Papers by Yichao Wang
GIFT: Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer for Enhancing Instruction-Tuned Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiwen Ruan, Yichao Du, Jianjie Zheng, Longyue Wang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Jinsong Su, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
| Challenge: | Existing adapter-based transfer methods treat instruction-tuned models as passive targets . direct fine-tuning can disrupt this delicate balance and lead to instability or performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates instruction-level guidance into task adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms direct fine-tuning and representative transfer-based baselines while maintaining robust generalization and favorable test-time scaling behavior. |
Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation is Meta-Optimizer on Output Projection Layer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) is a powerful domain adaptation tool . the reasons for its success have not been thoroughly investigated . |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate pre-trained Neural Machine Translation models with token-level retrieval . they propose to implicitly execute gradient descent on the output projection layer of NMT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms model fine-tuning on in-domain tests while achieving better performance on out-of-domain sets. |
DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Existing detectors are limited in their ability to detect large language models generated content in multilingual environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions to better align with real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. |
Bridging Relevance and Reasoning: Rationale Distillation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Pengyue Jia, Derong Xu, Xiaopeng Li, Zhaocheng Du, Xiangyang Li, Yichao Wang, Yuhao Wang, Qidong Liu, Maolin Wang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rerank and align documents based on reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) . prior work shows that LLMs have exceptional reasoning and text generation capabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale extraction method that leverages reasoning capabilities of large language models to extract the rationales necessary for answering a query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compared with baseline methods on two tasks across three datasets. |
LLMTreeRec: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models for Cold-Start Recommendations (2025.coling-main)
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Wenlin Zhang, Chuhan Wu, Xiangyang Li, Yuhao Wang, Kuicai Dong, Yichao Wang, Xinyi Dai, Xiangyu Zhao, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang
| Challenge: | Lack of training data leads to the system cold-start problem in recommendation systems, making them struggle to provide effective recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based LLM recommendation framework which structures all items into an item tree to improve the efficiency of LLM’s item retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baseline model in the A/B test on Huawei industrial system. |
Learning to Discriminate Perturbations for Blocking Adversarial Attacks in Text Classification (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on adversarial attacks on deep learning models focus on generation of adversarials and defense against adversarial attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to identify and adjust malicious perturbations and block adversarial attacks for machine learning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in blocking adversarial attacks for text classification models. |
Learning Gender-Neutral Word Embeddings (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Word embeddings trained on human-generated corpora inherit strong gender stereotypes . prior studies show such embeddables exhibit social biases, such as gender stereotype . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to preserve gender information in certain dimensions of word vectors . they propose GN-GloVe, which is a gender-neutral variant of the word embedding model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method preserves gender information in certain dimensions of word vectors while compelling other dimensions to be free of gender influence. |
Tree-KG: An Expandable Knowledge Graph Construction Framework for Knowledge-intensive Domains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graphs are a useful tool for organizing complex data in knowledge-intensive domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an expandable framework that combines structured domain texts with advanced semantic techniques to create a tree-like graph from textbooks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses competing methods in the text-Annotated dataset with high scores on the Text-Annalytated data. |
MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)
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Sheng Zhang, Junyi Li, Yingyi Zhang, Pengyue Jia, Yichao Wang, Xiaowei Qian, Wenlin Zhang, Maolin Wang, Yong Liu, Xiangyu Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for memory management struggle to capture fine-grained semantic relations between queries and documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reasoning and agentic search that grows fine-grained memory fragments from seed tokens from queries, then retraces and deep refines the memory via a contribution function. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that MemSearch-o1 significantly mitigates memory dilution and more effectively activates reasoning potential of diverse LLMs. |
StepSearch: Igniting LLMs Search Ability via Step-Wise Proximal Policy Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in sophisticated linguistic comprehension and generative tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for search LLMs that trains with step-wise proximal policy optimization method to improve QA performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms global-reward benchmarks on multi-hop QA with a stepwise proximal policy optimization method and richer and more detailed intermediate search rewards and token-level process supervision. |
Interventional Rationalization (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rationalization use spurious correlations in data to compose rationales and make predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to discover the causal rationales by using a structural causal model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the causal theory and validates on three real-world datasets. |
Goal-Oriented End-to-End Conversational Models with Profile Features in a Real-World Setting (N19-2)
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| Challenge: | a recent study has focused on how algorithmic improvements help model performance on fabricated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to train conversational neural models for goal-oriented conversational systems . they train models on historical chat transcripts and test on live contacts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to generate top-four responses on live contacts . the model is also able for customer profile features to assess their impact on performance . |
Fine-grained Medical Vision-Language Representation Learning for Radiology Report Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn medical vision-language representations by contrasting images with entire reports are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a phenotype-driven medical vision-language representation learning framework to bridge the gap between visual and textual modalities for improved text-oriented generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between visual and textual modalities for improved radiology report generation. |
A Multistage Extraction Pipeline for Long Scanned Financial Documents: An Empirical Study in Industrial KYC Workflows (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Structured information extraction from long, multilingual scanned financial documents is a core requirement in industrial KYC and compliance workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for structured information extraction from long, multilingual scanned financial documents . they combine image preprocessing, multilinguistic OCR, hybrid page-level retrieval and VLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms direct PDF-to-VLM baselines on 120 production KYC documents. |
Non-Parametric Domain Adaptation for End-to-End Speech Translation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) systems have received increasing attention due to its less error propagation, lower latency and fewer parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-parametric method that leverages in-domain text translation corpus to achieve domain adaptation for E2E-ST systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing in-domain fine-tuning strategies on the Europarl-ST benchmark. |
“The Boating Store Had Its Best Sail Ever”: Pronunciation-attentive Contextualized Pun Recognition (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Identifying and modeling puns is challenging as they involve implicit semantic or phonological tricks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect puns in a sentence and then locate them in it . they propose to capture phonetic associations between the context and phonetic symbols . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in pun detection and location tasks. |
Rethinking Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation: From a Perspective of Latent Variables (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to achieve zero-shot translation suffer from spurious correlations between output language and language invariant semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that denoizes the autoencoder objective based on pivot language into traditional training objective to improve translation accuracy on zero-shot directions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates spurious correlations and outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark machine translation datasets. |
At Your Own PACE: A Causal Framework for Evaluating EQ in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Quotient (EQ) has emerged as a competency for seamless human-AI integration. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for a closed-loop EQ evaluation using a PACE taxonomy to define four dimensions of LLM EQ. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high alignment of 89.31% with human preferences while maintaining robust consistency of 83.6%. |