Papers by Yi Wen
CharacterBox: Evaluating the Role-Playing Capabilities of LLMs in Text-Based Virtual Worlds (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evaluating role-playing capabilities in large language models is challenging due to complex dynamics involved in role-playering. |
| Approach: | They propose a simulation sandbox that generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance LLM performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates situational fine-grained character behavior trajectories to enhance performance. |
R2D2: Recursive Transformer based on Differentiable Tree for Interpretable Hierarchical Language Modeling (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models with stacked layers do not explicitly model hierarchical structure of language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a recursive Transformer model based on differentiable CKY style binary trees to emulate hierarchical composition process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict words given their left and right abstraction nodes. |
What’s Missing in Screen-to-Action? Towards a UI-in-the-Loop Paradigm for Multimodal GUI Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI reasoning methods rely on direct screen-based decision-making, which lacks interpretability and overlooks a comprehensive understanding of UI elements, ultimately leading to task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI reasoning paradigm that treats the GUI reasoning task as a cyclic ***Screen-UI elements-Action** process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art UI understanding performance while yielding superior results in GUI reasoning tasks. |
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Minyi Zhao, Yi Liu, Jianfeng Wen, Boshen Zhang, Hailang Chang, Zhiheng Ouyang, Jie Wang, Wensong He, Shuigeng Zhou
| Challenge: | Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy. |
| Approach: | They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better. |
DoTAT: A Domain-oriented Text Annotation Tool (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | DoTAT is a domain-oriented text annotation tool that can reduce the time for event annotation by 19.7% . the tool supports multi-person collaborative process with automatically merging and review . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-oriented text annotation tool called DoTAT . it provides multi-person collaborative process with automatic merging and review . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can reduce the time for event annotation by 19.7% compared with existing tools. |
RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System (2021.naacl-demos)
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Haoyang Wen, Ying Lin, Tuan Lai, Xiaoman Pan, Sha Li, Xudong Lin, Ben Zhou, Manling Li, Haoyu Wang, Hongming Zhang, Xiaodong Yu, Alexander Dong, Zhenhailong Wang, Yi Fung, Piyush Mishra, Qing Lyu, Dídac Surís, Brian Chen, Susan Windisch Brown, Martha Palmer, Chris Callison-Burch, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | We present a new information extraction system that can construct temporal event graphs from news documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal event graph extraction system that can extract news documents . they extend the system from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-media event extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can extract temporal event graphs from news documents in multiple languages and multiple data modalities. |
Learning How and What to Memorize: Cognition-Inspired Two-Stage Optimization for Evolving Memory (2026.acl-long)
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Derong Xu, Shuochen Liu, Pengfei Luo, Pengyue Jia, Yingyi Zhang, Yi Wen, Yimin Deng, Wenlin Zhang, Enhong Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Tong Xu
| Challenge: | Existing memory systems rely on static, hand-crafted update rules for personalization, but sparse outcome rewards provide weak supervision, resulting in unstable long-horizon optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory guideline optimization framework that learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns how memory should be organized and what information to update. |
On Synthetic Data Strategies for Domain-Specific Generative Retrieval (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative retrieval models can be used to generate ranked lists of potentially relevant document identifiers for a user query. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data generation strategy for a two-stage training framework that focuses on learning to decode document identifiers from queries and a strategy for mining hard negatives based on initial model's predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate ranked lists of potentially relevant document identifiers for a user query and then refine ranking through preference learning. |
SynPrompt: Syntax-aware Enhanced Prompt Engineering for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of prompt-tuning for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) are crude and simple. |
| Approach: | They propose a Syntax-aware Enhanced Prompt method which mines syntactic information related to aspect words from the syntaktic dependency tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the syntactic knowledge embedded in PLMs and achieves favorable results on three benchmark datasets. |
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhongyi Zhou, Yichen Zhu, Minjie Zhu, Junjie Wen, Ning Liu, Zhiyuan Xu, Weibin Meng, Yaxin Peng, Chaomin Shen, Feifei Feng, Yi Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language-action models prioritize robotic action mastery . however, models trained on visual-text pairs struggle to interpret multimodal data . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks and achieves six times higher performance on visual question-answering datasets. |
E-ViC: Reasoning Beyond Text via Embodied Visual Chain for Spatial Intelligence (2026.acl-long)
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Junbo Qi, Yi Zhang, Hanchu Ni, Che Liu, Zhimin Yao, Ruilin Yang, Xiancong Ren, Liangjian Wen, Wei Ge, Yuya Ieiri, Osamu Yoshie, Yong Dai, Xiaozhu Ju
| 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%. |
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)
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Yi Liu, Yuan Tian, Jianxun Lian, Xinlong Wang, Yanan Cao, Fang Fang, Wen Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB). |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
An Empirical Study of LLM Reasoning Ability Under Strict Output Length Constraint (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yi Sun, Han Wang, Jiaqiang Li, Jiacheng Liu, Xiangyu Li, Hao Wen, Yizhen Yuan, Huiwen Zheng, Yan Liang, Yuanchun Li, Yunxin Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are a powerful tool for test-time scaling, but they are often used under time constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose to use LLMs to make models think before answering questions . they also use self-correction and best-of-N decoding to encourage deeper thinking . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are able to achieve higher inference accuracy with extra inference computation under time constraints. |