Papers by Yifan Lu
TreeBoN: Enhancing Inference-Time Alignment with Speculative Tree-Search and Best-of-N Sampling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiahao Qiu, Yifu Lu, Yifan Zeng, Jiacheng Guo, Jiayi Geng, Chenhao Zhu, Xinzhe Juan, Ling Yang, Huazheng Wang, Kaixuan Huang, Yue Wu, Mengdi Wang
| Challenge: | Best-of-N (BoN) sampling generates multiple responses and selects the best one, achieving improved performance but with a high computational cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a speculative tree-search strategy into Best-of-N (BoN) Sampling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Best-of-N (BoN) sampling but has high computational cost . tree-search strategy reduces computational overhead while maintaining high output quality . |
Reflection on Knowledge Graph for Large Language Models Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Yigeng Zhou, Wu Li, Yifan Lu, Jing Li, Fangming Liu, Meishan Zhang, Yequan Wang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for supplementing Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs often introduce noise in the retrieval and reasoning pipeline, hindering their ability to integrate external knowledge for complex multi-hop question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities through reflective engagement with knowledge graphs by Query Decoupling, LLM-Driven Knowledge Graph Exploration, and Inference with Knowledge Reconstruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates external knowledge into LLMs and trains them to leverage this knowledge for answering questions. |
FLAT-LLM: Fine-grained Low-rank Activation Space Transformation for Large Language Model Compression (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank decomposition methods suffer from accuracy degradation and expensive calibration procedures. |
| Approach: | They propose a fast and accurate, training-free structural compression method based on fine-grained low-rank transformations in the activation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning baselines in generalization and downstream performance while delivering inference speedups. |
ToolCPT: Improving Tool Utilization in LLM Agents via Continuous Pre-training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool knowledge for LLM-based agents during continuous pre-training . they curate 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on out-of-distribution tools on multiple benchmarks. |
SLAM-Omni: Timbre-Controllable Voice Interaction System with Single-Stage Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Wenxi Chen, Ziyang Ma, Ruiqi Yan, Yuzhe Liang, Xiquan Li, Ruiyang Xu, Zhikang Niu, Yanqiao Zhu, Yifan Yang, Zhanxun Liu, Kai Yu, Yuxuan Hu, Jinyu Li, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | a new spoken dialogue system with single-stage training is demonstrating its low latency and high quality . SLAM-Omni achieves zero-shot timbre control by modeling spoken language with semantic tokens . |
| Approach: | They propose a timbre-controllable, end-to-end voice interaction system with single-stage training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms previous models on 4 GPUs with limited data. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Self-Injecting Hallucinations (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection. |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies. |
| Outcome: | a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation. |
Adaptive Detoxification: Safeguarding General Capabilities of LLMs through Toxicity-Aware Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-acl)
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Yifan Lu, Jing Li, Yigeng Zhou, Yihui Zhang, Wenya Wang, Xiucheng Li, Meishan Zhang, Fangming Liu, Jun Yu, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods for large language models (LLMs) suffer from over-editing, where detoxified models reject legitimate queries, compromising overall performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a toxicity-aware knowledge editing approach that dynamically detects toxic activation patterns during forward propagation and then routes computations through adaptive inter-layer pathways to mitigate toxicity effectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on large language models and enhances the SafeEdit benchmark. |
The Essence of Contextual Understanding in Theory of Mind: A Study on Question Answering with Story Characters (2025.acl-long)
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Chulun Zhou, Qiujing Wang, Mo Yu, Xiaoqian Yue, Rui Lu, Jiangnan Li, Yifan Zhou, Shunchi Zhang, Jie Zhou, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | Theory-of-Mind (ToM) is a psychological capability that allows humans to understand and interpret the mental states of others. |
| Approach: | They propose a CharToM-QA benchmark to assess the importance of comprehensive contextual understanding about personal backgrounds in ToM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 1,035 ToM questions based on classic novels and shows that educated participants perform better when they have read the novels than non-educated participants. |
User Feedback Alignment for LLM-powered Exploration in Large-scale Recommendation Systems (2025.acl-industry)
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Jianling Wang, Yifan Liu, Yinghao Sun, Xuejian Ma, Yueqi Wang, He Ma, Zhengyang Su, Minmin Chen, Mingyan Gao, Onkar Dalal, Ed H. Chi, Lichan Hong, Ningren Han, Haokai Lu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used to broaden user experiences beyond established preferences and reinforce feedback loops. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical approach that combines hierarchic planning with LLM inference-time scaling to improve recommendation relevancy without compromising novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows significant gains in both user satisfaction and exploration diversity. |
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. |
Optimizing Native Sparse Attention with Latent Attention and Local Global Alternating Strategies (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has proposed a variety of training-free and post-training methods for selecting critical key-value pairs at each generation step. |
| Approach: | They propose to use local (sliding-window) and global (compression/selective) attention across layers to enlarge long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on models from 340M to 1.3B parameters show that the proposed method matches or exceeds full attention and native sparse attention in both common-sense reasoning and long-context understanding tasks. |
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. |
InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | In order to perform downstream tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) need continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that allows for continual adaptation without catastrophic forgetting . they propose to replay previous data based on task similarity with instructions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance over 16 tasks with different training orders. |
LoRASC: Expressive and Generalizable Low-rank Adaptation for Large Models via Slow Cascaded Learning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing low-rank adaptations have limited expressiveness, a tendency to overfit, and sensitivity to hyperparameter settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to enhance LoRA’s expressiveness and generalization capabilities while preserving its training efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines, mitigates overfitting, enhances model stability, and improves OOD robustness. |
From Experience to Skill: Multi-Agent Generative Engine Optimization via Reusable Strategy Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Beining Wu, Fuyou Mao, Jiong Lin, Cheng Yang, Jiaxuan Lu, Yifu Guo, Siyu Zhang, Yifan Wu, Ying Huang, Fu Li
| Challenge: | Generative engines (GEs) are replacing ranked links with citation-grounded answers . current methods are unable to accumulate or transfer effective strategies across tasks and engines . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework where planning, editing, and fidelity-aware evaluation serve as the execution layer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms heuristic baselines in visibility and citation fidelity on three mainstream engines. |
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Hui Wang, Jinghua Zhao, Yifan Yang, Shujie Liu, Junyang Chen, Yanzhe Zhang, Shiwan Zhao, Jinyu Li, Jiaming Zhou, Haoqin Sun, Yan Lu, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages. |