Papers by Yilin Niu
ACR: Adaptive Context Refactoring via Context Refactoring Operators for Multi-Turn Dialogue (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiawei Shen, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Qingyu Niu, Guoqing Ma, Jingjiang Liu, Yidan Liang, Yilin Wang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multi-turn dialogues lack contextual consistency and dependencies, and models struggle to maintain factual faithfulness as interaction turns increase. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive context refactoring framework that monitors and reshapes the interaction history to mitigate contextual inertia and state drift. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines while reducing token consumption. |
Data Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Erle Zhu, Dazhi Jiang, Yuan Wang, Xujun Li, Jiale Cheng, Yuxian Gu, Yilin Niu, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Hongning Wang
| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods for RLVR are heuristic-based, lacking theoretical guarantees and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-policy influence estimation method that approximates data influence using offline trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational cost of policy rollouts and improves storage and computation efficiency. |
REPT: Bridging Language Models and Machine Reading Comprehension via Retrieval-Based Pre-training (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved great success on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) however, the poor support in evidence extraction hinders them from further advancing MRC. |
| Approach: | They propose a REtrieval-based pre-training approach that strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training by inherited downstream MRC tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach strengthens evidence extraction during pre-training, which is further inherited by downstream tasks. |
A Self-Training Method for Machine Reading Comprehension with Soft Evidence Extraction (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension lack evidence labels for training models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which supervises the evidence extractor with auto-generated evidence labels in an iterative process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on three MRC tasks on seven datasets. |
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
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Jiajie Zhang, Zhongni Hou, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Zhenyu Hou, Yilin Niu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | In recent years, significant advancements have been achieved in the development of long-context large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves models’ long-context performance and enhances their ability to follow short instructions. |
A Semantic-based Method for Unsupervised Commonsense Question Answering (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to score candidates without labeled task data are difficult to use . e.g., pre-trained language models can be easily affected by irrelevant factors . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates plausible answers with generative models and uses them to select the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the best results in unsupervised situations. |
IF-CRITIC: Towards a Fine-Grained LLM Critic for Instruction-Following Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Bosi Wen, Yilin Niu, Cunxiang Wang, Pei Ke, Xiaoying Ling, Ying Zhang, Aohan Zeng, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation models for instruction-following have many shortcomings, such as substantial costs and unreliable assessments. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM critic for fine-grained instruction-following evaluation using a checklist generator and a constraint-level preference optimization method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model beats strong LLM-as-a-Judge baselines in evaluations under lower computational overhead compared to baselines. |
IF-RewardBench: Benchmarking Judge Models for Instruction-Following Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for instruction-following lack data coverage and oversimplified pairwise evaluation paradigms that misalign with model optimization scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction-following that covers diverse instruction and constraint types and a preference graph for each instruction. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on IF-RewardBench show that the proposed benchmark achieves a stronger positive correlation with downstream task performance compared to existing benchmarks. |
RSDA: Restoring Stale Data Affinity via Dynamic Renovation Strategy for Mitigating Data Scarcity (2026.acl-long)
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Yidan Liang, Jia Zhu, Weijie Shi, Hanghui Guo, Yue Cui, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Jingjiang Liu, Qingyu Niu, Yilin Wang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | High-quality data is the cornerstone of advancing large language models, but the supply of premium data is nearing depletion, while vast stale corpora remain underutilized. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to restore stale data affinity by quantifying the latent value of samples and employing a dynamic renovation strategy selection mechanism to determine the optimal component-level strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance improvements using less than 10% of the data volume, underscoring that the latent potential of stale corpora remains largely untapped. |
KCVR: Knowledge-Centric Video Reconstruction for Structured Pedagogical Summarization via Dynamic Graph Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingjiang Liu, Jia Zhu, Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Yue Cui, Xiaokang Jin, Yilin Wang, Qingyu Niu, Jiawei Shen, Guoqing Ma, Yidan Liang, Shimin Di, Jiajie Xu
| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods compress content for gist browsing, but they break prerequisite logic in instructional videos. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples epistemic planning from content generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong end-to-end baselines on Knowledge Progression Consistency and Learning Objective Coverage. |
Bridging the Gap between Synthetic and Natural Questions via Sentence Decomposition for Semantic Parsing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to train a parser to perform zero-shot learning are limited by the lack of training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a decomposition-based method to unify the sentence structures of questions . their method can generalize to natural questions with novel text expressions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on synthetic data and on complex web questions with novel expressions. |