Papers by Yikun Li
MARS2: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning are decoupled from structured search due to limited trajectory diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified RL framework that integrates multiple agents within a shared tree-structured search environment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MARS2 improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings. |
VideoPro: Adaptive Program Reasoning for Long Video Understanding (2026.acl-long)
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Chenglin Li, Feng Han, Yikun Wang, Ruilin Li, Shuai Dong, Haowen Hou, Haitao Li, Qianglong Chen, Feng Tao, Jingqi Tong, Yin Zhang, Jiaqi Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding long videos are limited due to the sparsity of visual evidence relevant to a given query. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables VideoLLMs to reason over long videos and refine their predictions through executable programs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods across long-video understanding benchmarks. |
Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation (2024.acl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. Obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a task using ranking metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods. |
SeCuRepair: Semantics-Aligned, Curriculum-Driven, and Reasoning-Enhanced Vulnerability Repair Framework (2026.acl-long)
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Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Jinfeng Jiang, Xin Zhou, Haoye Tian, Mingzhe Du, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Yikun Li, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating vulnerability repair suffer from syntactic overfitting . nvd published 49,230 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) records in 2025 alone . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-aware reward framework that optimizes for code semantic equivalence rather than lexical mimicry. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art frameworks on repository-level splits . it incorporates expert-aligned reasoning mechanism that grounds patch generation in structured diagnosis. |
Beyond Self-Report: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap in Critical Thinking Assessment via Interpretable Multi-Agent System (2026.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Ye He, Daniel Zhang-Li, Shangqing Tu, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Yikun Jiang, Jiaxin Yuan, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Accurate assessment of critical thinking is limited by the Intention Behavior Gap in psychology . evaluators that measure self-reported competence are limited by multiagent architectures . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes cognitive assessment into an interpretable multi-agent workflow with Assessment Chain-of-Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns better with human expert ratings than gold-standard inventories on large-scale simulations and human participants. |
Can Graph Neural Networks Learn Language with Extremely Weak Text Supervision? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) with CLIP pipeline are difficult because of the scarcity of labeled data and text supervision, different levels of downstream tasks, and conceptual gaps between domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal prompt learning paradigm to adapt pre-trained GNNs to downstream tasks with weak text supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize graphs to unseen classes with weak text supervision. |
PEIT: Bridging the Modality Gap with Pre-trained Models for End-to-End Image Translation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Image translation is a task that translates an image containing text in the source language to the target language. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end image translation framework that bridges the modality gap between visual inputs and textual inputs/outputs of machine translation (MT). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on a large-scale image translation corpus . it significantly outperformed both cascaded and strong models on the e-commerce domain . |
SecureVibeBench: Benchmarking Secure Vibe Coding of AI Agents via Reconstructing Vulnerability-Introducing Scenarios (2026.acl-long)
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Junkai Chen, Huihui Huang, Yunbo Lyu, Junwen An, Jieke Shi, Chengran Yang, Ting Zhang, Haoye Tian, Yikun Li, Zhenhao Li, Xin Zhou, Xing Hu, David Lo
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to capture scenarios in which vulnerabilities are introduced by humans . we evaluate 5 popular code agents supported by 5 LLMs on SecureVibeBench . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that compares 105 C/C++ secure coding tasks . they use real-world open-source vulnerabilities and a comprehensive evaluation tool . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that code agents struggle to produce correct and secure code . the best performing agent produces merely 23.8% correct and secured solutions . |