Papers by Yikun Zhang
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. |
AgentCPM-GUI: Building Mobile-Use Agents with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Zhong Zhang, Yaxi Lu, Yikun Fu, Yupeng Huo, Shenzhi Yang, Yesai Wu, Han Si, Xin Cong, Haotian Chen, Yankai Lin, Xie Xie, Wei Zhou, Wang Xu, Zhou Su, Zhongwu Zhai, Xiaoming Liu, null Meiyudong, Jianming Xu, Hongyan Tian, Chongyi Wang, Chi Chen, Yuan Yao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large language model agents have enabled GUI-based automation, but their deployment is limited by noisy data, poor generalization, and lack of support for non-English GUIs. |
| Approach: | They propose an 8B-parameter GUI agent built for robust and efficient on-device GUI interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent achieves promising performance on five public benchmarks and proposed Chinese benchmark CAGUI. |
Faithfully Explainable Recommendation via Neural Logic Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for explainable recommendation have neglected faithfulness of KG reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose to draw on interpretable logical rules to guide path-reasoning process for explanation generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method delivers high-quality recommendations and ascertains the faithfulness of the derived explanation. |
Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment strategies that focus on diverse and high-quality data often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce the sample uncertainty into the alignment of different task scenarios by a simple fashion by setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning on high-entropy tasks and complex low-entropic tasks. |
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. |
Think-Search-Patch: A Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Framework for Repository-Level Code Repair (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Bojian Xiong, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Shaowei Zhang, Pengyun Zhu, Yan Liu, Yongqi Leng, Ling Shi, Meizhi Zhong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from multiple-file coding scenarios with strong inter-file dependencies . experimental results show that large language models exhibit inadequate performance in multi-file scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented reasoning framework for repository-level code repair . they use a dataset to generate standardized patches based on the key snippets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval accuracy and repair success on SWE-bench Lite . it surpasses models with larger size in managing extensive code contexts and fixing bugs spanning across multiple files. |
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. |
BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Ken Gu, Ruoxi Shang, Ruien Jiang, Keying Kuang, Richard-John Lin, Donghe Lyu, Yue Mao, Youran Pan, Teng Wu, Jiaqian Yu, Yikun Zhang, Tianmai Zhang, Lanyi Zhu, Mike Merrill, Jeffrey Heer, Tim Althoff
| Challenge: | Language model-based agents can be used to conduct and support data-driven science, but evaluating them on open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. |
| Outcome: | BLADE evaluates agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions using data from 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature. |
DecEx-RAG: Boosting Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Decision and Execution Optimization via Process Supervision (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yongqi Leng, Yikun Lei, Xikai Liu, Meizhi Zhong, Bojian Xiong, Yurong Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) have shown strong performance, but this approach still suffers from inefficient exploration, sparse reward signals, and ambiguous global reward feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that models RAG as a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and introduces an efficient pruning strategy to optimize data expansion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods and achieves an average performance improvement of 6.2% across six datasets. |
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. |
Understanding the RoPE Extensions of Long-Context LLMs: An Attention Perspective (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Enabling LLMs to handle lengthy context is currently a research hotspot . a notable challenge limiting further customization is the inability of LLM to utilize context beyond pretrained length due to the inherent flaw of rotary position embedding (RoPE). |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the RoPE from an attention perspective and on two benchmarking tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of the RoPE improves extrapolation and retrieval errors. |
ZigZagKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression for Long-context Modeling based on Layer Uncertainty (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference of Large Language models (LLMs) are limited in their ability to retain key tokens as input length increases. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages layer uncertainty to allocate budget size for each layer to reduce memory usage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces memory usage of the KV caches to only 20% when compared to full KV inference while achieving nearly lossless performance. |
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 . |