Papers by YiFan Zhang
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
Evaluating Step-by-Step Reasoning through Symbolic Verification (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (LMs) have shown remarkable reasoning performance using explanations or chain-of-thoughts (CoT)) for in-context learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use symbolic examples to iteratively reason over symbolic examples and to recover Prolog’s backward chaining algorithm to iterate over KBs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on length generalization benchmarks than CoT on explanations and chain-of-thoughts (CoT) tasks. |
ErrorRadar: Benchmarking Complex Mathematical Reasoning of Multimodal Large Language Models Via Error Detection (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Hang Li, Boyan Li, Jiamin Su, Xiong Gao, YiFan Zhang, Tianlong Xu, Zhendong Chu, Aoxiao Zhong, Kun Wang, Hui Xiong, Philip S. Yu, Xuming Hu, Qingsong Wen
| Challenge: | Current mathematical benchmarks focus on evaluating MLLMs’ problem-solving ability, yet there is a crucial gap in addressing more complex scenarios such as error detection. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate multimodal error detection by evaluating two sub-tasks error step identification and error categorization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task evaluates MLLMs' ability to handle multimodal questions compared to text-only models. |
Reasoning is All You Need for Video Generalization: A Counterfactual Benchmark with Sub-question Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)
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Qiji Zhou, YiFan Gong, Guangsheng Bao, Hongjie Qiu, Jinqiang Li, Xiangrong Zhu, Huajian Zhang, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal benchmarks often overlook counterfactual reasoning, which is crucial for robust video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a multidimensional multimodal benchmark that systematically evaluates MLLMs across the abstract-concrete and perception-cognition dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decomposes complex queries into structured sub-questions, enabling fine-grained reasoning analysis. |
V-Oracle: Making Progressive Reasoning in Deciphering Oracle Bones for You and Me (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Jiapeng Wang, YiFan Zhang, Zhuoma GongQue, Chong Sun, Yida Xu, Yadong Xue, Ye Tian, Zhimin Bao, Lan Yang, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Deciphering oracle bone scripts using AI technology is not an overnight task due to the evolution of written language over millennia. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes Large Multi-modal Models (LMMs) for interpreting Oracle Bone Script (OBS). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative analyses and superior deciphering capability. |
Why Can Distillation Work with Limited Resources? A Systematic Study (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiao Hu, Xingyu Lu, Liyuan Mao, YiFan Zhang, Tianke Zhang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have driven reasoning performance . low-resource distillation can boost models' performance, but a framework is missing . |
| Approach: | They conduct a controlled experiment to find out why low-resource distillation can boost model performance . they find that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows more flexible reasoning, the authors show . they show that distillation enhances the presence of advanced cognitive behaviors . |
A Study on the Calibration of In-context Learning (2024.naacl-long)
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Hanlin Zhang, YiFan Zhang, Yaodong Yu, Dhruv Madeka, Dean Foster, Eric Xing, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Sham Kakade
| Challenge: | Prior research has demonstrated improvements in the calibration of language models (LMs) in-context learning is a popular method for adapting static LMs to safety-critical domains. |
| Approach: | They use in-context learning to adapt static language models through tailored prompts to a wide range of tasks and find that miscalibration occurs in low-shot settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibrations show that models exhibit increased miscalibration before achieving better calibration in low-shot settings. |
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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YiFan Zhang, Tao Yu, Feng Li, Chaoyou Fu, Yibo Hu, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Rong Jin
| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes . |
| Approach: | They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models . |