Papers by Yin Cai
Data Manipulation: Towards Effective Instance Learning for Neural Dialogue Generation via Learning to Augment and Reweight (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Current state-of-the-art neural dialogue models learn from human conversations . however, due to the open-ended nature of human conversations, the quality of training data varies . |
| Approach: | They propose a data manipulation framework to augment and highlight effective training samples . they also propose to increase its manipulation skills through gradient descent with validation samples a reshaping framework to proactively restructure the data distribution towards reliable samples is also proposed . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of open-domain neural dialogue models with respect to evaluation metrics and human judgments. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
Towards General Agentic Intelligence via Environment Scaling (2026.findings-acl)
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Runnan Fang, Shihao Cai, Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Guangyu Li, Wenbiao Yin, Xinyu Wang, Xiaobin Wang, Liangcai Su, Zhen Zhang, Shibin Wu, Zhengwei Tao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Ningyu Zhang, Fei Huang, Wentao Zhang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Diverse real-world APIs require precise, robust function-calling intelligence, which needs agents to develop these capabilities through interaction in varied environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that scales up environments to enable agentic intelligence . they use a two-phase agent fine-tuning strategy to first endow agents with basic agentic capabilities, then specializing them for domain-specific contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on -bench, -Bench, and ACEBench show that the model significantly enhances the models’ function-calling capability. |
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hengxing Cai, Xiaochen Cai, Junhan Chang, Sihang Li, Lin Yao, Wang Changxin, Zhifeng Gao, Hongshuai Wang, Li Yongge, Mujie Lin, Shuwen Yang, Jiankun Wang, Mingjun Xu, Jin Huang, Xi Fang, Jiaxi Zhuang, Yuqi Yin, Yaqi Li, Changhong Chen, Zheng Cheng, Zifeng Zhao, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Sense-Aware Neural Models for Pun Location in Texts (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Puns where the two meanings share the same pronunciation are known as homographic puns. |
| Approach: | They propose a sense-aware neural model to address the task of pun location . they first obtain several WSD results for the text and then leverage a bidirectional LSTM network to model each word senses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a SemEval 2017 benchmark dataset showing that it can predict homographic puns. |
PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize RAG generators fail to align with RAG requirements thoroughly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for optimizing the RAG generator from multiple preference perspectives to align with RAG requirements comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of RAG generators by incorporating retrieved documents into the prompt. |
AdaSwitch: Adaptive Switching between Small and Large Agents for Effective Cloud-Local Collaborative Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Hao Sun, Jiayi Wu, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Yue Feng, Bo Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yan Zhang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have been remarkable . users face a choice between using cloud-based LLMs for generation quality or local-based ones for lower computational cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM utilization paradigm that facilitates collaborative operation . they evaluate AdaSwitch across 7 benchmarks and compare it to other LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance of local and cloud agents across 7 benchmarks . it achieves competitive results compared to the cloud agent while utilizing less computational overhead. |
Adaptive Parameterization for Neural Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of open-domain dialogue generate responses based on sequence-to-sequence paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Neural Dialogue generation model which manages various conversations with conversation-specific parameterization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on a large-scale conversational dataset. |
Towards Verifiable Text Generation with Evolving Memory and Self-Reflection (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually incorrect information, also known as hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for verifiable text generation with evolving memory and self-reflection that incorporates long-term memory to retain documents and recent documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on five datasets across three knowledge-intensive tasks. |
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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Junhao Ruan, Abudukeyumu Abudula, Bei Li, Yongjing Yin, Xinyu Liu, Kechen Jiao, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power. |
BAPO: Boundary-Aware Policy Optimization for Reliable Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiyu Liu, Yongjing Yin, Jianhao Yan, Yunbo Tang, Qinggang Zhang, Bei Li, Xin Chen, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing RL-based agentic search models fail to recognize reasoning boundaries and rarely admit "I DON'T KNOW" lack of reliability leads to plausible but unreliable answers, introducing significant risks . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to cultivate reliable boundary awareness without compromising accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves the reliability of agentic search models. |
MatchTIR: Fine-Grained Supervision for Tool-Integrated Reasoning via Bipartite Matching (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods rely on outcome- or trajectory-level rewards, assigning uniform advantages to all steps within a trajectory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces fine-grained supervision via bipartite matching-based turn-level reward assignment and dual-level advantage estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses the majority of 8B competitors on three benchmarks. |
Uplift-RAG: Uplift-Driven Knowledge Preference Alignment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to estimate document utility rely on downstream generation performance, which conflates the influence of external documents with the intrinsic knowledge of the LLM. |
| Approach: | They propose an uplift-based definition of document utility that quantifies each document’s marginal benefit over the LLM’s internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of the LLM by incorporating external retrieved documents into the model. |
CTR-Guided Generative Query Suggestion in Conversational Search (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Erxue Min, Hsiu-Yuan Huang, Xihong Yang, Min Yang, Xin Jia, Yunfang Wu, Hengyi Cai, Junfeng Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Generating effective query suggestions requires aligning model outputs with user click preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that leverages click modeling to denoise implicit feedback and enables reliable preference optimization for improving real-world user engagement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines in CTR, relevance, diversity and diversity. |
PILE: Pairwise Iterative Logits Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Labeled Distillation (2022.emnlp-industry)
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Lianshang Cai, Linhao Zhang, Dehong Ma, Jun Fan, Daiting Shi, Yi Wu, Zhicong Cheng, Simiu Gu, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have been a key part of ranking systems . knowledge distillation is widely used to maintain high performance while keeping efficient computations. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to combine knowledge from multi-teachers and label information to achieve competitive performance in offline and online experiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has been deployed in a real-world commercial search system. |
MIRAGE: Exploring How Large Language Models Perform in Complex Social Interactive Environments (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in environmental perception, reasoning-based decision-making, and simulating complex human behaviors, particularly in interactive role-playing contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to assess LLMs' proficiency in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games using eight intricately crafted scripts. |
| Outcome: | The framework evaluates LLMs' performance in portraying advanced human behaviors through murder mystery games. |