Papers by Yining Wang
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. |
Heterogeneous Graph Neural Networks for Extractive Document Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models capture cross-sentence relations with recurrent neural networks, but they are hard to capture sentence-level long-distance dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based neural network for extractive summarization which contains semantic nodes apart from sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph-based neural network is the first to incorporate different types of nodes into it and perform a qualitative analysis. |
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 . |
A Compact and Language-Sensitive Multilingual Translation Method (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for multilingual neural machine translation do not make full use of language commonality and parameter sharing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual neural machine translation paradigm with one encoder-decoder model that makes full use of language commonality and parameter sharing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong standard multilingual translation systems on WMT and IWSLT datasets. |
AnaloBench: Benchmarking the Identification of Abstract and Long-context Analogies (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xiao Ye, Andrew Wang, Jacob Choi, Yining Lu, Shreya Sharma, Lingfeng Shen, Vijay Murari Tiyyala, Nicholas Andrews, Daniel Khashabi
| Challenge: | Analogical reasoning is an important part of human communication, says a new study . a benchmark to determine analogical reasoning ability in language models is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark analogical reasoning ability in language models by collecting 340 analogies from human writings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to determine analogical reasoning ability in language models. |
ReasoningGuard: Safeguarding Large Reasoning Models with Inference-time Safety Aha Moments (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) depend on costly fine-tuning and additional expert knowledge, which limits their scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time safeguard for Large Reasoning Models that injects safety aha moments into the reasoning process to guide the model towards harmless yet helpful reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safeguard outperforms nine existing safeguards while avoiding common exaggerated safety issues. |
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% . |
TROVE: A Challenge for Fine-Grained Text Provenance via Source Sentence Tracing and Relationship Classification (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated great potential in natural language generation, but their widespread adoption has raised concerns regarding content reliability and accountability. |
| Approach: | They propose a challenge to trace each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences within potentially lengthy or multi-document inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed challenge traces each sentence of a target text back to specific source sentences . the dataset includes 11 scenarios covering QA and summarization in english and Chinese . |
A Knowledge-driven Generative Model for Multi-implication Chinese Medical Procedure Entity Normalization (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Medical entity normalization (NEN) is a task that links medical mentions to entities in knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence generative framework to generate Chinese medical procedure entity normalization by constraint decoding and category-based model refining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on baselines especially in the case of multi-implication Chinese medical procedures. |
NeuroSym-Cal: Bridging the Reasoning-Execution Gap in Code Generation via Hierarchical Calibration (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing calibration methods rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness . Existing methods fail under systematic errors, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical calibration framework that measures confidence at two levels . they propose sensitivity analysis to measure local curvature of deductive process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework de-saturates overconfident errors and improves selective generation performance on OOD benchmarks. |
Investigating BERT’s Knowledge of Language: Five Analysis Methods with NPIs (D19-1)
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Alex Warstadt, Yu Cao, Ioana Grosu, Wei Peng, Hagen Blix, Yining Nie, Anna Alsop, Shikha Bordia, Haokun Liu, Alicia Parrish, Sheng-Fu Wang, Jason Phang, Anhad Mohananey, Phu Mon Htut, Paloma Jeretic, Samuel R. Bowman
| Challenge: | Recent work evaluating sentence representation models' knowledge of grammar has been slower to emerge. |
| Approach: | They propose five experimental methods inspired by prior work evaluating pretrained sentence representation models to examine their grammatical knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that the model has significant knowledge of the licensing environment but its success varies widely across different methods. |
Benchmarking Language Model Creativity: A Case Study on Code Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on LLM creativity evaluation focus on open-ended generation tasks . however, the degree to which LLMs possess and utilize creativity for problem-solving remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates design ingredients . they introduce DENIAL PROMPTING which pushes LLMs to develop more creative solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework quantifies creativity in LLMs on Codeforces problems . it also finds that even the most creative model fails to demonstrate human-like creativity . |
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. |
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. |
UORA: Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation in Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods such as LoRA and VeRA use a low-rank approximation method that reduces the number of trainable parameters without compromising performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning approach that leverages a low-rank approximation method that reduces the number of trainable parameters without compromising performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on GLUE and E2E benchmarks and is effective in instruction-tuning large language models and image classification models. |
LLM-Guided Semantic-Aware Clustering for Topic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that topic modeling is competitive compared to closed-source methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised topic modeling method that combines LLMs with clustering to improve topic generation and distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods that utilize GPT-4 on topic alignment and exhibits competitive performance compared to Neural Topic Models on topic quality. |
R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuan Li, Qi Luo, Xiaonan Li, Bufan Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Yuxin Wang, Zhangyue Yin, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | RAG systems that integrate external knowledge with Large Language Models often become bottlenecks due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers. |
Synchronously Generating Two Languages with Interactive Decoding (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multilingual NMT models handle multiple language pairs in one model. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive approach to translate a source language into two different languages simultaneously and interactively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on IWSLT and WMT datasets. |
Beyond Modality Collapse: Taming Guided Modality Entropy for Omni-modal Emotion Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | EmoOmni is a data paradigm for omni-modal large language models that can be used for emotion reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data paradigm that interleaves guided tokens into reasoning traces to enforce structured evidence extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm over-relys on a dominant modality while neglecting complementary cues. |
RATIONALYST: Pre-training Process-Supervision for Improving Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Dongwei Jiang, Guoxuan Wang, Yining Lu, Andrew Wang, Jingyu Zhang, Chuyu Liu, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi
| Challenge: | RATIONALYST is a model for process-supervision of reasoning based on pretraining on rationale annotations extracted from unlabeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for process-supervision of reasoning based on pre-training on rationale annotations extracted from unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | RATIONALYST improves reasoning accuracy by 3.9% on representative reasoning benchmarks. |
VAPO: End-to-end Slide-Enhanced Speech Recognition with Omni-modal Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current Automatic Speech Recognition models, such as Whisper, have demonstrated impressive performance in general domains, but their accuracy often deteriorates significantly in specialized scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a visually-anchored policy optimization approach to decouple visual perception from auditory processing to optimize the model's inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model eliminates visual interference and achieves state-of-the-art performance on SlideASR-Bench and public datasets. |
FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Fuyuan Liu, Dianyu Yu, He Ren, Nayu Liu, Xiaomian Kang, Delai Qiu, Fa Zhang, Genpeng Zhen, Shengping Liu, Liang Jiaen, null Weihuang, Yining Wang, Junnan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document comprehension rely on uniform supervision, resulting in a performance degradation in the intermediate sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework driven by Focal Preference Optimization to detect reading order in document layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing baselines and surpasses large-scale general VLMs. |
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. |
NCLS: Neural Cross-Lingual Summarization (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual summarization divide the task into two steps: summarizing and translation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate two related tasks into the training process of CLS under multi-task learning to improve cross-lingual summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on English-to-Chinese and Chinese-to English CLS human-corrected test sets. |
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. |
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Yang, Honglin Guo, Li Ji, Jiazheng Zhou, Rui Zheng, Zhikai Lei, Shuo Zhang, Zhiheng Xi, Shichun Liu, Yuxin Wang, Bo Wang, Yining Zheng, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
| Outcome: | The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow. |
Cheap Character Noise for OCR-Robust Multilingual Embeddings (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Optical character recognition (OCR) is a key component of the digitization of historical documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that fine-tunes existing multilingual models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the training data of existing models using noisy texts and a contrastive loss. |
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. |
Three Strategies to Improve One-to-Many Multilingual Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that one-to-many multilingual translation cannot perform on par with the individually trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit unique initial states for target languages and language-dependent positional embeddings to create hidden cells of the encoder to achieve comparable or even better performance than individually trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve comparable or even better performance than the individually trained models. |
Investigating and Enhancing Vision-Audio Capability in Omnimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in large language models (LLMs) but still struggle with integrating vision and audio. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-knowledge distillation method to improve vision-audio capabilities of OLLMs by learning from the vision-text components. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves vision-audio capabilities of OLLMs by learning from vision-text components, which improves interaction between audio and images and results in improved performance on multimodal tasks. |
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. |