Papers by Yifan Shen
CESRec: Constructing Pseudo Interactions for Sequential Recommendation via Conversational Feedback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS) rely on collaborative filtering signals and fail to capture real-time user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. |
PACE: Prefix-Protected and Difficulty-Aware Compression for Efficient Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruixiang Feng, Yuntao Wen, Silin Zhou, Ke Shi, Yifan Wang, Ran Le, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen, Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Yiming Jia, Dongsheng Wang, Tao Zhang, Lisi Chen, Yang Song, Shen Gao, Shuo Shang
| Challenge: | Existing LRMs often suffer from "overthinking" and excessively long reasoning traces . a dual-level framework for length compression of LRM is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prefix-protected and difficulty-aware compression under hierarchical supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on math benchmarks. |
MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models assume a global reward function, limiting personalization and pluralistic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages binary preference datasets to enhance personalized preference learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures diverse human preferences without fine-grained annotations and significantly improves personalized preference learning on downstream tasks. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Tree-of-Code: A Self-Growing Tree Framework for End-to-End Code Generation and Execution in Complex Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Effectively and efficiently handling complex realworld problems has become a key focus across industry and academia. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-of-code framework that generates nodes through self-supervision and combines prompt and model exploration in a GT-free setting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two datasets with ten popular zero-shot LLMs show that Tree-of-Code boosts accuracy by nearly 20% over CodeAct with fewer than 1/4 turns. |
Rethinking Token Reduction for State Space Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zheng Zhan, Yushu Wu, Zhenglun Kong, Changdi Yang, Yifan Gong, Xuan Shen, Xue Lin, Pu Zhao, Yanzhi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for token reduction for SSMs lead to performance drops . a recent study shows that Mamba-2 improves the accuracy of the model by 5.7% to 13.1% . |
| Approach: | They propose a token reduction method that integrates token importance and similarity into SSMs and takes advantage of pruning and merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy by 5.7% to 13.1% on six benchmarks with Mamba-2 compared to existing methods while reducing computational demands and memory requirements. |
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. |
Filter-And-Refine: A MLLM Based Cascade System for Industrial-Scale Video Content Moderation (2025.acl-industry)
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Zixuan Wang, Jinghao Shi, Hanzhong Liang, Xiang Shen, Vera Wen, Zhiqian Chen, Yifan Wu, Zhixin Zhang, Hongyu Xiong
| Challenge: | Effective content moderation is essential for video platforms to safeguard user experience and uphold community standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transform a generative MLLM into a multimodal classifier using minimal discriminative training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves F1 score by 66.50% over traditional classifiers while requiring only 2% of the fine-tuning data. |
BFS-Prover: Scalable Best-First Tree Search for LLM-based Automatic Theorem Proving (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to theorem proving in large language models rely on value functions and/or Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), but the potential of simpler methods like Best-First Tree Search remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable expert iteration framework that implements strategic data filtering at each expert iteration round, excluding problems solvable via beam search node expansion to focus on harder cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a state-of-the-art score of 72.95 on the MiniF2F test set and challenges the perceived necessity of complex tree search methods. |
ChartInsights: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models for Low-Level Chart Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Chart question answering (ChartQA) tasks are a critical part of visualization charts. |
| Approach: | They propose a chart question answering task that uses MLLMs to analyze charts . they propose 'Chain-of-Charts' textual prompt strategy that directs attention to visual elements . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance by 14.41% and 80% in low-level ChartQA tasks. |
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. |
OCR or Not? Rethinking Document Information Extraction in the MLLMs Era with Real-World Large-Scale Datasets (2026.eacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are used for document information extraction, but their impact on document information processing remains unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated hierarchical error analysis framework that leverages large language models to diagnose errors systematically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comparable performance to OCR-enhanced approaches. |
Lock on Target! Precision Unlearning via Directional Control (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning harmful, sensitive, or outdated knowledge suffer from two critical limitations: (1) collateral forgetting, where erasing target data inadvertently removes related but desirable knowledge, and (2) generality forgetting degrades the model’s general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that identifies and leverages a targeted "unlearning direction" in the model's parameter space and selectively updates along this direction. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art unlearning precision while preserving both related knowledge and general capabilities. |
Rescorla-Wagner Steering of LLMs for Undesired Behaviors over Disproportionate Inappropriate Context (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rushi Wang, Jiateng Liu, Cheng Qian, Yifan Shen, Yanzhou Pan, Zhaozhuo Xu, Ahmed Abbasi, Heng Ji, Denghui Zhang
| Challenge: | Incorporating external context can enhance the response quality of Large Language Models (LLMs). however, real-world contexts often mix relevant information with disproportionate inappropriate content. |
| Approach: | They propose a Poisoned Context Testbed to pair queries with real-world contexts . they propose 'rw-Steering' to internalize inappropriate signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves response quality by 39.8% and reverses undesirable behavior curve. |