Papers by Yizhe Huang
Temporal Scaling Law for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yizhe Xiong, Xiansheng Chen, Xin Ye, Hui Chen, Zijia Lin, Haoran Lian, Zhenpeng Su, Wei Huang, Jianwei Niu, Jungong Han, Guiguang Ding
| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that the test loss of LLMs scales as power-laws with model size, computational budget, and dataset size. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept of Temporal Scaling Law to study test loss of LLMs . they break down test loss into fine-grained token positions and develop a dynamic hyperbolic-law . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the test loss of LLMs as the training steps scale up. |
INSET: Sentence Infilling with INter-SEntential Transformer (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Missing sentence generation fosters a wide range of applications in natural language generation . Developing models for sentence infilling can potentially facilitate many text generation applications . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to decouple the problem from natural language processing . they propose generating missing sentences that can syntactically and semantically bridge context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns a sentence representation and generates 'missing sentences' the proposed model can be used for document auto-completion and meeting note expansion . |
Graph vs. Sequence: An Empirical Study on Knowledge Forms for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge-grounded dialogue systems can generate informative responses based on dialogue history and external knowledge source. |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough experiment to determine the optimal knowledge form, mutual effects between knowl- edge and model selection, and the few-shot performance of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines knowledge-grounded dialogue with human-generated dialogues to generate informative and meaningful responses. |
Consistent Client Simulation for Motivational Interviewing-based Counseling (2025.acl-long)
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Yizhe Yang, Palakorn Achananuparp, Heyan Huang, Jing Jiang, Nicholas Gabriel Lim, Cameron Tan Shi Ern, Phey Ling Kit, Jenny Giam Xiuhui, John Pinto, Ee-Peng Lim
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simulate human clients in mental health counseling are limited and cost prohibitive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that supports consistent client simulation for mental health counseling by tracking the mental state of a simulated client, controlling its state transitions, and generating for each state behaviors consistent with the client’s motivation, beliefs, preferred plan to change, and and receptivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can simulate human clients for mental health counseling tasks and achieve higher consistency than previous methods. |
MIThinker: A Plug-and-Play Policy-Optimized Thinker For Motivational Interviewing Counseling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning large language models (LLMs) generate responses without explicitly aligning thoughts with counseling techniques, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight thinking model that generates therapeutic thoughts to guide MI counseling agents in strategy selection and response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theory-of-mind assessment comparable to state-of the-art systems with an order of magnitude less computation. |
Speaker Verification in Agent-generated Conversations (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have increased the capabilities of conversational AI to solve challenging dialogue problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to verify whether two sets of utterances originate from the same speaker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to verify whether two sets of utterances originate from the same speaker. |
Fundamental Capabilities of Large Language Models and their Applications in Domain Scenarios: A Survey (2024.acl-long)
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Jiawei Li, Yizhe Yang, Yu Bai, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yinghao Li, Huashan Sun, Yuhang Liu, Xingpeng Si, Yuhao Ye, Yixiao Wu, 林一冠 林一冠, Bin Xu, Ren Bowen, Chong Feng, Yang Gao, Heyan Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmark-based evaluations cannot accurately reflect the performance of real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy addresses the challenges faced by domains to choose more robust LLMs for real-world applications. |
ECom-Bench: Can LLM Agent Resolve Real-World E-commerce Customer Support Issues? (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | ECom-Bench is a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark framework for evaluating LLM agent with multimodal capabilities in the e-commerce customer support domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features dynamic user simulation based on persona information from real e-commerce customer interactions and a realistic task dataset derived from authentic ecommerce dialogues. |
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhongyuan Peng, Yifan Yao, Kaijing Ma, Shuyue Guo, Yizhe Li, Yichi Zhang, Chenchen Zhang, Yifan Zhang, Zhouliang Yu, Luming Li, Minghao Liu, Yihang Xia, Jiawei Shen, Yuchen Wu, Yixin Cao, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Ge Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to formalizing mathematical statements face limitations in accuracy, especially in the context of complex, highlevel problems that involve sophisticated mathematical reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a CriticLean framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component and introduce a benchmark to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open- and closed-source benchmarks and shows that it significantly outperformed existing models. |
Fast Quiet-STaR: Thinking Without Thought Tokens (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models have achieved impressive performance across a range of tasks, but further gains require more than scaling up model sizes or training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that gradually reduces the number of thought tokens . this method allows models to internalize more abstract reasoning processes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves the benefits of token-level reasoning while reducing computational cost. |
Breaking the Stage Barrier: A Novel Single-Stage Approach to Long Context Extension for Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Haoran Lian, Junmin Chen, Wei Huang, Yizhe Xiong, Wenping Hu, Guiguang Ding, Hui Chen, Jianwei Niu, Zijia Lin, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Large language models struggle with handling long token sequences due to limited training context size. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-stage continual pretraining method to equip LLMs with long context modeling capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on 4 language modeling benchmarks. |
On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yong Lin, Skyler Seto, Maartje Ter Hoeve, Katherine Metcalf, Barry-John Theobald, Xuan Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Chen Huang, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. |
| Approach: | They compare the accuracy of DPORM and EXRM with a reward function for scoring human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can approximate an EXRM on the limit infinite samples, but it is unclear how effective they are in practice. |
CAMI: A Counselor Agent Supporting Motivational Interviewing through State Inference and Topic Exploration (2025.acl-long)
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Yizhe Yang, Palakorn Achananuparp, Heyan Huang, Jing Jiang, Phey Ling Kit, Nicholas Gabriel Lim, Cameron Tan Shi Ern, Ee-Peng Lim
| Challenge: | Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a client-centered counseling technique designed to address ambivalence and facilitate behavior change in clients. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a STAR framework to evoke change talk by using large language models to assess MI skill competency, client’s state inference accuracy, topic exploration proficiency, and overall counseling success. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms several state-of-the-art methods and shows more realistic counselor-like behavior. |
EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
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Wei Tang, Yixin Cao, Yang Deng, Jiahao Ying, Bo Wang, Yizhe Yang, Yuyue Zhao, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yong Liao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge evolution benchmarks are static and fail to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolving dataset that categorizes information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is auto-updatable and enables evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs. |