propose a statistical re-weighting method that assigns different weights for multiple responses of the same query.
Outcome: The proposed method improves acceptance rate of generated responses and significantly reduces generated generic responses.
Reason Only When Needed: Efficient Generative Reward Modeling via Model-Internal Uncertainty (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to generating reward models rely on voting-based mechanisms to evaluate CoT outputs.
Approach: They propose an efficient generative reward modeling framework grounded in model-internal uncertainty.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces inference cost while improving answer accuracy.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing efficient methods estimate performance of models on large benchmarks, but these methods rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models.
Approach: They propose a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the MAE of estimates by 31.4% on benchmarks across 300 models.
Iterative Refinement of Project-Level Code Context for Precise Code Generation with Compiler Feedback (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) generate code for given contexts, such as incomplete code, class, data structure, or project-specific information.
Approach: They propose a compiler feedback-based code generation approach that leverages static analysis to identify mismatches between the generated code and the project's context.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms retrieval-based code generation baselines and significantly outperfies the existing large language models.
From Individual Excellence to Collective Sustainability: Seeking Strategic Equilibrium in Proactive Multi-Agent Teams (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a team of proactive agents suffer from a greedy optimization for immediate task accuracy . a new approach to improve team collaboration is based on the opportunity cost .
Approach: They propose a game-theoretic proactive multi-agent reinforcement learning framework to solve this imbalance . they use a Positive-Unlabeled scorer to anchor intervention quality under sparse supervision .
Outcome: The proposed framework maintains high performance while preventing experts from over-developing.
GLIMPSE: Do Large Vision-Language Models Truly Think With Videos or Just Glimpse at Them? (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing video benchmarks often resemble image-based questions with scans of only a few key frames, without deep temporal reasoning.
Approach: They propose a video benchmark to assess whether large vision-language models can genuinely think with videos rather than perform superficial frame-level analysis.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark consists of 3,269 videos and over 4,342 highly visual-centric questions across 11 categories, including Trajectory Analysis, Temporal Reasoning, and Forensics Detection.
CMDAG: A Chinese Metaphor Dataset with Annotated Grounds as CoT for Boosting Metaphor Generation (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Metaphors are a prominent linguistic device in human language and literature, as they add color, imagery, and emphasis to enhance effective communication.
Approach: They propose a large-scale high quality annotated Chinese Metaphor Corpus . they use a set of guidelines to ensure the accuracy and consistency of their annotations .
Outcome: The proposed corpus generates metaphors that resonate more with real-world intuition.
Beyond Local vs. External: A Game-Theoretic Framework for Trustworthy Knowledge Acquisition (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Cloud-hosted Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unmatched reasoning capabilities and dynamic knowledge, yet submitting raw queries to these services can expose sensitive user intent.
Approach: They propose a framework that formulates the trade-off between knowledge utility and privacy as a strategic game.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces intent leakage while maintaining high-fidelity answer quality.
Skill Weaving: Efficient LLM Improvement via Modular Skillpacks (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can specialize under fixed memory and inference budgets, but they struggle to achieve high performance across heterogeneous domains.
Approach: They propose a modular improvement framework that partitions full capabilities of a general-purpose model into domain-specific delta modules that reorganize and refine the model's internal knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms monolithic models on multi-task and agentic benchmarks and achieves up to 4 speedup.
Bone Soups: A Seek-and-Soup Model Merging Approach for Controllable Multi-Objective Generation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches focus on merging language models tuned on single objectives . existing approaches ignore the impacts of competing objectives on model tuning .
Approach: They propose a model merging approach that seeks a series of backbone models and merges them according to user preferences.
Outcome: The proposed approach exhibits strong controllability and Pareto optimality in controllable multi-objective generation.
Prompting Large Language Models to Tackle the Full Software Development Lifecycle: A Case Study (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks focused on simplified or isolated aspects of coding, ignoring the full spectrum of programming challenges.
Approach: They propose a case study that examines the performance of large language models across the entire software development lifecycle with four programming languages, multiple domains, and carefully designed and verified metrics for each task.
Outcome: The proposed model performs across the entire software development lifecycle, including design, environment setup, implementation, acceptance testing, and unit testing.
SimRPD: Optimizing Recruitment Proactive Dialogue Agents through Simulator-Based Data Evaluation and Selection (2026.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: High-quality data in training proactive dialogue agents is scarce, despite fine-tuning and reinforcement learning . a recent study has shown that the effectiveness of supervised fine-touring is limited by the lack of high-quality, domain-specific training data.
Approach: They propose a framework for training recruitment proactive dialogue agents using a high-fidelity user simulator and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework based on Chain-of-Intention.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing simulator-based data selection strategies in a real-world recruitment scenario.
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Speculative decoding method exploits consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases.
Approach: They propose a speculative decoding method that exploits the consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases.
Outcome: The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or databases.
When Helpers Become Hazards: A Benchmark for Analyzing Multimodal LLM-Powered Safety in Daily Life (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Safety impact of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) on human behavior is evaluated in this study.
Approach: They propose a safety-warning-based evaluation framework that encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals.
Outcome: The proposed safety-warning-based evaluation framework encourages models to provide clear and informative safety warnings, rather than generic refusals.
ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing dense retrieval with query augmentation ignore the alignment between generation and ranking objectives.
Approach: They propose a unified LLM-augmented dense retrieval framework that jointly optimizes both the LLM and the retriever.
Outcome: Experimental results show that ExpandR outperforms strong baselines, achieving more than 5% improvement in retrieval performance.
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Structured knowledge grounding (SKG) uses structured knowledge to complete user requests . since inputs and outputs of SKG tasks are heterogeneous, they have been studied separately .
Approach: They propose a framework that unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . they use unifiedSKG to benchmark T5 with different sizes .
Outcome: The proposed framework unifies 21 SKG tasks into a text-to-text format . it achieves state-of-the-art performance on almost all of the 21 tasks, the authors show .
FAIRGAMER: Evaluating Social Biases in LLM-Based Video Game NPCs (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced or replaced traditional non-player characters in video games.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate social biases across three interaction patterns: transaction, cooperation, and competition.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark assesses four bias types across transaction, cooperation, and competition using a novel metric, FairMCV.
Dependency Parsing via Sequence Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for dependency parsing are transition-based, graph-based and sequence-to-sequence method.
Approach: They propose to achieve dependency parsing (DP) via Sequence Generation (SG) by utilizing only the pre-trained language model without any auxiliary structures.
Outcome: The proposed method performs well on DP benchmarks including PTB, UD2.2, SDP15 and SemEval16.
D4: a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for Depression-Diagnosis-Oriented Chat (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing human-machine dialogue systems are not able to provide diagnostic information for depression diagnosis due to stigma associated with mental illness.
Approach: They propose to construct a Chinese Dialogue Dataset for depression-diagnosis-oriented chat based on clinical depression diagnostic criteria.
Outcome: The proposed system can be used to diagnose depression using a Chinese Dialogue Dataset.
GUI Agents: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Foundation Models (LFMs) have transformed the landscape of AI research and day-to-day life.
Approach: They propose a framework that delineates GUI agents' perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework delineates their perception, reasoning, planning, and acting capabilities.
From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MarkerGen (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to control text length are lacking in LCTG, posing a major limitation for practical applications.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play approach that decomposes LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and performs detailed error analysis.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability.
JudgeAgent: Beyond Static Benchmarks for Knowledge-Driven and Dynamic LLM Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks . limited knowledge coverage and fixed difficulties hinder the targeted optimizations resulting in superficial evaluations of LLMs - a problem that has been addressed by JudgeAgent .
Approach: They propose a knowledge-driven and dynamic evaluation framework for large language models . judgeAgent leverages LLM agents equipped with context graphs to traverse knowledge structures .
Outcome: The proposed framework can achieve comprehensive evaluations and facilitate effective model iterations.
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on self-consistency show that it improves reasoning abilities by aggregating diverse stochastic samples.
Approach: They propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature to align with high probability modes.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms fixed-diversity baselines on reasoning tasks and improves both average and best-case performance.
Making RALM Robust to Irrelevant Contexts via Layer Knowledge Guided Attention (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) face factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks.
Approach: They propose a layer-knowledge guided attention method which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of large language models to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks.
Behavior Knowledge Merge in Reinforced Agentic Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) are suboptimal to preserve task-specific capabilities on RL-trained agentic models.
Approach: They propose a distribution-aware merging framework specifically designed for RL-trained agentic models that disentangles shared and task-specific unique parameter updates while selectively preserving and rescaling unique ones.
Outcome: Experiments across multiple agent domains and model architectures show that the proposed framework surpasses baselines and unlocks synergistic potential among agents.
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS).
Approach: They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization.
CGBridge: Bridging Code Graphs and Large Language Models for Better Structure-Aware Code Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing structure-aware approaches treat structure as serialized text prompts or auxiliary training objectives, failing to provide explicit guidance during inference.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play method that enhances Large Language Models with Code Graph information through an external, trainable Bridge module.
Outcome: The proposed method decouples structural reasoning from textual generation without updating the backbone.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations