Papers by Yifan Cao
Enhancing Attributed Question Answering using Tailored Progressive Curriculum Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Attributed Question Answering models are not yet leveraged to enhance their essential capabilities, including evidence identification, cross-source relation recognition and anti-distraction reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a progressive progressive curriculum learning approach that optimizes both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves both encoder-decoder and decoder-only AQA models on the quotesum benchmark. |
An Empirical Comparison of Unsupervised Constituency Parsing Methods (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unsupervised constituency parsing are inconsistent due to data preprocessing, lexicalization, and evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose to standardize experimental settings for better comparability between methods . they compare existing methods with those proposed by decade-old models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform better than decade-old models on English and Japanese, respectively, compared with decade- old models. |
Learning Robust Representations for Continual Relation Extraction via Adversarial Class Augmentation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attribute catastrophic forgetting to the corruption of the learned representations as new relations come . Continual relation extraction models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new relations . |
| Approach: | They propose to use adversarial class augmentation mechanism to learn more precise representations . they propose to train the model on a sequence of tasks where two new relations are discovered . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two popular benchmarks. |
Logical Consistency as a Bridge: Improving LLM Hallucination Detection via Label Constraint Modeling between Responses and Self-Judgments (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Mi, Qiang Sheng, Shaofei Wang, Beizhe Hu, Yifan Sun, Zhengjia Wang, Hengqi Zeng, Yang Li, Danding Wang, Juan Cao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection focus on implicit neural uncertainty or explicit symbolic reasoning, ignoring factual hallucinosities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bridges neural features and symbolic judgments for hallucination detection by leveraging a "meta-judgment" process to map symbolic labels back into the feature space. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 4 public datasets, across 4 LLMs, against 8 baselines demonstrate the superiority of LaaB. |
Adversarial Preference Optimization: Enhancing Your Alignment via RM-LLM Game (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models require additional annotations to adjust to shifted distributions. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that allows LLMs and reward models to update alternatively via a min-max game to improve their alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves existing alignment baselines in terms of LLM helpfulness and harmlessness. |
Temporal Flattening in LLM-Generated Text: Comparing Human and LLM Writing Trajectories (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in daily applications, from content generation to code writing. |
| Approach: | They construct a longitudinal dataset of 412 human authors and 6,086 documents spanning 2012–2024 and compare them to trajectories generated by three representative LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The results show that LLMs produce greater lexical diversity but exhibit substantially reduced semantic and cognitive–emotional drift relative to humans. |
Tailoring Rumor Debunking to You: Diversifying Chinese Rumor-Debunking Passages with an LLM-Driven Simulated Feedback-Enhanced Framework (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fact-checking lack coherence and context, whereas abstractive methods lack cohesion and context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages . they propose to use a generative AI framework to generate context-sensitive responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates Chinese user-specific debunking passages by iteratively refining outputs based on simulated user feedback. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
The Staircase of Ethics: Probing LLM Value Priorities through Multi-Step Induction to Complex Moral Dilemmas (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs' moral reasoning capabilities rely on single-step evaluations, ignoring how models adapt to evolving ethical challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate evolving moral judgments of large language models (LLMs) using multi-step moral dilemma questionnaires. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables a fine-grained analysis of how LLMs adjust their moral reasoning across escalating dilemmas. |
Phi: Preference Hijacking in Multi-modal Large Language Models at Inference Time (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models have raised serious safety concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for manipulating the output preference of MLLMs using a preference hijacked image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method works at inference time and requires no model modifications. |
Looking Beyond the One: Operationalizing and Eliciting Visual Ambiguity in VLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Visual question answering systems typically collapse ambiguity, committing to a single interpretation during decoding and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They operationalize ambiguity as the existence of multiple answer-supporting regions in an image . they show that ambiguities are already encoded in their internal representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach makes ambiguity observable without exhaustive annotations . ambiguities are already encoded in models, but not reliably expressed in outputs despite hidden states . |
Enhancing the Comprehensibility of Text Explanations via Unsupervised Concept Discovery (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing concepts-based explainable approaches do not discover unseen concepts . a recent approach to solve this problem is concept-based explanations . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts comprehensible concepts automatically with no annotations . ECO-Concept uses an object-centric architecture to extract task-specific semantic concepts . |
| Outcome: | a new framework extracts comprehensible concepts with no concept annotations . the proposed framework outperforms existing methods in computability tests on diverse tasks . |
CoUDA: Coherence Evaluation via Unified Data Augmentation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentations for coherence evaluation rely on heuristic rules and lack designing criteria. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that breaks down coherence into global and local aspects and designs augmentation strategies for both aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses recent models in scoring and ranking tasks with 233M parameters. |
FolkScope: Intention Knowledge Graph Construction for E-commerce Commonsense Discovery (2023.findings-acl)
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Changlong Yu, Weiqi Wang, Xin Liu, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Tianyu Cao, Bing Yin
| Challenge: | Existing intention-based studies on recommendation tasks are limited and use models to implicitly model the intention memberships. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the generation power of large language models and human-in-the-loop annotation to semi-automatically construct the intention knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can model e-commerce knowledge and have many potential applications. |