Papers by Ying Nian Wu
Simple Role Assignment is Extraordinarily Effective for Safety Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhou Ziheng, Jiakun Ding, Zhaowei Zhang, Ruosen Gao, Ying Nian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Yipeng Kang, Fangwei Zhong, Junqi Wang
| Challenge: | a new study proposes a role-conditioned pipeline for value alignment . principles alone are incomplete, and they provide little guidance on when and how a value applies in context. |
| Approach: | They propose a role-conditioned pipeline with role-based critics and a model-free approach that is based on role conditioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms principle-based, Chain-of-Thought and other benchmarks. |
On the Analysis and Distillation of Emergent Outlier Properties in Pre-trained Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that a small subset of dimensions within language Transformers’ representation spaces emerge as "outliers" during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prioritizes critical outlier dimensions in distillation using a weighted MSE loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art distillation methods and generalizes well across Encoder-only BERT, Decoder-only GPT-2, and Encodeer-Decoder T5 architectures. |
SCRIPT: Self-Critic PreTraining of Transformers (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for representation learning of text are masked language modeling (MLM) a language model is trained to learn universal contextual embeddings, which are fine-tuned on a down-stream task. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-critic pretraining transformer for representation learning of text . they demonstrate improved sample-efficiency and improved performance over strong baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves sample-efficiency and performance over strong baselines. |
SocAoG: Incremental Graph Parsing for Social Relation Inference in Dialogues (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on identifying entities' relations from the semantics of dialogues-they utilize either the attention mechanism or a refined token graph to locate informative words. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequential structure prediction task to incrementally parse SocAoG for dynamic inference upon any incoming utterance. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model infers social relations more accurately than the state-of-the-art methods. |
Training LLMs for Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Elevates Test-Time Scalability (2026.acl-long)
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Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin, Eric Hanchen Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Yeyun Gong, Weizhu Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, but their strictly sequential nature constrains test-time scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework to enhance LLMs' DAC-style reasoning capacity by decomposing a problem into subproblems and solving them sequentially. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses CoT by 8.6% and 6.3% on competition-level benchmarks and is available at the [github.com/MasterVito/DAC-RL]. |
Value-Spectrum: Quantifying Preferences of Vision-Language Models via Value Decomposition in Social Media Contexts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have broadened the scope of multimodal applications, but evaluations often neglect abstract dimensions such as personality traits and human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a Visual Question Answering (VQA) benchmark based on Schwartz’s value dimensions that capture core human values guiding people’s preferences and actions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate visual question answering (VQA) tasks and to simulate diverse personas. |
Generative Text Modeling through Short Run Inference (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Latent variable models for text capture global semantic and syntactic features when trained correctly. |
| Approach: | They propose a short run dynamics for inference that initializes from the prior distribution of the latent variable and runs a small number of Langevin dynamics steps guided by its posterior distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to generate coherent sentences with smooth transition and shows no sign of posterior collapse. |
Explore the Reasoning Capability of LLMs in the Chess Testbed (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that large language models struggle with long-term, complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate annotated strategy and tactic into large language models to improve reasoning capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than GPT, Claude, and Gemini models . it integrates annotated strategy and tactic into the model . |
Dynamic Generation of Multi LLM Agents Communication Topologies with Graph Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Levina Li, Frank Wan, Xiao Liang, Sophia Yin, Yuchen Wu, Xinfeng Li, Yizhou Sun, Wei Wang, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks rely on static or rule-based topologies that fail to adapt to task requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative framework that generates highly task-adaptive topologies . they validated the framework on multiple benchmarks and validated it on multiple platforms . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks in task-adaptive communication topologies. |
Mitigating Over-Refusal in Aligned Large Language Models via Inference-Time Activation Energy (2026.acl-long)
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Eric Hanchen Jiang, Weixuan Ou, Run Liu, Shengyuan Pang, Guancheng Wan, Ranjie Duan, Wei Dong, Kai-Wei Chang, XiaoFeng Wang, Ying Nian Wu, Xinfeng Li
| Challenge: | Existing safety alignment techniques prioritize mitigating harmful responses at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly refuse benign requests. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning free framework to improve safety and reduce false refusals by dynamic, inference-time intervention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework raises compliance on the ORB-H benchmark from 57.3% to 82.6% while maintaining the baseline safety performance. |
Why Are We Moral? An LLM-based Agent Simulation Approach to the Study of Moral Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Zhou Ziheng, Huacong Tang, Mingjie Bi, Wanying He, Fang Sun, Yizhou Sun, Ying Nian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Yipeng Kang, Fangwei Zhong
| Challenge: | Existing models of moral evolution must abstract away cognitive processes . et al. (2017): evolution of morality presents a puzzle: natural selection favors selfish . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent simulation framework that manipulates cognitive factors to understand moral evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits cognitive realism to explore moral evolution in a hunter-gatherer society. |
Robust Transfer Learning with Pretrained Language Models through Adapters (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to transfer learning with pretrained transformer-based language models are not robust and can be adversarial. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective adapter-based approach to fine-tune language models on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves stability and adversarial robustness in transfer learning to various downstream tasks. |
Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions (2026.acl-long)
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Boyan Duan, Xiao Liang, Shuai Lu, Yaoxiang Wang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Mao Yang, Weizhu Chen, Yeyun Gong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for geometry theorem proving in Euclidean geometry are challenging and require a neural network to perform. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for adding auxiliary points in geometry that runs on CPUs without relying on neural network-based inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves silver-medal-level human performance on IMO-30 benchmark. |