Papers by Yilun Zhou
Direct Judgement Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing judge models are largely trained with supervised finetuning on small data scales to perform limited types of evaluation tasks, limiting generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose to train judge models at large data scales with direct preference optimization . they use four training tasks to form three types of preference pairs targeting different aspects of evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o and other similar models on 13 benchmarks. |
J4R: Learning to Judge with Equivalent Initial State Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for reasoning intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that trains judges to be robust to positional biases . they also propose a benchmark that evaluates judges in diverse reasoning settings . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms GPT-4o and the next best small judge by 6.7% and 9% on ReasoningJudgeBench and JudgeBench. |
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)
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Simeng Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alexander Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabó, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
The Solvability of Interpretability Evaluation Metrics (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Feature attribution methods are often evaluated on metrics such as comprehensiveness and sufficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use beam search to define problem of optimizing an explanation for a metric . they also propose to evaluate the metric on one or more metrics to determine its solvability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed explainer can solve the problem of optimizing an explanation for a metric by beam search. |
P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Simeng Han, Aaron Yu, Rui Shen, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, Yujie Qiao, Yilun Zhao, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning by 10% or more. |
MIMIR: A Customizable Agent Tuning Platform for Enhanced Scientific Applications (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Xiangru Tang, Chunyuan Deng, Hanminwang Hanminwang, Haoran Wang, Yilun Zhao, Wenqi Shi, Yi Fung, Wangchunshu Zhou, Jiannan Cao, Heng Ji, Arman Cohan, Mark Gerstein
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents capable of planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform that leverages large language models to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuneing smaller, specialized models. |
| Outcome: | MIMIR enables large models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2. |
All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other Tokens (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) perform well on a multitude of computational tasks, yet their inner workings remain unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose two techniques to inhibit input-specific token computations in initial layers . they propose a transformer that allows for any token to immediately access all preceding tokens . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms can perform on a variety of mental math tasks with high accuracy and transfer across models. |
WebUIBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in WebUI-to-Code (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models focus on webpage generation outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view evaluation framework to evaluate MLLMs in four key areas: WebUI Perception, HTML Programming, WebUI-HTML Understanding, and WebUI to code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates MLLMs in four key areas: WebUI Perception, HTML Programming, WebUI-HTML Understanding, and WebUI to code. |
GTA: Generating Long-horizon Tasks for Web Agents at Scale (2026.acl-long)
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Tenghao Huang, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Yilun Zhou, Muhao Chen, Jonathan May, Chien-Sheng Wu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks provide only coarse start–goal annotations without intermediate trajectories . Existing frameworks provide no supervision over the agent's latent decision process . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates crawling, retrieval-based seeding, in-context generation and automated quality control to produce realistic tasks paired with executable trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples crawling from generation for greater efficiency and ensures dense supervision through deterministic replays and systematic validation. |
ExSum: From Local Explanations to Model Understanding (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Interpretability methods are developed to understand the working mechanisms of black-box models. |
| Approach: | They propose a mathematical framework for quantifying model understanding with an explanation summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework highlights limitations in the current practice and reveals easily overlooked properties of the model. |
On Evaluating the Integration of Reasoning and Action in LLM Agents with Database Question Answering (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | a new study evaluates how Large Language Models interact with a SQL interpreter . the model is limited in context and is stochastic, making it less suited for tasks requiring high precision and extensive computations. |
| Approach: | They propose and evaluate two interaction strategies to evaluate how LLMs interact with a SQL interpreter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy and reliability of the evaluations. |
Struc-Bench: Are Large Language Models Good at Generating Complex Structured Tabular Data? (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced capabilities but produce complex structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware fine-tuning method to bolster LLMs' performance by crafting format-specific instructions from the intended outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms LLMs on all three formats and spans text tables, HTML, and LaTeX formats. |
CHAMP: A Competition-level Dataset for Fine-Grained Analyses of LLMs’ Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models have shown indications of mathematical reasoning ability on competition-level problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset to enable such analyses using large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better with concepts and hints than with the best model, but it is difficult to verify. |
Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (LMs)2 have been adopted for semantic parsing due to their promising performance and straightforward architectures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use token preprocessing to preserve semantic boundaries of tokens produced by LM tokenizers and special tokens to mark the boundaries of aligned components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques improve the performance of pre-trained language models on two text-to-SQL semantic parsing datasets. |