Papers by Yiwei Zhang
LLM-Powered Benchmark Factory: Reliable, Generic, and Efficient (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Jiayi Shi, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Using generic and efficient benchmark generators, human annotators are limited by inefficiency . current benchmark generator methods rely on seed signals, leading to long cycles and high costs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate LLMs as generic benchmark generators and integrate them as BenchMaker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable performance to human-annotated benchmarks on most metrics. |
Context-DPO: Aligning Language Models for Context-Faithfulness (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Baolong Bi, Shaohan Huang, Yiwei Wang, Tianchi Yang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Lingrui Mei, Junfeng Fang, Zehao Li, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Shenghua Liu
| Challenge: | Context-DPO is the first alignment method specifically designed to enhance contextfaithfulness for large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates Retrieval-Augmented Generation scenarios with knowledge conflicts to evaluate context-faithfulness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves LLMs' context-faithfulness by 35% to 280% over open-source models. |
Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Xinglin Wang, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Peiwen Yuan, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing decoding strategies for chain-of-thought reasoning do not exploit prior information about question difficulty. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding strategy called self-consistency to improve reasoning performance by adjusting the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning tasks while achieving comparable performance. |
SPARD: Self-Paced Curriculum for RL Alignment via Integrating Reward Dynamics and Data Utility (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Xuyang Zhi, Peilun Zhou, Chengqiang Lu, Hang Lv, Yiwei Liang, Rongyang Zhang, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Hongchao Gu, Defu Lian, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales. |
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hengyuan Zhang, Zhihao Zhang, Ercong Nie, Mingyang Wang, Zunhai Su, Yiwei Wang, Qianli Wang, Shuzhou Yuan, Xufeng Duan, Qibo Xue, Zeping Yu, Chenming Shang, Xiao Liang, Jing Xiong, Hui Shen, Chaofan Tao, Zhengwu Liu, Senjie Jin, Zhiheng Xi, Dongdong Zhang, Sophia Ananiadou, Tao Gui, Ruobing Xie, Hayden Kwok-Hay So, Hinrich Schuetze, Xuanjing Huang, Qi Zhang, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency. |
MCiteBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for Generating Text with Citations (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work focuses on generating citations for text-only content . experimental results reveal MLLMs struggle to ground outputs reliably when handling multimodal input . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of MLLMs to generate text with citations in multimodal contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the ability of MLLMs to generate text with citations in multimodal contexts. |
Focused Large Language Models are Stable Many-Shot Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Heda Wang, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that disperses model attention from the query . they propose 'focus' search strategy that uses model perplexity to ensure sufficient attention . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average performance improvement of 5.2% over vanilla ICL and scales well with many-shot demonstrations. |
InsBank: Evolving Instruction Subset for Ongoing Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Jiayi Shi, Yiwei Li, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Huan Ren, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Recent studies emphasize that quality and diversity of instruction data are more crucial than quantity, highlighting the need to select diverse, high-quality subsets to reduce training costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a continuously updated repository to integrate the latest valuable instruction data with a progressive evolution framework to evolve InsBank over time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in InsBank evolution and extracts budget-specific subsets. |
AnyTrans: Translate AnyText in the Image with Large Scale Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing and computer vision have made it possible to translate images with text in one language into equivalent images displaying that text translated into another language. |
| Approach: | They propose an all-encompassing framework for the task–In-Image Machine Translation (IIMT) that incorporates contextual cues from both textual and visual elements during translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be constructed using open-source models and requires no training, making it highly accessible and expandable. |
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Tailored Benchmarks for Efficient Evaluation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Yueqi Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing efficient methods estimate performance of models on large benchmarks, but these methods rely on the assumption that target models have high prediction consistency with source models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that conducts customized evaluation tailored to each target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the MAE of estimates by 31.4% on benchmarks across 300 models. |
MARK: Multi-agent Collaboration with Ranking Guidance for Text-attributed Graph Clustering (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Fu, Yuxing Zhang, Chunchun Chen, JianwenMa JianwenMa, Quan Yuan, Rong-Cheng Tu, Xinli Huang, Wei Ye, Xiao Luo, Minghua Deng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cluster graphs with GNNs are limited due to label scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage large language models to enhance text-attributed graph clustering by using three LLMs as ranking-based supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates reliable guidance using collaboration of three LLM-based agents as ranking-based supervision signals. |
Dynamic Infilling Anchors for Format-Constrained Generation in Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer bidirectional attention and parallel generation . fixed anchors can enforce constraints, but they often impose rigid spans, leading to truncated reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically estimates end-anchor positions to adjust generation length before iterative infilling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves format compliance and answer accuracy on GSM8K and MATH. |
DatawiseAgent: A Notebook-Centric LLM Agent Framework for Adaptive and Robust Data Science Automation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents for data science automation are limited by narrow task scopes, limited generalization across tasks and models, and over-reliance on state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a notebook-centric LLM agent framework for adaptive and robust data science automation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines such as AutoGen and TaskWeaver in performance tests across diverse data science scenarios and models. |
MetaTS: Meta Teacher-Student Network for Multilingual Sequence Labeling with Minimal Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Sequence labeling aims to predict fine-grained sequences of labels for text, but lack of token-level annotated data hinders the effectiveness of supervised methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Meta Teacher-Student (MetaTS) Network to alleviate data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta learning method alleviates data scarcity by leveraging large multilingual unlabeled data. |
Vulnerability of Text-to-Image Models to Prompt Template Stealing: A Differential Evolution Approach (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yurong Wu, Fangwen Mu, Qiuhong Zhang, Jinjing Zhao, Xinrun Xu, Lingrui Mei, Yang Wu, Lin Shi, Junjie Wang, Zhiming Ding, Yiwei Wang
| Challenge: | Prompt trading has emerged as a significant intellectual property concern in recent years, where vendors entice users by showcasing sample images before selling prompt templates that can generate similar images. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-stealing benchmark consisting of 50 templates and 450 images organized into Easy and Hard difficulty levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods with an average improvement of over 10%. |
To See a World in a Spark of Neuron: Disentangling Multi-Task Interference for Training-Free Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zitao Fang, Guodong Du, Shuyang Yu, Yifei Guo, Yiwei Zhang, Yiyao Cao, Jing Li, Ho-Kin Tang, Sim Kuan Goh
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model merging ignore the fundamental roles of neurons, connectivity and activation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that relies on neuronal mechanisms to mitigate task interference . they decomposed task-specific representations into two complementary subspaces . their results offer new insights into mitigating task interference and improving knowledge fusion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces task interference within neurons and improves knowledge fusion. |
Speculative Decoding for Multi-Sample Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Li, Jiayi Shi, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Ji Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Speculative decoding method exploits consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative decoding method that exploits the consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or external databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the intrinsic consensus of parallel reasoning paths to synthesize high-quality draft tokens without auxiliary models or databases. |
From Logical to Computational Sparsity: Structure-Aware Block-Sparse Attention for Long-Code Completion (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing sparse attention methods for long-context generation pose high latency . general sparsity methods cause excessive accuracy degradation without considering code structure . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free **S**tructure-**a**ware **b**lock-spa**r**s**e** attention mechanism that bridges the gap between logical and computational sparsity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces TTFT by 45-55% while maintaining accuracy within 3% of dense attention. |
SQLAgent: Learning to Explore Before Generating as a Data Engineer (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to large language models fail to generalize in complex, real-world settings due to database-specific nature of SQL reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage LLM-based framework that decouples knowledge acquisition from query generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy over baselines on large-scale benchmarks. |
From Sub-Ability Diagnosis to Human-Aligned Generation: Bridging the Gap for Text Length Control via MarkerGen (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Peiwen Yuan, Chuyi Tan, Shaoxiong Feng, Yiwei Li, Xinglin Wang, Yueqi Zhang, Jiayi Shi, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods to control text length are lacking in LCTG, posing a major limitation for practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play approach that decomposes LCTG sub-abilities with human patterns as reference and performs detailed error analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves LCTG across various settings, exhibiting outstanding effectiveness and generalizability. |
Hard to Read, Easy to Jailbreak: How Visual Degradation Bypasses MLLM Safety Alignment (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual context compression enable MLLMs to process ultra-long contexts efficiently by rendering text into images. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that decouples visual transcription from safety auditing by enforcing a serialized pipeline to decouple visual transcription and safety assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy decouples visual transcription from safety auditing to reduce the risk of jailbreaking. |
Revisiting Self-Consistency from Dynamic Distributional Alignment Perspective on Answer Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yiwei Li, Ji Zhang, Shaoxiong Feng, Peiwen Yuan, Xinglin Wang, Jiayi Shi, Yueqi Zhang, Chuyi Tan, Boyuan Pan, Yao Hu, Kan Li
| Challenge: | Existing studies on self-consistency show that it improves reasoning abilities by aggregating diverse stochastic samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidence-driven mechanism that dynamically calibrates temperature to align with high probability modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-diversity baselines on reasoning tasks and improves both average and best-case performance. |
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
Harmonizing Dense and Sparse Signals in Multi-turn RL: Dual-Horizon Credit Assignment for Industrial Sales Agents (2026.acl-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models for industrial sales require balancing long-term commercial objectives with immediate linguistic constraints such as fluency and compliance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that disentangles optimization across time scales by normalizing advantages from turn-level and session-level rewards before fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art GRPO model in conversion rate and identity detection rate. |
VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to long videos are limited by limited context windows and flatten videos into independent segments. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured and intent-aware long-video RAG framework that structures a video as a spatio-temporal graph and then performs multi-hop retrieval to aggregate evidence across distant yet contextually related events. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is competitive with state-of-the-art baselines without auxiliary information. |