Papers by Yichen Li
ThinkPersona: Thinking with Persona Graphs for Faithful Individualized Role-Playing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly utilized as role-playing agents to simulate personas in interactive settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-playing agent trained to explicitly ground responses in individual identity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent can generate persona-consistent responses in long-context dialogues while maintaining general instruction-following capabilities. |
Beyond Single-Event Extraction: Towards Efficient Document-Level Multi-Event Argument Extraction (2024.findings-acl)
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Wanlong Liu, Li Zhou, DingYi Zeng, Yichen Xiao, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Grandee Lee, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
| Challenge: | mainstream event argument extraction methods process each event in isolation, resulting in inefficient inference and ignoring correlations among multiple events. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-event argument argument extraction model which extracts arguments from all events simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on four public datasets while saving time. |
Vector-Vector-Matrix Architecture: A Novel Hardware-Aware Framework for Low-Latency Inference in NLP Applications (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve accuracy of neural networks are slow due to computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a vector-vector-matrix architecture which greatly reduces latency at inference time for NLP applications by a factor of four. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the latency of sequence-to-sequence and Transformer models used for NMT by a factor of four. |
Understanding Secret Leakage Risks in Code LLMs: A Tokenization Perspective (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Code Large Language Models (CLLMs) are reshaping how software is built, maintained, and evolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BPE tokenization to inadvertently leak code secrets . they propose to mitigate the gibberish bias by using a newer tokenizer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a novel method that can be used to detect and mitigate gibberish bias in CLLMs. |
ManuSearch: Democratizing Deep Search in Large Language Models with a Transparent and Open Multi-Agent Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems with opaque architectures are limiting deep search capabilities for web-augmented large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a transparent and modular multi-agent framework to democratize deep search for LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source systems in deep reasoning tasks. |
IEvoAgent: Evolving Conversational Agent based on User Implicit Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize conversational agents often rely on explicit preference pairs and expert evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent framework that leverages the structured dependency between agent responses and user reactions to extract implicit feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on MT-Bench-101, WildBench, and FB-Bech, and shows that mining implicit feedback supports better multi-turn alignment under evolving user preferences. |
VideoCuRL: Video Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Orthogonal Difficulty Decomposition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning (RL) is crucial for Video-LLMs with complex spatiotemporal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes difficulty into two axes in video understanding . they employ efficient, training-free proxies to map data onto a 2D curriculum grid . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses strong RL baselines on reasoning and perception tasks. |
Noisy Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-Training for Speculative Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Ruijie Wang, Baoyu Li, Yichen Lu, Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Yuchen Yan, Shengzhong Liu, Hanghang Tong, Tarek Abdelzaher
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods fail in speculative reasoning task on knowledge graphs . state-of the-art approaches assume correctness of fact is determined by its presence in KG . |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative reasoning task on real-world knowledge graphs . they propose nPUGraph that estimates correctness of both collected and uncollected facts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the robustness of a label posterior-aware graph encoder against false positive links and identifies missing facts to provide high-quality grounds of reasoning. |
FairSteer: Inference Time Debiasing for LLMs with Dynamic Activation Steering (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing prompt-based debiasing methods exhibit instability due to sensitivity to prompt changes . fine-tuning-based techniques incur substantial computational overhead and catastrophic forgetting . |
| Approach: | They propose a debiasing framework that encodes fairness-related features into separable directions in the hidden activation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs inference-time debiasing without requiring retraining or prompt design . it detects bias signatures in activations and then computes debiased steering vectors . the proposed framework is available to download in the u.s. |
Self-adaptive Dataset Construction for Real-World Multimodal Safety Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing dataset construction methods fail to cover the complexity of multimodal safety scenarios . lack of a unified evaluation metric makes them unproven . |
| Approach: | They propose a risk-oriented image-oriented self-adaptive dataset construction method for RMS . they automatically generate an RMS dataset comprising 35,610 image–text pairs with guidance responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method automatically generates an RMS dataset comprising 35,610 image–text pairs with guidance responses. |
SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Licheng Zong, Hongru Wang, Jingyan Zhou, Jingjing Li, Yichen Gao, Kam-Fai Wong, Yu Li, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches to large language models face performance limitations due to the lack of publicly available training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play LLM-based retrieval method called Self-Rewarding Tree Search based on Monte Carlo Tree Search and a self-rewarding paradigm to address these limitations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the BM25 retriever and surpasses the baseline of self-reflection in both efficiency and scalability. |
BadScientist: Can a Research Agent Write Convincing but Unsound Papers that Fool LLM Reviewers? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence suggests that LLMs are not able to detect scientifically unsound work from malicious or poorly designed research agents. |
| Approach: | They develop a framework that evaluates whether fabrication-oriented paper generation agents can deceive multi-model LLM review systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that fabricated papers achieve acceptance rates up to 18% . the framework shows only marginal improvements, with detection accuracy barely exceeding random chance. |
On the Generation of Medical Dialogs for COVID-19 (2021.acl-short)
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Meng Zhou, Zechen Li, Bowen Tan, Guangtao Zeng, Wenmian Yang, Xuehai He, Zeqian Ju, Subrato Chakravorty, Shu Chen, Xingyi Yang, Yichen Zhang, Qingyang Wu, Zhou Yu, Kun Xu, Eric Xing, Pengtao Xie
| Challenge: | under the pandemic of COVID-19, people experiencing COVI D19-related symptoms have a pressing need to consult doctors. |
| Approach: | They develop a medical dialog system that can provide COVID19-related consultations . they use two dialog datasets containing conversations between doctors and patients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can provide COVID19-related consultations, but is too small compared with general-domain dialog datasets. |
Two Intermediate Translations Are Better Than One: Fine-tuning LLMs for Document-level Translation Refinement (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) can enhance translation quality through self-refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend translation refinement from sentence-level to document-level by using document-to-document (Doc2Doc) translations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves translation quality across ten translation tasks with LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-Nemo-Instru. |
Graph Counselor: Adaptive Graph Exploration via Multi-Agent Synergy to Enhance LLM Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing LLM reliability suffer from inefficient information aggregation and rigid reasoning schemes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly models external knowledge integration capabilities by explicitly modeling knowledge relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in multiple graph reasoning tasks. |
Identifying and Mitigating Social Bias Knowledge in Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debiasing may generate incorrect or nonsensical predictions but leave aside individual commonsense facts, resulting in modified knowledge that elicits unreasonable or undesired predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that identifies encoding locations of biases within language models and then applies the Fairness-Stamp (FAST) they also propose 'BiaScope' to evaluate the retention of commonsense knowledge and generalization across paraphrased social biase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art baselines with superior debiasing performance while not compromising the overall model capability for knowledge retention and prediction. |
Does DetectGPT Fully Utilize Perturbation? Bridging Selective Perturbation to Fine-tuned Contrastive Learning Detector would be Better (2024.acl-long)
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Shengchao Liu, Xiaoming Liu, Yichen Wang, Zehua Cheng, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Yu Lan, Chao Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect MGT from human-written texts are inadequate . existing methods are fine-tuned and zero-shot metric-based, but they can be more accurate. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel fine-tuned detector that can detect MGT from human-written texts by contrastive learning on selective perturbation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 1.20% on four public datasets. |
PaSa: An LLM Agent for Comprehensive Academic Paper Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | We introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . despite being trained on synthetic data, PaSA outperforms existing baselines on RealScholarQuery . |
| Approach: | They introduce PaSa, an advanced Paper Search agent powered by large language models . they optimize PaSA using a synthetic dataset, AutoScholarQuery, which includes 35k fine-grained queries . |
| Outcome: | The paper analyzes the performance of a paper search agent using a synthetic dataset . it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks on RealScholarQuery . |
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Junpeng Ding, Zichen Tang, Haihong E, Mengyuan Ji, Yang Liu, Haolin Tian, Haiyang Sun, Pengqi Sun, Yang Xu, Yichen Liu, Haocheng Gao, Zijie Xi, Ruomeng Jiang, Peizhi Zhao, Rongjin Li, Yuanze Li, Jiacheng Liu, Zhongjun Yang, Jintong Chen, Siying Lin
| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | 3D visual grounding aims to localize the desired objects in a 3D point cloud by a free-form language description. |
| Approach: | They propose a relation-aware framework which captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks . it captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes . |
UMPIRE: Unveiling LLM-generated Posts via Redundant Expressions (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to verify the provenance of multimodal content fall into two categories: traditional methods rely on low-level artifacts or unimodal statistics. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic decomposition mechanism that disentangles textual embeddings into redundant and complementary components and a latent redundancy regularization loss to encourage LLM-generated content to exhibit high semantic redundancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art detection methods across multiple datasets and achieves 5.38% improvement in accuracy. |
FuseSearch: Learning Adaptive Parallel Execution for Efficient Code Localization (2026.findings-acl)
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Ke Xu, Siyang Xiao, Ming Liang, Yichen Yu, Zhixiang Wang, Jingxuan Xu, Dajun Chen, Wei Jiang, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Existing parallel code localization agents suffer from a 34.9% redundant tool invocation rate . specialized localization agent that operate as dedicated search components is needed to achieve high localization accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel code localization system that reframes parallel code execution as a quality–efficiency co-optimization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches SOTA performance while being 93.6% faster. |