Papers by Yiyang Zhang
Back to the Future: Bidirectional Information Decoupling Network for Multi-turn Dialogue Modeling (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue modeling use pre-trained language models to encode dialogue history as successive tokens, which is insufficient in capturing the temporal characteristics of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional information decoupling network as a universal dialogue encoder which explicitly incorporates both the past and future contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates past and future contexts and can be generalized to a wide range of dialogue-related tasks. |
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Chi Chen, Yiyang Du, Zheng Fang, Ziyue Wang, Fuwen Luo, Peng Li, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model. |
Graphine: A Dataset for Graph-aware Terminology Definition Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale terminology definition dataset hinders definition generation . lack of precise terminology definitions poses great challenges in scientific communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale terminology definition dataset Graphine that exploits the graph structure of terminologies to generate graph-aware text generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by exploiting graph structure of terminologies. |
Interpretable Graph-Language Modeling for Detecting Youth Illicit Drug Use (2026.findings-eacl)
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Yiyang Li, Zehong Wang, Zhengqing Yuan, Zheyuan Zhang, Keerthiram Murugesan, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Illicit drug use among teens and young adults remains a public health concern . existing models ignore latent and interconnected structures among survey variables . |
| Approach: | They propose a joint graph-language modeling framework to detect illicit drug use among TYAs . they use large-scale surveys such as the Youth Risk Behavior Survey and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health to analyze data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on YRBS and NSDUH datasets in predictive accuracy. |
VeriFact: Enhancing Long-Form Factuality Evaluation with Refined Fact Extraction and Reference Facts (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work focuses on accuracy and precision, but factuality evaluation is difficult due to inter-sentence dependencies. |
| Approach: | They introduce a factuality evaluation framework to enhance fact extraction . they also introduce 'factRBench' that evaluates both precision and recall . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances fact extraction by identifying incomplete and missing facts . it also evaluates precision and recall in long-form models, whereas prior work focuses on precision. |
A Survey of Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval: Progress and Challenges (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval (RIR) targets retrieval settings where relevance is mediated by latent inferential links between a query and supporting evidence, rather than semantic similarity. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy that categorizes methods based on where and how reasoning is integrated into the retrieval pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method framework provides a detailed analysis of the current landscape and its trade-offs and practical applications. |
VCB Bench: An Evaluation Benchmark for Audio-Grounded Large Language Model Conversational Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiliang Hu, Wenfu Wang, Zuchao Li, Chenxing Li, Yiyang Zhao, Hanzhao Li, Liqiang Zhang, Meng Yu, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | despite advances in multimodal conversational systems, current benchmarks lack comprehensive evaluation across key dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese benchmark built exclusively on real human speech to fill this gap . they assess LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, robustness . |
| Outcome: | VCB Bench assesses LALMs across three complementary axes: instruction following, knowledge understanding, and robustness . VCBM Bench provides reproducible and fine-grained framework for Chinese voice chat bots . results show significant performance disparities and offer tangible insights for future improvements . |
PPT: A Minor Language News Recommendation Model via Cross-Lingual Preference Pattern Transfer (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems for minor language news recommendation lack interaction with content . linguistic gap can lead to inaccurate modeling of minor language content despite strong English capability . |
| Approach: | They propose a minor language news recommendation model by cross-lingual preference pattern transfer . their model employs the widely used two-tower architecture and large language model as the backbone of the news encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on 15 minor languages. |
Zero-shot Generative Linguistic Steganography (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generative linguistic steganography attempts to hide secret messages into covertext . previous studies focused on the statistical differences between the covertext and stegotext - however, ill-formed stegotas can readily be identified by humans . |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach based on in-context learning for linguistic steganography to achieve better perceptual and statistical imperceptibility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces 1.926 more innocent and intelligible stegotext than any other method. |
SimpleOCR: Rendering Visual Questions to Teach MLLMs to Read (2026.findings-acl)
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Yibo Peng, Peng Xia, Ding Zhong, Kaide Zeng, Siwei Han, Yiyang Zhou, Jiaqi Liu, Ruiyi Zhang, Huaxiu Yao
| Challenge: | MLLMs lack visual grounding mechanism to read text embedded in images, or rely on parametric shortcuts . despite strong OCR capabilities, models suffer performance degradation of 12.7% in the VQ setting . |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play training strategy that invalidates shortcuts in text prompts . they propose 'vq' setting where text queries are rendered directly onto images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy surpasses the base model by 5.4% and GRPO based on original images by 2.7% on four representative OOD benchmarks. |
NGQA: A Nutritional Graph Question Answering Benchmark for Personalized Health-aware Nutritional Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Zheyuan Zhang, Yiyang Li, Nhi Ha Lan Le, Zehong Wang, Tianyi Ma, Vincent Galassi, Keerthiram Murugesan, Nuno Moniz, Werner Geyer, Nitesh V Chawla, Chuxu Zhang, Yanfang Ye
| Challenge: | Diet plays a critical role in human health, but tailoring dietary reasoning to individual health conditions remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning using a national health survey data set. |
| Outcome: | The NGQA benchmark evaluates dietary reasoning across three tasks using a set of question complexity settings and baseline models. |
Think in Latent Thoughts: A New Paradigm for Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to sign language translation (SLT) assume video segments are directly mappable to spoken-language words. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-driven SLT framework that uses an ordered sequence of latent thoughts as an explicit middle layer between video and generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves coherence and faithfulness over existing gloss-free methods. |
LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs (2025.acl-long)
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Kaibo Liu, Zhenpeng Chen, Yiyang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yudong Han, Yun Ma, Yihong Dong, Ge Li, Gang Huang
| Challenge: | TrickCatcher generates test cases that pass existing tests yet contain bugs . a recent study found that tricky bugs are not detected by test suites . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs . they use a PUT and specification to generate program variants, an input generator and an Llm to construct test inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80, 2.65, and 1.66 . trickCatcher generates program variants based on the program under test and its specification . |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Distorted or Fabricated? A Survey on Hallucination in Video LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Despite significant advances in video-language modeling, hallucinations remain a persistent challenge in video large language models. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic taxonomy that categorizes hallucinations into two core types: dynamic distortion and content fabrication. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy categorizes hallucinations into two core types: dynamic distortion and content fabrication. |
Improving Factual Consistency in Abstractive Summarization with Sentence Structure Pruning (2024.lrec-main)
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Dingxin Hu, Xuanyu Zhang, Xingyue Zhang, Yiyang Li, Dongsheng Chen, Marina Litvak, Natalia Vanetik, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Yanquan Zhou, Lei Li, Yuze Li, Yingqi Zhu
| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models suffer from factual inconsistency problem . post-editing methods focus on replacing suspicious entities, failing to modify incorrect content hidden in sentence structures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use sentence pruning operation to correct possible errors . they propose to apply sentence pruning operations to the syntactic dependency tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factual consistency on the FRANK dataset compared with baselines . it is model-independent and can serve as the final step in ensuring factual consistentness. |
SaSR-Net: Source-Aware Semantic Representation Network for Enhancing Audio-Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing AVQA methods often fail to link sound-producing objects in the video with the audio-visual information. |
| Approach: | They introduce a source-aware semantic representation network for AVQA . they use source-wise learnable tokens to capture and align audio-visual elements with the question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the Music-AVQA and AVQA-Yang datasets. |
Removal of Hallucination on Hallucination: Debate-Augmented RAG (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | erroneous or biased retrieval can mislead generation, compounding hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multi-agent debates into retrieval and generation stages to improve retrieval reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval reliability, reduces hallucinations and significantly improves overall factual accuracy. |
Optimize Weight Rounding via Signed Gradient Descent for the Quantization of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional proficiency in language-related tasks, but their deployment poses significant memory and storage requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes rounding values and weight clipping within 200 steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves exceptional results across 2 to 4 bits while maintaining low tuning costs and avoiding additional inference overhead. |