Papers by Yifu Chen
Dual-Axis Generative Reward Model Toward Semantic and Turn-taking Robustness in Interactive Spoken Dialogue Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Zhengqing Liu, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Ziqing Wang, Yangzhuo Li, Tianle Liang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has improved text- and vision-language models, but its application in SDMs is hindered. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-axis Generative Reward Model that provides semantic quality and interaction timing for SDMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on interaction-quality assessment across a wide spectrum of datasets. |
WavRAG: Audio-Integrated Retrieval Augmented Generation for Spoken Dialogue Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG frameworks rely on Automatic Speech Recognition to process speech input, which discards crucial audio information and increases computational overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval augmented generation framework with native, end-to-end audio support that integrates audio and text into a unified knowledge representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can perform 10x faster than current pipelines while delivering 10x acceleration. |
SDiaReward: Modeling and Benchmarking Spoken Dialogue Rewards with Modality and Colloquialness (2026.acl-long)
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Jingyu Lu, Yuhan Wang, Fan Zhuo, Xize Cheng, Changhao Pan, Xueyi Pu, Yifu Chen, Chenyuhao Wen, Tianle Liang, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | SDiaReward is an end-to-end spoken dialogue system that integrates paralinguistic nuances and spontaneous nature of human conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end multi-turn reward model trained on SDiaReward-Dataset . it is a collection of episode-level preference pairs targeting modality and colloquiality gaps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms general-purpose audio LLMs in episode-level evaluation. |
DB-LLM: Accurate Dual-Binarization for Efficient LLMs (2024.findings-acl)
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Hong Chen, Chengtao Lv, Liang Ding, Haotong Qin, Xiabin Zhou, Yifu Ding, Xuebo Liu, Min Zhang, Jinyang Guo, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for ultra-low bit quantization cause severe accuracy drops . a novel Dual-Binarization method is proposed for efficient Large Language Models . |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Binarization method that takes 2-bit-width and binarization into account . they propose DB-LLM, which uses a 2-bit binarized weighted model to represent weights efficiently . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the current State-of-the-Art in ultra-low bit quantization and achieves 20% reduction in computational consumption compared to the SOTA method under the same bit-width. |
DuReader-Retrieval: A Large-scale Chinese Benchmark for Passage Retrieval from Web Search Engine (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for non-English passage retrieval are lacking in quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese dataset for passage retrieval . they reduce false negatives by manually annotating results pooled from multiple retrievers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset reduces false negatives in development and testing sets and removes similar training queries. |
Dual-Reasoner: Bridging Interleaved Atomicity and Streaming Latency via Thinking-while-Talking (2026.findings-acl)
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Yangzhuo Li, Shengpeng Ji, Yifu Chen, Tianle Liang, Haoyu Yang, null Junboli, Jun Fang, Lin Li, Qingyang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing methods to integrate Chain-of-Thought into spoken dialogue models incur prohibitive latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a Streaming Masking Mechanism to ensure uninterrupted audio streaming . they use a quadruple-constraint system to reconstruct logical atomicity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that Dual-Reasoner improves speech generation performance with low latency. |
Guiding Variational Response Generator to Exploit Persona (2020.acl-main)
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Bowen Wu, MengYuan Li, Zongsheng Wang, Yifu Chen, Derek F. Wong, Qihang Feng, Junhong Huang, Baoxun Wang
| Challenge: | Neural Response Generators (NRGs) use persona information of users to perform personalized conversations . current studies focus on incorporating explicit meta-data of user profiles or character descriptions to generate persona-aware responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use persona information of users in Neural Response Generators to perform personalized conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves persona-aware response generation and the metrics are reasonable to evaluate them. |
EEE-QA: Exploring Effective and Efficient Question-Answer Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to question answering rely on pre-trained language models like RoBERTa. |
| Approach: | They propose a pooling approach that embeds all answer candidates with the question . they also propose enabling cross-reference between answer choices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve throughput and memory efficiency with little sacrifice in performance. |
VoxMind: An End-to-End Agentic Spoken Dialogue System (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Liang, Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Yijun Chen, Zhiyang Jia, Jingyu Lu, Fan Zhuo, Xueyi Pu, Yangzhuo Li, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing research on end-to-end spoken dialogue models has focused on core perception and generation, with limited exploration of tool-augmented extensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to equip end-to-end spoken dialogue models with comprehensive agentic abilities by leveraging a 470-hour AgentChat dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro on spoken agent tasks while maintaining general conversational quality. |
RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haonan Bian, Zhiyuan Yao, Sen Hu, Zishan Xu, Shaolei Zhang, Yifu Guo, Ziliang Yang, Xueran Han, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks simulate the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
InteractSpeech: A Speech Dialogue Interaction Corpus for Spoken Dialogue Model (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Spoken Dialogue models face challenges in handling nuanced interactional phenomena, such as interruptions and backchannels. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a 150-hour English speech interaction dialogue dataset to empower spoken dialogue models with nuanced real-time interaction capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset trains and evaluates a speech understanding model that classifies key interactional events directly from audio. |
War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances LLM reasoning without finetuning by using test-time scaling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models in both budget and model size. |
WavAlign: Enhancing Intelligence and Expressiveness in Spoken Dialogue Models via Adaptive Hybrid Post-Training (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifu Chen, Shengpeng Ji, Qian Chen, Tianle Liang, Yangzhuo Li, Ziqing Wang, Wen Wang, Jingyu Lu, Haoxiao Wang, Xueyi Pu, Fan Zhuo, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | End-to-end spoken dialogue models have higher potential ceiling in expressiveness and perceptual ability than cascaded systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a modality-aware adaptive post-training recipe that constrains preference updates to the semantic channel and improves acoustic behavior via explicit anchoring. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves speech quality and expressiveness across spoken dialogue benchmarks and architectures. |