Papers by Yining Chen
A Survey of Large Language Models in Psychotherapy: Current Landscape and Future Directions (2025.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Yining Hua, Zimu Wang, Tao Shen, Beibei Yu, Lilin Wang, Wei Wang, John Torous, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can handle extensive context and multi-turn reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy dividing psychotherapy into stages of assessment, diagnosis, and treatment to examine LLM advancements and challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy reveals imbalances in current research, such as a focus on common disorders, linguistic biases, fragmented methods, and limited theoretical integration. |
Detecting Conversational Mental Manipulation with Intent-Aware Prompting (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect mental manipulations are limited due to complexity of detecting subtle, covert tactics in conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to detect mental manipulations using large language models using intent-aware prompting by capturing the intents of participants. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly reduces false negatives, helping detect more instances of mental manipulation with minimal misjudgment of positive cases. |
Stylized Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation via Disentangled Template Rewriting (2022.naacl-main)
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Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Yujing Wang, Jian Miao, Xiubo Geng, Yining Chen, Fei Xu, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue generation models only produce pedantic responses, which lacks emotion and attraction compared with the responses with polite style, positive and negative sentiments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which generates responses via combing disentangled style templates and content templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on evaluation metrics compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
Biology-Instructions: A Dataset and Benchmark for Multi-Omics Sequence Understanding Capability of Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haonan He, Yuchen Ren, Yining Tang, Ziyang Xu, Junxian Li, Minghao Yang, Di Zhang, Yuan Dong, Tao Chen, Shufei Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Nanqing Dong, Wanli Ouyang, Dongzhan Zhou, Peng Ye
| Challenge: | Biology-Instructions is the first large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset for multi-omics biological sequences . they propose 'chatMultiOmics' to overcome limitations of current LLMs on multi-ome tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset bridges LLMs and complex biological sequence-related tasks while maintaining conversational fluency. |
GuideTree: Guideline-Induced Review Trees for Long Medical Records (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Medical record reviewers must produce consistent, traceable, guideline-compliant outcomes . longcontext inference is expensive and often degrades as inputs grow . |
| Approach: | a new method compiles textual guidelines into a fixed review tree . a cost-aware split-and-prune search is used to update the tree offline . the algorithm produces consistent, traceable, guideline-compliant outcomes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms the strongest non-expert baselines by 84.5–92.8 Macro-F1 . it reduces average I/O volume to 74K input+output characters and average latency to 22s . |
LoRA-PAR: A Flexible Dual-System LoRA Partitioning Approach to Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale generative models like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-O1 benefit substantially from chain-of-thought reasoning, yet pushing their performance typically requires vast data, large model sizes, and full-parameter fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-system LoRA framework that partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands and adopts a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance knowledge and intuition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework partitions data and parameters by System 1 or System 2 demands, using fewer yet more focused parameters for each task. |
Rethinking RL Evaluation: Can Benchmarks Truly Reveal Failures of RL Methods? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for reinforcement learning for large language models do not accurately assess generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose three core principles for designing more faithful benchmarks: sufficient difficulty, balanced evaluation, and distributional robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks do not accurately assess generalization across distribution shifts, difficulty levels, and counterfactual scenarios. |
RouteMoA: Dynamic Routing without Pre-Inference Boosts Efficient Mixture-of-Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Jize Wang, Han Wu, Zhiyuan You, Yiming Song, Yijun Wang, Zifei Shan, Yining Li, Songyang Zhang, Xinyi Le, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for mixing-of-agents (MoA) lack model selection criteria and struggle with large model pools. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-agents framework with dynamic routing that uses a lightweight scorer to perform initial screening and refines the model scores through self- and cross-assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for large model pools and tasks . it reduces cost by 89.8% and latency by 63.6% in the large-scale model pool. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial question answering datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for long-form question answering in finance to evaluate QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites. |
RORA: Robust Free-Text Rationale Evaluation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics rely on degree to which rationale supports a label, but they fail to evaluate rationales that inadvertently leak the label. |
| Approach: | They propose a RObust free-text RAtionale evaluation against label leakage that quantifies the new information supplied by a rationale to justify the label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation outperforms existing methods in evaluating human-written, synthetic, or model-generated rationales, particularly demonstrating robustness against label leakage. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan
| Challenge: | NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Temporal perception is crucial for Large Language Models to understand the world. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal-relative ability benchmark to evaluate LLMs' temporal perception . they conduct extensive experiments on popular LLM GPT-4 scenarios . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show a significant performance gap between LLMs and humans in temporal-relative capability. |
On the Representation Geometry of LoRA Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning focus on globally shared structure . combining SVD with CUR improves performance of LoRA model merging . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that combines SVD and CUR decomposition to improve LoRA merging performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed procedure improves on vision and language benchmarks. |
Recurrent Neural Networks as Weighted Language Recognizers (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent experiments show that RNNs outperform other methods in assigning high probability to held-out English text. |
| Approach: | They focus on the single-layer, ReLU-activation, rational-weight RNNs with softmax . they show that most problems for such RNN are undecidable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other methods in assigning high probability to held-out English text. |
Analytical Reasoning of Text (2022.findings-naacl)
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Wanjun Zhong, Siyuan Wang, Duyu Tang, Zenan Xu, Daya Guo, Yining Chen, Jiahai Wang, Jian Yin, Ming Zhou, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models with implicit reasoning ability struggle to solve analytical reasoning of text. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to analyze text and use it to perform reasoning over it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms pre-trained models on an analysis of the Law School Admission Test dataset. |
Beyond the Individual: Virtualizing Multi-Disciplinary Reasoning for Clinical Intake via Collaborative Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Huangwei Chen, Wu Li, Junhao Jia, Yining Chen, Xiaotao Pang, Ya-Long Chen, Li Gonghui, Haishuai Wang, Jiajun Bu, Lei Wu
| Challenge: | Initial outpatient consultations are costly and difficult to scale to real-time intake. |
| Approach: | They propose a synchronous virtual MDT framework that formalizes the consultation state using a structured SOAP representation, separating evidence collection from diagnostic reasoning to improve traceability and bias control. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on ClinicalBench and a real-world RAPID-IPN dataset in documentation quality and consultation capability. |
Maria: A Visual Experience Powered Conversational Agent (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on grounding conversational agents on text-only corpora, but they lack the perception ability to our physical world. |
| Approach: | They propose to ground conversational agents on images retrieved from large-scale image indexes . they propose to use visual knowledge to generate informative responses based on the extracted knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art methods on automatic metrics and human evaluation. |
Cracking Factual Knowledge: A Comprehensive Analysis of Degenerate Knowledge Neurons in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are believed to store extensive factual knowledge, yet the mechanisms of knowledge storage in LLMs remain largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose that some multi-layer perceptron neurons can store "knowledge". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can store "knowledge" in multi-layer perceptron neurons, but not redundancy. |
MIG: Automatic Data Selection for Instruction Tuning by Maximizing Information Gain in Semantic Space (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction-tuning datasets prioritize instance quality and use heuristic rules to maintain diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that quantifies diversity based on the distribution of information within a label graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on 5% Tulu3 datasets and base models. |
The Paradox of Outcome Optimization: A Causal Information-Theoretic Bound on Reasoning Shortcuts in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibit a critical failure mode: they exhibit brittle reasoning capabilities on out-of-distribution tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework bridging Structural Causal Models and the Information Bottleneck principle to explain this paradox. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the framework between SCM and IB principles to explain the problem. |
Learning Neural Templates for Recommender Dialogue System (2021.emnlp-main)
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Zujie Liang, Huang Hu, Can Xu, Jian Miao, Yingying He, Yining Chen, Xiubo Geng, Fan Liang, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural models have shown promising progress on this task, but key challenges remain . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can decouple dialogue generation from item recommendation . they use a response template generator and item selector to generate a responses template . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ReDial. |
Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)
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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing approaches lack flexibility to address diverse and ever-evolving user queries in open domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLMs on open-domain knowledge that requires tools to solve diverse and ever-evolving user queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines in the open domain task-solving benchmark. |