Papers by Yicheng Wang
TellWhisper: Tell Whisper Who Speaks When (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches decouple temporal modeling and speaker modeling when addressing 'when' and 'who' . a new framework that couples temporal structure with speaker dynamics is proposed to address these limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that couples temporal and speaker identity within the speech encoder . they propose TS-RoPE, a time-speaker rotary positional encoding that partitions Query/Key channels into temporal, speaker subspaces and applies region-specific rotations to align "when" and "who" cues in selfattention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework couples temporal structure with speaker dynamics in speech encoder . it uses frame-level speaker activity to estimate speaker-activity estimates . |
MINER: Improving Out-of-Vocabulary Named Entity Recognition from an Information Theoretic Perspective (2022.acl-long)
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Xiao Wang, Shihan Dou, Limao Xiong, Yicheng Zou, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Liang Qiao, Zhanzhan Cheng, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition models are feature-engineering and machine learning based. |
| Approach: | They propose a new NER learning framework that uses entity mentions to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance on OOV entities on various settings and datasets. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
AdapterDistillation: Non-Destructive Task Composition with Knowledge Distillation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on learning from multiple tasks has shown that adding an extra fusion layer to implement knowledge composition is non-scalable for some applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation algorithm to extract task specific knowledge by using local data to train a student adapter. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on frequently asked question retrieval in task-oriented dialog systems validate the efficiency of AdapterDistillation. |
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Fei Zhao, Chengqiang Lu, Yufan Shen, Qimeng Wang, Yicheng Qian, Haoxin Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Zhen Wu, Shangyu Xing, Xinyu Dai
| Challenge: | RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images . |
| Approach: | They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a . |
| Outcome: | The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images. |
Bayesian Calibration of Win Rate Estimation with LLM Evaluators (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show the potential of using LLMs as evaluators for text quality evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to improve the accuracy of LLM evaluators by Bayesian inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the accuracy of the win rate estimation using LLMs . the proposed methods are based on six datasets covering story generation, summarization, and instruction following tasks . |
Unsupervised Candidate Answer Extraction through Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor Model (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for candidate answer extraction are reliant on linguistic rules or annotated data and face partial annotation issue and challenges in generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised approach that leverages the inherent structure of context passages through a Differentiable Masker-Reconstructor (DMR) Model with the enforcement of self-consistency for picking up salient information tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms supervised and unsupervised methods in two datasets with exhaustively-annotated answers and shows that it is comparable to supervised methods. |
ConQuer: A Framework for Concept-Based Quiz Generation (2025.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based quiz generation frameworks that leverage external knowledge sources are challenging and labor intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based quiz generation framework that leverages external knowledge sources to assess the quality of the generated quizzes, using LLMs as judges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 4.8% improvement in evaluation scores and a 77.52% win rate in pairwise comparisons against baseline quiz sets. |
LAMBDA: Large Language Model-Based Data Augmentation for Multi-Modal Machine Translation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-modal machine translation methods are underperforming compared to pre-trained models due to lack of triplet training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal machine translation method that integrates images and visual modality to enhance language understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enrich the original samples and expand the dataset without requiring external images and text. |
DHP Benchmark: Are LLMs Good NLG Evaluators? (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yicheng Wang, Jiayi Yuan, Yu-Neng Chuang, Zhuoer Wang, Yingchi Liu, Mark Cusick, Param Kulkarni, Zhengping Ji, Yasser Ibrahim, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly serving as evaluators in Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures the discernment of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse NLG tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides quantitative discernment scores for LLMs across four NLG tasks. |
Diversity Collapse in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: Structural Coupling and Collective Failure in Open-Ended Idea Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly used for open-ended idea generation . when and why collective interaction expands the solution space remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose to study diversity in multi-agent systems across three bottom-up levels: model intelligence, agent cognition, and system dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields diminishing diversity despite higher quality . the proposed model fails to expand diversity and causes it to collapse . |
Advancing Abductive Reasoning in Knowledge Graphs through Complex Logical Hypothesis Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abductive reasoning is the process of making educated guesses to provide explanations for observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of complex logical hypothesis generation to generate a complex logique hypothesis that can explain a set of observations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates logical hypotheses closer to the reference hypothesis, but not better on unseen observations. |
BalanceSFT: Improving LLM Function Calling with Balanced Training Signals and Data Hardness (2026.findings-acl)
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Bingguang Hao, Zengzhuang Xu, Maolin Wang, Yuntao Wen, Yicheng Chen, Cunyin Peng, Long Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jinjie Gu, Chenyi Zhuang, Ji Zhang
| Challenge: | Currently, Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is the prevailing method for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with function calling capabilities, but its effectiveness is often compromised by two challenges: 1) lengthy Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning tokens dominate training signals over concise function calls in the learning objective; 2) scarcity of hard training examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a self-adjusted signal balancing loss and a hard data re-sampling strategy to selectively generate new, high-quality complex data guided by model errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art models like GPT-5 in function calling performance. |
Understanding ME? Multimodal Evaluation for Fine-grained Visual Commonsense (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that understand image and text but also cross-reference in-between are lacking in evaluation data resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal evaluation pipeline to automatically generate question-answer pairs to test models’ understanding of the visual scene, text, and related knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can answer the highly semantic VCR question correctly but fails to answer related visual question (Q2), textual question (q3), and background knowledge question ( Q4) as shallow mappings with language priors and unbalanced utilization of information between modalities. |
LLaMA-Rider: Spurring Large Language Models to Explore the Open World (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have used Large Language Models to help decision-making and planning in environments, but their capacity to acquire environmental knowledge and adapt in an open world remains uncertain. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to spur LLMs to explore the open world, gather experiences, and learn to improve their task-solving capabilities by using a feedback-revision mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enhances the efficiency of the LLM in exploring the open world and improves its ability to accomplish more tasks through fine-tuning with merely 1.3k instances of collected data, showing minimal training costs compared to baseline using reinforcement learning. |
Commonsense for Generative Multi-Hop Question Answering Tasks (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Reading comprehension QA tasks have seen a recent surge in popularity, yet most work has focused on fact-finding extractive QA. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-hop generative task that uses a pointer-generator decoder to synthesize disjoint pieces of information within the context to generate an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than previous generative models and is competitive with current state-of-the-art span prediction models. |
Mixed Distillation Helps Smaller Language Models Reason Better (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive multiple step-by-step reasoning capabilities in recent NLP reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed distillation framework that distills multiple step-by-step reasoning abilities into smaller language models (SLMs) they leverage LLMs to generate multiple step by step reasoning rationales by sampling automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on SVAMP, GSM8K and ASDIV, while a single model generated by MD exceeds the comprehensive performance of two individual CoT and PoT distilled models. |
Dataset Bias Mitigation in Multiple-Choice Visual Question Answering and Beyond (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhecan Wang, Long Chen, Haoxuan You, Keyang Xu, Yicheng He, Wenhao Li, Noel Codella, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined dataset biases in VQA benchmarks with short-phrase answers Multiple-choice Question with the LONG Answers (VCR, VLEP, etc.) |
| Approach: | They propose to use Adversarial Data Synthesis (ADS) to generate synthetic training and debiased evaluation data and introduce Intra-sample Counterfactual Training (ICT) to assist models in utilizing synthesized training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves model performance even in domain-shifted scenarios. |
Divide and Conquer: Text Semantic Matching with Disentangled Keywords and Intents (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text semantic matching models do not provide granularity for text comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective training strategy for text semantic matching by disentangling keywords from intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stable performance improvements against a wide range of models on three benchmarks. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
Robust Machine Comprehension Models via Adversarial Training (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for the Stanford Question Answering Dataset suffer from a 50% decrease in F1 score during adversarial evaluation based on AddSent. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative adversary-generation algorithm, AddSentDiverse, that significantly increases the variance within the adversarial training data by providing effective examples that punish the model for making certain superficial assumptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can achieve a 36.5% increase in F1 score while maintaining performance on the regular SQuAD task. |
See the Forest for the Trees: Loosely Speculative Decoding via Visual-Semantic Guidance for Efficient Inference of Video LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video understanding suffer from autoregressive generation of tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free loosely SD framework for Video-LLMs that uses visual-relevant tokens to accurately pinpoint the latter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts the accepted length and speedup ratio by 136% and 35% compared to SOTA training-free SD methods for Video-LLMs. |