Papers by Yibo Yan
Position: Multimodal Large Language Models Can Significantly Advance Scientific Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Shen Wang, Jiahao Huo, Jingheng Ye, Zhendong Chu, Xuming Hu, Philip S. Yu, Carla P Gomes, Bart Selman, Qingsong Wen
| 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. |
VLA-Mark: A cross modal watermark for large vision-language alignment models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Shuliang Liu, Zheng Qi, Jesse Jiaxi Xu, Yibo Yan, Junyan Zhang, He Geng, Aiwei Liu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Yik-Cheung Tam, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking methods disrupt visual-textual alignment, leaving semantic-critical concepts vulnerable. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-aligned framework that embeds detectable watermarks into outputs . they combine localized patch affinity, global semantic coherence, contextual attention patterns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows lower PPL and higher BLEU than conventional methods with near-perfect detection (98.8% AUC). |
PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Song Dai, Yibo Yan, Jiamin Su, Zihao Dongfang, Yubo Gao, Yonghua Hei, Jungang Li, Junyan Zhang, Sicheng Tao, Zhuoran Gao, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Current physics benchmarks focus on text-only inputs or only on problem-solving . current physics reasoning benchmarks neglect critical intermediate steps of variable identification and process formulation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates multimodal large language models in physics reasoning . the benchmark measures variables, process formulations, and solution derivation . |
| Outcome: | PhysicsArena is the first multimodal physics reasoning benchmark . it evaluates MLLMs across three critical dimensions: variable identification, process formulation, and solution derivation. |
Pierce the Mists, Greet the Sky: Decipher Knowledge Overshadowing via Knowledge Circuit Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by hallucinations, a particularly challenging variant, knowledge overshadowing, which can lead to erroneous outputs even with high-quality training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze and detect knowledge overshadowing by using knowledge circuit analysis to dissect the function of key components in the circuit and how attention pattern dynamics contribute to the phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the framework can detect and analyze knowledge overshadowing and improves on existing models. |
FastMem: Fast Memorization of Prompt Improves Context Awareness of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with context awareness, leading to inaccuracies in tasks requiring faithful adherence to provided information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance LLMs' context awareness by updating only the last Feed-Forward Network module to maximize the likelihood of the prompt before inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of Llama 3-8B-Inst on the NQ-SWAP dataset from 59.1% to 71.6% and reduces the output structure failure rate of Qwen 1.5-4B-Chat from 34.9% to 25.5%. |
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. |
RSA-Bench: Benchmarking Audio Large Models in Real-World Acoustic Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Zhang, Kaiwen Luo, Liang Lin, Shilinlu Yan, Jin Wang, Yaoqi Guo, Yitian Chen, Yalan Qin, Zhenhong Zhou, Kun Wang, Li Sun
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on synthetic Gaussian noise or simplistic single-source interference, failing to capture the intricate, multi-layered acoustic dynamics that characterize authentic physical environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a robustness benchmark to stress-test Audio Large Models (ALLMs) using high-fidelity auditory scene simulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on a wide range of tasks, including automatic speech recognition, speech translation, and audio-based reasoning. |
LLM Agents for Education: Advances and Applications (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Zhendong Chu, Shen Wang, Jian Xie, Tinghui Zhu, Yibo Yan, Jingheng Ye, Aoxiao Zhong, Xuming Hu, Jing Liang, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen
| 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. |
EssayJudge: A Multi-Granular Benchmark for Assessing Automated Essay Scoring Capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiamin Su, Yibo Yan, Fangteng Fu, Zhang Han, Jingheng Ye, Xiang Liu, Jiahao Huo, Huiyu Zhou, Xuming Hu
| 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. |
Exploring Response Uncertainty in MLLMs: An Empirical Evaluation under Misleading Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yunkai Dang, Mengxi Gao, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Yanggan Gu, Jungang Li, Jingyu Wang, Peijie Jiang, Aiwei Liu, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused mainly on visual–textual misalignment, leaving largely unexplored the MLLMs’ ability to preserve an original correct answer when confronted with misleading information. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage evaluation pipeline to quantify the response uncertainty phenomenon by eliciting each model’s original response on unperturbed inputs and injecting explicit (false-answer hints) and implicit (contextual contradictions) misleading instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overturns a correct answer in 65% of cases after receiving a single deceptive cue. |
SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features. |
Thinking Economically: A Hierarchical Framework for Adaptive-Complexity Reasoning in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Gao, Haotian Wu, Hong Chen, Junquan Huang, Yibo Yan, Jungang Li, Zihao Dongfang, Sicheng Tao, PS Tan, Jie Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing efficiency methods for Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generate excessively long rationales without commensurate accuracy gains. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that operationalizes this principle through coarse-to-fine budgeting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GSM8K and MATH500 show that HAB surpasses standard CoT in accuracy and reduces token usage, achieving stronger performance-efficiency trade-off than baselines. |
MMNeuron: Discovering Neuron-Level Domain-Specific Interpretation in Multimodal Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs have a visual question answering capability but lack domain-specific information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for language model modules in MLLMs when handling projected image features and verify this hypothesis using logit lens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework will yield a 10% change in accuracy at most, shedding light on the development of cross-domain, all-encompassing MLLMs in the future. |
Vision-Language Introspection: Mitigating Overconfident Hallucinations in MLLMs via Interpretable Bi-Causal Steering (2026.acl-long)
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Shuliang Liu, Songbo Yang, Dong Fang, Sihang Jia, Yuqi Tang, Lingfeng Su, Ruoshui Peng, Yibo Yan, Xin Zou, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to overcome object hallucination are limited . Existing mitigations include costly retraining and a training-free inference framework . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free inference framework that simulates a metacognitive self-correction process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces object hallucination rates by 12.67% on MMHal-Bench and improves accuracy by 5.8% on POPE. |
Sculpting the Vector Space: Towards Efficient Multi-Vector Visual Document Retrieval via Prune-then-Merge Framework (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Document Retrieval (VDR) is of importance in multimodal retrieval applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage pruning and merging frameworks that combine pruning and merge techniques to achieve higher compression rates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on 29 visual document retrieval datasets. |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
A Survey on Proactive Defense Strategies Against Misinformation in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Shuliang Liu, Hongyi Liu, Aiwei Liu, Duan Bingchen, Zheng Qi, Yibo Yan, He Geng, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detection of misinformation generated by large language models fail to mitigate societal risks . authors propose a paradigm shift from passive detection to anticipatory mitigation strategies . existing defenses remain reactionary in an era demanding proactive defense, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a three-pillar approach to prevent misinformation by fortifying integrity of training data and inference reliability by embedding self-corrective mechanisms during reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing methods in misinformation prevention by 63% . it demonstrates that existing methods exhibit false negative rates against misinformation . |
A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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Yibo Yan, Jiamin Su, Jianxiang He, Fangteng Fu, Xu Zheng, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Kun Wang, Shen Wang, Qingsong Wen, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | This survey provides **the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models** . integrating large language model with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming significant as AI advances . |
| Approach: | They review over 200 studies published since 2021 and examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs . they identify five major challenges hindering the realization of AGI in this domain . |
| Outcome: | The authors examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs with a focus on multimodal settings. |
MathAgent: Leveraging a Mixture-of-Math-Agent Framework for Real-World Multimodal Mathematical Error Detection (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle with identifying and categorizing student errors in multimodal mathematical contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that decomposes error detection into three phases with specialized agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows higher accuracy in error step identification and 3% improvement in error categorization on real-world educational data. |
SafeEraser: Enhancing Safety in Multimodal Large Language Models through Multimodal Machine Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
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Junkai Chen, Zhijie Deng, Kening Zheng, Yibo Yan, Shuliang Liu, PeiJun Wu, Peijie Jiang, Jia Liu, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for MU forget quality and model utility are not fully explored for safety in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety unlearning benchmark for MLLMs to measure over-forgetting . they propose MU methods to forget quality and model utility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces over-forgetting by 79.5% while maintaining forget quality and model utility. |
MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in machine learning (MU) have enabled the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to "reformulate" the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs by preserving only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baselines that finetuned MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions. |
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jingheng Ye, Shen Wang, Deqing Zou, Yibo Yan, Kun Wang, Hai-Tao Zheng, Ruitong Liu, Zenglin Xu, Irwin King, Philip S. Yu, Qingsong Wen
| 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. |
Reefknot: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Relation Hallucination Evaluation, Analysis and Mitigation in Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on object-level or attribute-level hallucinations, neglecting the more complex relation hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive benchmark targeting relation hallucinations comprising over 20,000 real-world samples and a confidence-based mitigation strategy which reduces the halluciation rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the hallucination rate by an average of 9.75% across three datasets, including Reefknot. |
Unlocking Speech Instruction Data Potential with Query Rewriting (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack datasets and biased training tasks to follow speech instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a query rewriting framework that uses multiple agents to annotate and validate the synthesized speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can transform text instructions into distributions more suitable for TTS models for speech synthesis without human annotation. |
Learning to Collaborate for Question Answering and Asking (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) are closely related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a training algorithm that generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets under the question answering scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training algorithm generalizes both Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Generating Domain-Adaptive Nets (GDAN) under the question answering scenario. |