Papers by Yifei Chen

Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier (2023.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing models of seeker simulations are limited by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in mental health research.
Approach:	They propose an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory to enable dynamic control of the simulator's configurations.
Outcome:	The proposed system achieves more realistic seeker simulation compared to baselines.

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Yifei Li, Zeqi Lin, Shizhuo Zhang, Qiang Fu, Bei Chen, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen

INTERS: Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models in Search with Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models have made impressive progress in few-shot learning but still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K.
Approach:	They propose a new approach that uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme to improve reasoning ability of language models.
Outcome:	The proposed approach improves GSM8K reasoning rate by 17.9% to 58.1%.

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Yutao Zhu, Peitian Zhang, Chenghao Zhang, Yifei Chen, Binyu Xie, Zheng Liu, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou

EMRs2CSP : Mining Clinical Status Pathway from Electronic Medical Records (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, but their application to information retrieval tasks is still challenging due to the infrequent occurrence of many IR-specific concepts in natural language.
Approach:	They propose to use instruction tuning to enhance LLMs' proficiency in IR tasks by combining a dataset with manually written templates to analyze the effects of instruction design, template diversity, few-shot demonstrations, and the volume of instructions.
Outcome:	The proposed model can be used to perform query understanding, document understanding, and query-document relationship understanding tasks.

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Yifei Chen, Ruihui Hou, Jingping Liu, Tong Ruan

Information Extraction & Text Mining

Challenge:	Current studies focus on extracting tests or treatments when constructing clinical pathways, neglecting the patient's symptoms and diagnosis.
Approach:	They propose a novel clinical pathway representation: the clinical status pathway and a pipeline framework for extracting clinical status from electronic medical records.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves extraction accuracy by modeling diagnostic and treatment processes and demonstrates significant improvements on medical question-answering and decision-support tasks.

GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)

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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text.
Approach:	They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline.
Outcome:	The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline.

AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang

IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs (2025.emnlp-industry)

Challenge:	Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning.
Approach:	AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks.
Outcome:	Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% .

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Aosong Feng, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Yun Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Yueyan Chen, Xian Wu, Ninad Kulkarni, Yi Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Dmitriy Bespalov, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Yifei Teng, Darren Yow-Bang Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong

Low-Resource NLP

Challenge:	Existing systems require users to manually select models or employ rigid routing rules that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of query complexity.
Approach:	They propose a quality-constrained intelligent prompt routing framework that automatically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 43.9% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency.

What if Othello-Playing Language Models Could See? (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Xinyi Chen, Yifei Yuan, Jiaang Li, Serge Belongie, Maarten de Rijke, Anders Søgaard

Neural Parameter Search for Slimmer Fine-Tuned Models and Better Transfer (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	a multi-modal model trained on move sequences and board images is a popular testbed for language models .
Approach:	They propose a multi-modal model trained jointly on move sequences and board images.
Outcome:	The proposed multi-modal model trains on move sequences and board images.

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Guodong Du, Zitao Fang, Jing Li, Junlin Li, Runhua Jiang, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yangneng Chen, Sim Kuan Goh, Ho-Kin Tang, Daojing He, Honghai Liu, Min Zhang

ELAD: Explanation-Guided Large Language Models Active Distillation (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Foundational models and their checkpoints have advanced deep learning, boosting performance across applications.
Approach:	They propose a method for pruning fine-tuned models by calculating differences between them and original model.
Outcome:	The proposed method can improve performance across vision, NLP, and multi-modal benchmarks.

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Yifei Zhang, Bo Pan, Chen Ling, Yuntong Hu, Liang Zhao

AfriInstruct: Instruction Tuning of African Languages for Diverse Tasks (2024.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are hindered by their memory inefficiency, computational demands, and the high costs of API inferences.
Approach:	They propose an Explanation-Guided LLMs Active Distillation framework that employs an active learning strategy to optimize the balance between annotation costs and model performance.
Outcome:	The proposed framework significantly improves the efficiency of LLMs knowledge distillation.

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Kosei Uemura, Mahe Chen, Alex Pejovic, Chika Maduabuchi, Yifei Sun, En-Shiun Lee

ET-Agent: Incentivizing Effective Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent via Behavior Calibration (2026.acl-long)

Challenge:	Large language models (LLMs) for African languages perform worse compared to high-resource languages.
Approach:	They propose a model that specializes in instruction-tuning of multiple African languages covering various tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5-Turbo and other models of similar size in multiple tasks.

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Yifei Chen, Guanting Dong, Zhicheng Dou

Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing training frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on answers’ accuracy, overlooking specific alignment for behavior patterns.
Approach:	They propose a training framework for calibrating agent’s tool-use behavior through two synergistic perspectives: self-evolving data flywheel and behavior calibration training.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the accuracy, efficiency, reasoning conciseness, and tool execution accuracy of large language models.

Unveiling Factual Recall Behaviors of Large Language Models through Knowledge Neurons (2024.emnlp-main)

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Yifei Wang, Yuheng Chen, Wanting Wen, Yu Sheng, Linjing Li, Daniel Zeng

DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models have underscored their exceptional reasoning prowess with natural language understanding across a broad spectrum of tasks.
Approach:	They examine whether Large Language Models actively recall or retrieve their internal repositories of factual knowledge when faced with reasoning tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed model improves reasoning performance while suppressing it leads to notable degradation.

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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang

Challenge:	Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability.
Approach:	They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence.
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets.

Encourage or Inhibit Monosemanticity? Revisit Monosemanticity from a Feature Decorrelation Perspective (2024.emnlp-main)

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Hanqi Yan, Yanzheng Xiang, Guangyi Chen, Yifei Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Challenge:	Recent studies focus on monosemanticity on its basic units.
Approach:	They propose to revisit monosemanticity from the feature decorrelation perspective and advocate for its encouragement.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves representation diversity and activation sparsity and improves preference alignment performance.

Large Language Model Agents in Finance: A Survey Bridging Research, Practice, and Real-World Deployment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Kunlin Zhang, Yilong Dai, Sanjian Zhang, Wanghao Ye, Sihan Chen, Zhi-Qi Cheng

McQueen: a Benchmark for Multimodal Conversational Query Rewrite (2022.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	a systematic review of large language models (LLMs) is conducted to better align their capabilities with real-world demands.
Approach:	They propose a functional taxonomy mapping financial domains to tasks, datasets, and institutional constraints. they catalog over 30 financial benchmarks and 20 representative models.
Outcome:	The proposed model frameworks are bridging financial practice and LLM research.

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Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, Liyi Chen, Feijun Jiang, Yuan You, Wai Lam

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Recent studies have focused on conversational-related tasks that involve drawing information from more than one modality.
Approach:	They propose a task of multimodal conversational query rewrite which performs query . they collect a large-scale visual conversation dataset and benchmark it against other tasks .
Outcome:	The proposed task performs on a large-scale visual conversation dataset . it eliminates coreference and ellipsis in the original query without changing its semantic information.

RolePlot: A Systematic Framework for Evaluating and Enhancing the Plot-Progression Capabilities of Role-Playing Agents (2025.acl-long)

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Pinyi Zhang, Siyu An, Lingfeng Qiao, Yifei Yu, Jingyang Chen, Jie Wang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Kai Zhang

Dialogue Systems & Conversational Agents

Challenge:	Existing research has focused on role-playing agents’ ability to portray specified characters, but their ability to advance the plot requires substantial improvements to deliver more engaging interaction.
Approach:	They propose a role-playing framework to evaluate and enhance the plot-progression capabilities of role-players.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves RPAs’ ability to time plot developments and yields a significant increase in conversation turns and sustained higher arousal levels.

CogDual: Enhancing Dual Cognition of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Rule-Based Rewards (2025.emnlp-main)

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Cheng Liu, Yifei Lu, Fanghua Ye, Jian Li, Xingyu Chen, Feiliang Ren, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li

Challenge:	Existing approaches to role-playing language models rely on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning to emulate character behaviors but neglect the underlying cognitive mechanisms driving these behaviors.
Approach:	They propose a novel RPLA adopting a cognize-then-respond reasoning paradigm that leverages dual cognition for more contextually grounded and psychologically coherent responses.
Outcome:	The proposed RPLA outperforms baselines and generalizes effectively across diverse role-playing tasks.

GUITester: Enabling GUI Agents for Exploratory Defect Discovery (2026.findings-acl)

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Yifei Gao, Jiang Wu, Xiaoyi Chen, Yifan Yang, Zhe Cui, Tianyi Ma, Jiaming Zhang, Jitao Sang

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.

PlaM: Training-Free Plateau-Guided Model Merging for Better Visual Grounding in MLLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Zijing Wang, YongKang Liu, Mingyang Wang, Ercong Nie, Deyuan Chen, Zhengjie Zhao, Shi Feng, Daling Wang, Xiaocui Yang, Yifei Zhang, Hinrich Schuetze

Multimodality

Challenge:	Multimodal instruction fine-tuning degrades textual reasoning capability, undermining multimodal performance.
Approach:	They propose a plateau-guided model merging method that selectively injects base language model parameters into MLLMs to mitigate this degradation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework reduces multimodal instruction fine-tuning degradation by incorporating a plateau-guided model merging method into MLLMs.

Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations (2024.acl-long)

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Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Zhihong Shao, Runxin Xu, Damai Dai, Yifei Li, Deli Chen, Yu Wu, Zhifang Sui

Numerical Reasoning

Challenge:	Existing methods for process-oriented math reward models rely on manual annotation.
Approach:	They propose a process-oriented math process reward model called Math-shepherd which assigns a reward score to each step of math problem solutions.
Outcome:	The proposed model breaks the bottleneck of manual supervision in two scenarios.

AutoSDT: Scaling Data-Driven Discovery Tasks Toward Open Co-Scientists (2025.emnlp-main)

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Yifei Li, Hanane Nour Moussa, Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Botao Yu, Mingyi Xue, Benjamin Burns, Tzu-Yao Chiu, Vishal Dey, Zitong Lu, Chen Wei, Qianheng Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Song Gao, Xuhui Huang, Xia Ning, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Ali Payani, Huan Sun

LESA: Learnable LLM Layer Scaling-Up (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	AutoSDT-5K is the only automatically collected and the largest open dataset for data-driven scientific discovery.
Approach:	They propose an automatic pipeline that collects high-quality coding tasks in real-world data-driven discovery workflows.
Outcome:	The proposed pipeline synthesizes accurate tasks and tasks from a dataset of 5,404 tasks covering four scientific disciplines and 756 Python packages.

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Yifei Yang, Zouying Cao, Xinbei Ma, Yao Yao, Zhi Chen, Libo Qin, Hai Zhao

Efficiently Editing Mixture-of-Experts Models with Compressed Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing methods for depth scaling-up rely on empirical heuristic rules for layer duplication, resulting in poor initialization and slower convergence during continual pre-training.
Approach:	They propose a method for learning latent parameters between layers by concatenating parameters from each layer and applying Singular Value Decomposition.
Outcome:	Experiments show that LESA outperforms baseline models with less than half the cost of existing methods.

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Yifei He, Yang Liu, Chen Liang, Hany Hassan Awadalla

Green & Sustainable NLP

Challenge:	Mixture-of-Experts models allow for efficient scaling of large language models . fewer experts reduce computational costs, while more experts improve performance .
Approach:	They propose to activate only a subset of experts during training and inference . they propose compressed experts that preserve the most important experts .
Outcome:	The proposed approach preserves the most important experts while replacing other auxiliary activated experts with compressed experts.

CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite (2024.lrec-main)

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Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Wang Runze, Liyi Chen, Renjun Hu, Zengming Zhang, Feijun Jiang, Wai Lam

GoViG: Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation Instruction Generation via Multimodal Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Recent advances in conversational IR systems have seen a resurgent interest in conversation . generative query rewrite generates reconstructed query based on the conversation history .
Approach:	They propose to use unlabeled data to make further improvements using contrastive co-training paradigm.
Outcome:	The proposed model is robust to noise and language style shift under few-shot and zero-shot scenarios.

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Fengyi Wu, Yifei Dong, Yilong Dai, Guangyu Chen, Qifeng Wu, Huiting Huang, Hang Wang, Qi Dai, Alexander G Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng

Multimodality

Challenge:	Current methods for instruction generation depend on privileged inputs such as semantic maps, landmark annotations, and panoramic views.
Approach:	They propose a task that generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual observations.
Outcome:	The proposed task generates coherent navigation instructions from egocentric visual data . the proposed task improves performance over state-of-the-art methods in BLEU-4 and CIDEr scores .

An Effective Post-training Embedding Binarization Approach for Fast Online Top-K Passage Matching (2022.aacl-short)

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Yankai Chen, Yifei Zhang, Huifeng Guo, Ruiming Tang, Irwin King