Papers by Yikai Zhang
SELFGOAL: Your Language Agents Already Know How to Achieve High-level Goals (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Ruihan Yang, Jiangjie Chen, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Aili Chen, Kyle Richardson, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve the performance of language agents without training are not available. |
| Approach: | They propose an automatic approach to break down high-level goals into tree structure of more practical subgoals during interaction with environments while identifying the most useful subgoal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the performance of language agents across various tasks, including competitive, cooperative, and deferred feedback environments. |
HAUSER: Towards Holistic and Automatic Evaluation of Simile Generation (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Similes are a crucial part of creative writing, but there is still a lack of evaluation metrics for simile generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use similes as a tool to evaluate simile generation metrics . they propose to combine five criteria and automatic metrics for each criterion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics are significantly more correlated with human ratings from each perspective compared with prior automatic metrics. |
MCiteBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Generating Text with Citations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on generating citations for text-only content . experimental results reveal MLLMs struggle to ground outputs reliably when handling multimodal input . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate text with citations in multimodal contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the ability of MLLMs to generate text with citations in multimodal contexts. |
DEEPER Insight into Your User: Directed Persona Refinement for Dynamic Persona Modeling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Aili Chen, Chengyu Du, Jiangjie Chen, Jinghan Xu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Zulong Chen, Liangyue Li, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating personas from static historical data fail to capture dynamic behaviors and evolving preferences in real-world interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that iteratively updates personas using streaming user behavior data to continually enhance their quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach delivers 32.2% reduction in user behavior prediction error over four update rounds, outperforming the best baseline by 22.92%. |
Can LLMs Learn to Map the World from Local Descriptions? (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in tasks such as code generation and mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether large language models can construct coherent global spatial cognition by integrating fragmented relational descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can generalize to unseen spatial relationships and exhibit latent representations aligned with real-world spatial distributions. |
Revealing the Barriers of Language Agents in Planning (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies show language agents lack human-level planning abilities . limitations and mechanisms to address them remain insufficiently understood . |
| Approach: | They apply a feature attribution study to identify key factors hindering agent planning . they identify the limited role of constraints and diminishing influence of questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 15.6% on a real-world planning benchmark. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that human and Large Language Model preferences are important for model fine-tuning and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They dissect the preferences of human and 32 different Large Language Models to understand their quantitative composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with 32 different large language models using real-world user-model conversations. |
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning. |
Self-Paced Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that the training of neural machine translation (NMT) rely on the quality of artificial schedule drawn up with the handcrafted features, e.g. sentence length or word rarity. |
| Approach: | They propose to train NMT model using a self-paced learning approach that allows it to quantify the learning confidence over training examples and flexibly govern its learning via regulating the loss in each iteration step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and those trained with human-designed curricula on translation quality and convergence speed. |
Metaphor Reasoning is Meta-reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Qianyu He, Junting Lu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Xiaojun Meng, Jiansheng Wei, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing work on metaphor reasoning's impact on reasoning abilities is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a system for synthesizing metaphorical riddles that satisfy five quality dimensions: diverse, balanced, reasoning-oriented, challenging, and verifiable. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves reasoning abilities across six domains using only thousands of metaphorical riddles. |
ChatKBQA: A Generate-then-Retrieve Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering with Fine-tuned Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Haoran Luo, Haihong E, Zichen Tang, Shiyao Peng, Yikai Guo, Wentai Zhang, Chenghao Ma, Guanting Dong, Meina Song, Wei Lin, Yifan Zhu, Anh Tuan Luu
| Challenge: | Existing KBQA methods address inefficient knowledge retrieval and semantic parsing errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a generatethen-retrieve KBQA framework that generates logical form and replaces entities and relations with an unsupervised retrieval method to improve both generation and retrieval more directly. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that ChatKBQA achieves new state-of-the-art performance on standard KBQA datasets, WebQSP, and CWQ. |
TimeArena: Shaping Efficient Multitasking Language Agents in a Time-Aware Simulation (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | e.g., GPT-4 still lag behind humans in effective multitasking, a study finds . current textual simulations do not adequately address the notion of time . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual simulated environment that incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates complex temporal dynamics and constraints that better reflect real-life planning scenarios. |
Light Up the Shadows: Enhance Long-Tailed Entity Grounding with Concept-Guided Vision-Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) are knowledge graphs that integrate and align information from diverse modalities (e.g., text and images). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates image-text pairs of long-tailed entities and a concept guidance module that offers explainability and enables human verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of recognizing long-tailed image-text pairs compared to baselines and also offers flexibility and explainability. |