Papers by Yifan Jiang
Graph Reasoning for Question Answering with Triplet Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer complex questions require reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) state-of-the-art methods constrain retrieved knowledge in local subgraphs and discard more diverse triplets that are disconnected but useful for question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve the most relevant triplets from KGs and then rerank them, which are then concatenated with questions to be fed into language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on commonsenseQA and OpenbookQA datasets with 4.6% absolute accuracy. |
CoCA: Fusing Position Embedding with Collinear Constrained Attention in Transformers for Long Context Window Extending (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use self-attention and position embedding have anomalous behavior that hinder long context window extrapolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a collinear constraint between Q and K to integrate RoPE and self-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model integrates self-attention and position embedding into LLMs without fine-tuning. |
Aligning Large Language Models with Implicit Preferences from User-Generated Content (2025.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zheng Li, Tianyi Liu, Haodong Wang, Hyokun Yun, Ming Zeng, Pei Chen, Zhihan Zhang, Yifan Gao, Ruijie Wang, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing preference learning methods rely heavily on curated data from humans or advanced LLMs, which is costly and difficult to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages implicit preferences in unlabeled user-generated content to generate preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms user-generated content into user queries and generates responses from the policy model. |
BRAINTEASER: Lateral Thinking Puzzles for Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | lateral thinking tasks require implicit and complex reasoning, relying on human-like commonsense mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a lateral thinking benchmark to test models' ability to exhibit lateral reasoning and defy default commonsense associations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits lateral thinking and defies default commonsense associations. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
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Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kailin Jiang, Ning Jiang, Yuntao Du, Yuchen Ren, Yuchen Li, Yifan Gao, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Bin Li, Lei Liu, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are constrained by static representations, inadequately evaluating their ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types to evaluate temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 tasks, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. |
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hui Liu, Qingyu Yin, Zhengyang Wang, Chenwei Zhang, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Chao Zhang, Bing Yin, William Wang, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources. |
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. |
Benchmarking Large Language Models Under Data Contamination: A Survey from Static to Dynamic Evaluation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Simin Chen, Yiming Chen, Zexin Li, Yifan Jiang, Zhongwei Wan, Yixin He, Dezhi Ran, Tianle Gu, Haizhou Li, Tao Xie, Baishakhi Ray
| Challenge: | In the era of evaluating large language models, data contamination is an increasingly prominent concern . static benchmarking has been used for evaluation, but there are limitations of *dynamic* benchmarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a series of optimal design principles for *dynamic* benchmarking and analyze the limitations of existing *static* benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks highlight a critical gap in the evaluation of LLMs. |
IHEval: Evaluating Language Models on Following the Instruction Hierarchy (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhihan Zhang, Shiyang Li, Zixuan Zhang, Xin Liu, Haoming Jiang, Xianfeng Tang, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Haodong Wang, Zhaoxuan Tan, Yichuan Li, Qingyu Yin, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned language models (LMs) are increasingly deployed as interactive services across various applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to follow the instruction hierarchy by comparing their models to a set of benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 3,538 examples across nine tasks covering cases where instructions in different priorities either align or conflict. |
UniConv: Unifying Retrieval and Response Generation for Large Language Models in Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Chuan Meng, Xin Liu, Zhuofeng Wu, Kelong Mao, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing conversational search systems are usually built with two different models . this separation restricts the system from leveraging the model's intrinsic knowledge simultaneously . Existing studies for developing unified models cannot fully address the aspects of understanding conversational context, managing retrieval independently, and generating responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify dense retrieval and response generation for large language models in conversation by fine-tuning and mitigating data discrepancy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can outperform existing models on five conversational search datasets and reduce inconsistency risks while mitigating data discrepancy. |
Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions? (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chi Han, Xin Liu, Haodong Wang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Qingyu Yin, Liang Qiu, Changlong Yu, Yifan Gao, Zheng Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Despite of significant achievements in improving instruction-following capabilities of large language models, the ability to process multiple potentially entangled or conflicting instructions remains a considerable challenge. |
| Approach: | They construct multi-turn instruction with 1.1K high-quality multi-turned conversations using the human-in-the-loop approach and examine their capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it is difficult to integrate multiple turns and balance competing objectives when instructions intersect or conflict. |
Red Queen: Exposing Latent Multi-Turn Risks in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing jailbreak strategies are single-turn with explicit malicious intent, failing to reflect real-world scenarios where interactions can be multi-turn and users can conceal intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak attack that constructs a multi-turn scenario and conceals malicious intent under the guise of preventing harm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves 87.6% attack success rate (ASR) on GPT-4o and 77.1% on Llama3-70B compared to previous jailbreak attacks . |
ProLongVid: A Simple but Strong Baseline for Long-context Video Instruction Tuning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rui Wang, Bohao Li, Xiyang Dai, Jianwei Yang, Yi-Ling Chen, Zhen Xing, Yifan Yang, Dongdong Chen, Xipeng Qiu, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to adapt image-focused models for video understanding have not been successful in analyzing long video sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a video instruction dataset that outperforms existing video instruction data for fine-tuning MLLMs by incrementally increasing input context length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on video benchmarks and outperformed proprietary models on VideoMME even with a compact 7B model. |
Sentient Agent as a Judge: Evaluating Higher-Order Social Cognition in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Bang Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Qingxuan Jiang, Peisong Wang, Jiaqi Chen, Zheng Xie, Xingyu Chen, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Yifan Yang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have evolved from statistical sequence predictors to sophisticated autonomous agents capable of reasoning, planning, and sustaining multi-turn conversa-tions. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that instantiates a "Sentient Agent" that simulates human-like emotional changes and inner thoughts to provide a more realistic evaluation of the model in multi-turn conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures the agent's higher-order social cognition in multi-turn conversations. |
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihao Ding, Siwen Luo, Yue Dai, Yanbei Jiang, Zechuan Li, Qiang Sun, Geoffrey Martin, Wei Liu, Yifan Peng
| Challenge: | Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents . |
| Approach: | They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
Agentic Conversational Search with Contextualized Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Fengran Mo, Yifan Gao, Sha Li, Hansi Zeng, Xin Liu, Zhaoxuan Tan, Xian Li, Jianshu Chen, Dakuo Wang, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on single-turn scenarios, which might lack the ability to handle multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational agent that interleaves search and reasoning across turns and provides tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent interleaves search and reasoning across turns, enabling exploratory and adaptive behaviors learned through reinforcement learning (RL) training with tailored rewards towards evolving user goals. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
The Ranking Blind Spot: Decision Hijacking in LLM-based Text Ranking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in information retrieval tasks like passage ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose two attacks that aim to force the LLM ranker to prefer a specific passage and rank it at the top. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks aim to force the LLM ranker to prefer a specific passage and rank it at the top. |
Implementing Retrieval Augmented Generation Technique on Unstructured and Structured Data Sources in a Call Center of a Large Financial Institution (2025.naacl-industry)
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Syed Shariyar Murtaza, Yifan Nie, Elias Avan, Utkarsh Soni, Wanyu Liao, Adam Carnegie, Cyril John Mathias, Junlin Jiang, Eugene Wen
| Challenge: | generative AI models can extract accurate facts from external unstructureddata sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data embeddings to enhance RAG for retrieving facts from structured data sources, achieving low latency and high reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves low latency and high reliability and average response time of 7.33 seconds. |
Evaluating the Expressive Appropriateness of Speech in Rich Contexts (2026.acl-long)
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Tianrui Wang, Ziyang Ma, Yizhou Peng, Haoyu Wang, Zhikang Niu, Zikang Huang, Yihao Wu, Yi-Wen Chao, Yu Jiang, Yuheng Lu, Guanrou Yang, Xuanchen Li, Hexin Liu, Chunyu Qiang, Cheng Gong, Yifan Yang, Tianchi Liu, Junyu Wang, Nana Hou, Meng Ge, Fuming You, Yang Wei, Zhongqian Sun, Hu Haifeng, Xiaobao Wang, Eng Siong Chng, Xie Chen, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating expressive speech focus on word accuracy, naturalness, signal quality, or emotional intensity at the utterance level. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Evaluating Expressive Appropriateness in speech that assesses whether a speech sample aligns with the underlying communicative intent implied by its discourse-level narrative context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing speech evaluation and analysis systems on a human-annotated test set. |
GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Exploratory GUI testing is essential for software quality but suffers from high manual costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples navigation from verification via two modules . they propose 143 tasks and a GUITestBench benchmark that features 26 defects . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks in 143 tasks and 26 defects. |
BackdoorAgent: A Unified Framework for Backdoor Attacks on LLM-based Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Yunhao Feng, Yige Li, Yutao Wu, Yingshui Tan, Yanming Guo, Yifan Ding, Kun Zhai, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular framework that provides a unified view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a unified, agent-centric view of backdoor threats in LLM agents. |
Synapse: Empowering LLM Agents with Episodic-Semantic Memory via Spreading Activation (2026.findings-acl)
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Hanqi Jiang, Junhao Chen, Yi Pan, Ling Chen, Weihang You, Yifan Zhou, Ruidong Zhang, Yohannes Abate, Tianming Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel at generalized reasoning, but lack the ability to accumulate experiences and maintain narrative coherence over long horizons. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified memory architecture that transcends static vector similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in temporal and multihop reasoning tasks. |