Papers by Ye Yan

42 papers
Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current scientific reasoning models struggle with generalization across domains and fall short of multimodal perception.
Approach: They propose to use multimodal large language models to integrate text, images, and other modalities to enhance scientific reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed models can integrate text, images, and other modalities and improve reasoning across disciplines.
Safe: Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via Retrospective Step-aware Formal Verification (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Chain-of-Thought prompting is a de facto method to elicit reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a step-aware formal verification framework Safe to address hallucinations in CoT prompting . they propose 'formal step' as a benchmark for step correctness theorem proving with 30,809 formal statements.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows significant performance improvement while offering interpretable and verifiable evidence.
Noise-robust Cross-modal Interactive Learning with Text2Image Mask for Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on multi-modal neural machine translation focus on visual information, but text and image may not match exactly, and visual noise is often ignored.
Approach: They propose a noise-robust multi-modal interactive fusion approach with cross-modal relation-aware mask mechanism for MNMT.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art scores in all En-De, En-Fr and En-Cs translation tasks.
Experience-driven Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions . training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to limited rewards and prohibitive costs.
Approach: They propose a method that leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significant gains over the base model with 1K public trajectories as RL experiences . it achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o .
LoopCoder: Scaling Code Intelligence via Looped Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models have mastered syntax-level code generation, but complex algorithmic reasoning remains a challenge.
Approach: They propose a recurrent inductive bias that aligns with the recursive nature of programming logic.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable performance to standard dense models with more parameters.
Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one.
Approach: They propose to use the law of capacity gap to distill knowledge from a large teacher to a small student model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms other language models on a larger scale by using the law of capacity gap inducted from a preliminary study on small-scale (3B) LMs.
AnyGPT: Unified Multimodal LLM with Discrete Sequence Modeling (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing language models that use discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities are limited to text generation and do not include multimodal output.
Approach: They propose a multimodal language model that utilizes discrete representations for unified processing of various modalities.
Outcome: The proposed model can be trained stably without any alterations to existing models or training paradigms.
mPLUG-DocOwl 1.5: Unified Structure Learning for OCR-free Document Understanding (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing Multimodal Large Language Models lack general structure understanding abilities for text-rich document images.
Approach: They propose to use unified structure learning to boost the performance of MLLMs by encoding structure information into text-rich images.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on 10 visual document understanding benchmarks.
mPLUG-DocOwl2: High-resolution Compressing for OCR-free Multi-page Document Understanding (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have improved document understanding performance but generate thousands of visual tokens for a single document image, leading to excessive GPU memory and slower inference times.
Approach: They propose a high-resolution document compression module to generate 324 tokens for a single document image.
Outcome: The proposed module reduces first token latency by more than 50% and improves document comprehension performance.
SalaMAnder: Shapley-based Mathematical Expression Attribution and Metric for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Chain-of-Thought prompting improves the math reasoning capability of large language models.
Approach: They propose a method for attribution of component-level contributions in CoT reasoning using Shapley value and a stratified sampling algorithm that significantly reduces computational complexity.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces computational complexity and provides robust correlations with model performance.
RHGN: Relation-gated Heterogeneous Graph Network for Entity Alignment in Knowledge Graphs (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for entity alignment fail to account for heterogeneity among KGs and distinction between KG entities and relations.
Approach: They propose a Relation-gated Heterogeneous Graph Network (RHGN) that uses a relation-gate based convolutional layer to distinguish relations and entities in the KG.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on four datasets show that the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art methods.
LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are transforming education by automating complex tasks and enhancing both teaching and learning processes.
Approach: This survey analyzes recent advances in applying Large Language Model agents to educational settings . it highlights ethical issues, hallucination and overreliance, and integration with existing ecosystems .
Outcome: The authors analyze the technologies enabling LLM agents and highlight key challenges in deploying them in educational settings.
Same Claim, Different Judgment: Benchmarking Scenario-Induced Bias in Multilingual Financial Misinformation Detection (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research on LLM biases has focused on direct questioning or general-purpose settings . pronounced behavioral biase despite their growing deployment in financial analysis, forecasting, and decision support.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate behavioral biases of large language models in MFMD . they use a multilingual financial misinformation dataset to integrate these with misinformation claims .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates behavioral biases of large language models across economic scenarios.
DESED: Dialogue-based Explanation for Sentence-level Event Detection (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for sentence-level event detection depend on manual annotations or domain expertise to design sophisticated templates and rules.
Approach: They propose a dialogue-based explanation paradigm to enhance sentence semantics for event detection.
Outcome: The proposed method can be applied to two event detection datasets.
From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool.
Approach: They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations.
Outcome: The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations.
Unifying Latent and Lexicon Representations for Effective Video-Text Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions.
Approach: They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively.
AISFG: Abundant Information Slot Filling Generator (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to zero/few-shot slot filling focus on slot descriptions and examples . AISFG model is based on domain-specific labels, which is not capable of transferring to new domains with little or no data.
Approach: They propose a model with a query template that incorporates domain descriptions, slot descriptions, and examples with context.
Outcome: Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in zero/few-shot slot filling task.
UReader: Universal OCR-free Visually-situated Language Understanding with Multimodal Large Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies for visually-situated language understanding have shown shallow zero-shot visual text recognition ability when fed a low-resolution image with salient text information.
Approach: They propose a model for universal OCR-free visually-situated language understanding based on the Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) their model is jointly finetuned on a wide range of visually situated language understanding tasks via a unified instruction format.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art ocr-free performance in 8 out of 10 visually-situated language understanding tasks across 5 domains: documents, tables, charts, natural images, and webpage screenshots.
EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Automated Essay Scoring (AES) systems face three major challenges: reliance on handcrafted features that limit generalizability, difficulty in capturing fine-grained traits like coherence and argumentation, and inability to handle multimodal contexts.
Approach: They propose a multimodal benchmark to evaluate AES capabilities across lexical-, sentence-, and discourse-level traits without manual feature engineering.
Outcome: The proposed system can evaluate AES capabilities across lexical-, sentence-, and discourse-level traits without manual feature engineering.
Tuning Less, Prompting More: In-Context Preference Learning Pipeline for Natural Language Transformation (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to natural language transformation (NLT) tasks face significant challenges, such as the computational costs of leveraging large pre-trained models and the limited generalization ability of fine-tuned smaller models.
Approach: They propose a framework that combines prompting with fine-tuning to enhance smaller models by integrating In-Context Examples from retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across MT and TST tasks.
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning.
Semantics-enhanced Cross-modal Masked Image Modeling for Vision-Language Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling.
Approach: They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks.
Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Lip reading is a process of interpreting silent speech from visual lip movements . but lip reading in cross-speaker scenarios poses a challenging problem due to inter-speech variability .
Approach: They propose to exploit lip landmark-guided visual clues instead of mouth-cropped images as input features.
Outcome: Experimental results show that the proposed approach reduces speaker-specific appearance characteristics in cross-speaker scenarios.
Meet Changes with Constancy: Learning Invariance in Multi-Source Translation (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to multi-source neural machine translation neglect inconsistencies between sources of information.
Approach: They propose a source invariance network to learn invariant information of parallel sources . they propose to integrate such network with multi-encoder based multi-source NMT methods .
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves clear gains in translation quality and captures implicit invariance between different sources.
MoDification: Mixture of Depths Made Easy (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Long-context efficiency is a trending topic in large language model (LLM) serving.
Approach: They propose a method to combine long-context efficiency and mixture of depths to bring down both latency and memory.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves 1.2 speedup in latency and 1.8 reduction in memory compared to original LLMs especially in long-context applications.
Modeling discourse cohesion for discourse parsing via memory network (P18-2)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to discourse parsing focus on studying the semantic and syntactic aspects of EDU pairs, but they do not address long span dependencies.
Approach: They propose a new transition-based discourse parser that takes discourse cohesion into account by using memory networks.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms traditional features and improves performance on the RST discourse treebank.
FastSeq: Make Sequence Generation Faster (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Transformer-based models have made tremendous impact in natural language generation, but inference speed is still a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process.
Approach: They propose an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O to accelerate sequence generation without loss of accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed framework can accelerate the sequence generation by 4x to 9x with a simple one-line code change for a set of widely used and diverse models.
On the Step Length Confounding in LLM Reasoning Data Selection (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing pipelines generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models (LLMs) and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples.
Approach: They propose to use supervised fine-tuning to generate long reasoning data from more capable Large Language Models and apply manually heuristic or naturalness-based selection methods to filter high-quality samples.
Outcome: Experiments on four LLMs and five evaluation benchmarks show that the proposed approach is effective in mitigating step length confounding problem.
DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient .
Approach: They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%.
Enhancing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Critical Representation Fine-tuning (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Representation Fine-tuning (ReFT) is a proposed method for improving parameter efficiency . however, it yields suboptimal performance, as fixed-position representations have uncertain impact on outputs .
Approach: They propose a method that fine-tunes critical representations in a low-rank linear subspace while freezing the base model.
Outcome: The proposed method improves accuracy of LLaMA-2-7B and ReFT by 18.2 and 3.8 on GSM8K.
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified.
Approach: They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric.
Outcome: The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area.
Discover and Prove: An Open-source Agentic Framework for Hard Mode Automated Theorem Proving in Lean 4 (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to solving mathematical problems fall into two broad categories: informal methods and formal methods.
Approach: They propose to use LLM natural-language reasoning to discover answers . they introduce Discover And Prove framework that rewrites Hard Mode statements into Easy Mode ones for existing ATP provers.
Outcome: The proposed framework can be used to prove hard mode statements on ATP benchmarks.
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning.
Approach: They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks .
Outcome: The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education.
Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent agentic search frameworks are text-centric, overlooking multimodal evidence . a pressing task is multimodal long-form generation, a new paper argues .
Approach: They propose a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation.
mPLUG: Effective and Efficient Vision-Language Learning by Cross-modal Skip-connections (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing pre-trained vision-language models suffer from inefficiency and linguistic signal overwhelmed by long visual sequences in cross-modal alignment.
Approach: They propose a vision-language foundation model with cross-modal skip-connections that can be pre-trained end-to-end on large-scale image-text pairs with both discriminative and generative objectives.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art results on a wide range of vision-language downstream tasks, including image captioning, image-text retrieval, visual grounding and visual question answering.
CC-Tuning: A Cross-Lingual Connection Mechanism for Improving Joint Multilingual Supervised Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing fine-tuning approaches that focus on English-centric training corpora often introduce implicit cross-lingual alignment, overlooking the potential for more profound, latent-level cross-linguistic interactions.
Approach: They propose a multilingual fine-tuning paradigm that explicitly establishes a cross-lingual connection mechanism at the latent level.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms vanilla SFT and offers a strong latent-level alternative to data-level augmentation methods.
Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem.
Approach: They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself.
TRIPS: Efficient Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Text-Relevant Image Patch Selection (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing vision-and-language pre-training models suffer from long visual sequences . experimental results show that TRIPS gains a speedup of 40% over previous similar VLP models .
Approach: They propose an efficient vision-and-language pre-training model with text-relevant image patch selection, TRIPS, which reduces the visual sequence progressively with a text-guided patch-selection layer in the visual backbone for efficient training and inference.
Outcome: The proposed model can speed up training and inference by 40% over previous models.
TrendFact: A Benchmark Towards Hotspot Perception in Automatic Fact-Checking (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks lack social metadata and evaluation framework to meet this urgent evaluation needs.
Approach: They propose a benchmark capable of evaluating HPA and three fact-checking tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves HPA and computational efficiency for RLM-driven systems.
Concise and Organized Perception Facilitates Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Extensive experimental results on several popular logical benchmarks (ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, PrONtoQA-OOD, and FOLIO) and mathematical benchmark (DI-GSM) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Approach: They propose a reasoning approach called Concise and Organized Perception (COP) that carefully analyzes the given statements to identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy efficiently.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several popular logical benchmarks and mathematical benchmarks.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains.
Approach: They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark.

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