Papers by Yichen Yan
Beyond Literal Descriptions: Understanding and Locating Open-World Objects Aligned with Human Intentions (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual grounding rely on the assumption that the given expression must be literal . this impedes the practical deployment of agents in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual grounding task that uses intention expressions to locate foreground entities . they build a large-scale IVG dataset with free-form intention expression to promote VG . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a large-scale intention-driven visual-language (V-L) dataset with free-form intention expressions. |
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. |
TinyChart: Efficient Chart Understanding with Program-of-Thoughts Learning and Visual Token Merging (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that multimodal large language models can be useful for chart understanding, but their size limits their use in resource-constrained environments. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient multimodal large language model with only 3B parameters for chart understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several chart-understanding MLLMs with up to 13B parameters on ChartQA, Chart-to-Text, Chart to Table, OpenCQA, and ChartX. |
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. |
LIFBench: Evaluating the Instruction Following Performance and Stability of Large Language Models in Long-Context Scenarios (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rarely focus on instruction-following in long-context scenarios or stability on different inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable dataset to evaluate LLMs’ instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates LLMs’ instruction-following capabilities and stability across long contexts. |