Papers by Yizhe Wang
RETAIL: Towards Real-world Travel Planning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing travel planning systems assume users provide explicit queries, limiting their practical utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset RETAIL which supports decision-making for implicit queries while covering explicit queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a 1.0% pass rate, suggesting real-world travel planning remains challenging. |
Decoding-Unlearning: Fact Forgetting via Entropy-Guided Inference (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large-scale modeling memorize sensitive information . however, they are limited in real-world scenarios and require updating parameters . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, plug-and-play inference-time unlearning strategy that uses a probe to detect queries involving forgettable concepts and applies entropy-guided decoding to suppress target knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MUSE, RWKU, and WMDP datasets show that SEGUE outperforms existing methods. |
Joint Embedding of Words and Labels for Text Classification (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Guoyin Wang, Chunyuan Li, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Dinghan Shen, Xinyuan Zhang, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to text classification use word embeddings to capture semantic regularities between words. |
| Approach: | They propose to view text classification as a label-word joint embedding problem . they use a framework that measures compatibility between text sequences and labels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on large text datasets. |
MMAU: A Holistic Benchmark of Agent Capabilities Across Diverse Domains (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Guoli Yin, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Feng Nan, Yanchao Sun, Zhaoyang Xu, Shen Ma, Jiarui Lu, Xiang Kong, Aonan Zhang, Dian Ang Yap, Yizhe Zhang, Karsten Ahnert, Vik Kamath, Mathias Berglund, Dominic Walsh, Tobias Gindele, Juergen Wiest, Zhengfeng Lai, Xiaoming Simon Wang, Jiulong Shan, Meng Cao, Ruoming Pang, Zirui Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific application scenarios, emphasizing task completion but failing to dissect the underlying skills that drive these outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Massive Multitask Agent Understanding benchmark that evaluates LLMs across five domains and offline tasks. |
| Outcome: | The Massive Multitask Agent Understanding (MMAU) benchmark evaluates models across five domains including Tool-use, Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) QA, Data Science and Machine Learning coding, Contest-level programming and Mathematics. |
ECom-Bench: Can LLM Agent Resolve Real-World E-commerce Customer Support Issues? (2025.emnlp-industry)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Bridging the Training-Inference Gap for Dense Phrase Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for building dense retrievers are often misaligned and do not reflect retrieval scenario at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to validate dense retrievers using a small subset of the entire corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves top-1 phrase retrieval accuracy by 2 3 points and top-20 passage retrieval by 2 4 points for open-domain question answering. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chen Xu, Yu ji, Zhenyu Lv, Yang Yi, Yizhe Yang, Luyao Ji, Chaoyi Chen, Xianyang Wang, Tian Lan, Zhihua Wang, Juan Wang, Xunde Dong, Fuze Tian, Qunxi Dong, Bin Hu
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based training approaches lack faithful responses to clinical errors and explainable feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic virtual standardized patient governed by an OBSERVE-THINK-BEHAVE architecture that embeds LLM reasoning into a symbolic system where experts implant causal associations between intervention logic and patient mental states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in faithfulness and pedagogical value. |
ToolSandbox: A Stateful, Conversational, Interactive Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Tool Use Capabilities (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiarui Lu, Thomas Holleis, Yizhe Zhang, Bernhard Aumayer, Feng Nan, Haoping Bai, Shuang Ma, Shen Ma, Mengyu Li, Guoli Yin, Zirui Wang, Ruoming Pang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have led to a growing interest in tool assisted LLMs . toolSandbox includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools . |
| Approach: | a new tool-based evaluation tool is released to help LLMs evaluate their tool-use capabilities. a tool-driven evaluation tool includes stateful tool execution, implicit state dependencies between tools and a built-in user simulator. |
| Outcome: | the toolSandbox evaluation benchmark shows that open source and proprietary models have a performance gap . the benchmarks show that even the most capable LLMs are challenged by state dependent tasks . |
POINTER: Constrained Progressive Text Generation via Insertion-based Generative Pre-training (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models cannot be directly employed to generate text under specified lexical constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for insertion-based text generation that inserts tokens between existing tokens in a parallel manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is intuitive and interpretable on Wikipedia and Yelp datasets. |
Baseline Needs More Love: On Simple Word-Embedding-Based Models and Associated Pooling Mechanisms (P18-1)
Copied to clipboard
Dinghan Shen, Guoyin Wang, Wenlin Wang, Martin Renqiang Min, Qinliang Su, Yizhe Zhang, Chunyuan Li, Ricardo Henao, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning architectures to model compositionality in text sequences require a large number of parameters and expensive computations. |
| Approach: | They propose two additional pooling strategies over word embeddings for improved interpretability and hierarchical pooling for spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pooling strategies improve interpretability and preserve spatial (n-gram) information within text sequences. |
MirageBackdoor: A Stealthy Attack that Induces Think-Well-Answer-Wrong Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing CoT backdoor attacks manipulate intermediate reasoning steps to steer the model toward incorrect answers, but these corrupted reasoning traces are readily detected by prevalent process-monitoring defenses. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack that exploits the model's post-output space to preserve clean CoTs while selectively steering the final answer toward a specific target. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MirageBD achieves over 90% success rate across four datasets and five models with a poison ratio of only 5%. |
On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jianqiao Li, Chunyuan Li, Guoyin Wang, Hao Fu, Yuhchen Lin, Liqun Chen, Yizhe Zhang, Chenyang Tao, Ruiyi Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Qian Yang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is used to train models, but during testing, the model is conditioned on previously generated tokens, resulting in exposure bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use optimal transport to match the sequences generated in MLE and test modes to reduce exposure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated on machine translation, text summarization, and text generation tasks. |
Improving Textual Network Embedding with Global Attention via Optimal Transport (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
Liqun Chen, Guoyin Wang, Chenyang Tao, Dinghan Shen, Pengyu Cheng, Xinyuan Zhang, Wenlin Wang, Yizhe Zhang, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning textual network embeddings are noisy and sparse. |
| Approach: | They propose to use text-based attention parsing to learn context-aware network embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a number of domains. |
EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
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. |
Towards Generating Long and Coherent Text with Multi-Level Latent Variable Models (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Variational autoencoders (VAEs) have received much attention as an end-to-end architecture for text generation with latent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage several multi-level structures to learn a variational autoencoder model for generating long, and coherent text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces more coherent and less repetitive long text compared to baselines and mitigates posterior collapse issue. |
Contrastive Multi-document Question Generation (2021.eacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Woon Sang Cho, Yizhe Zhang, Sudha Rao, Asli Celikyilmaz, Chenyan Xiong, Jianfeng Gao, Mengdi Wang, Bill Dolan
| Challenge: | Multi-document question generation focuses on generating a question that covers the common aspect of multiple documents, but a naive model trained only using the targeted document set may generate too generic questions that cover a larger scope than delineated by the document set. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning strategy where given ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ sets of documents, generate a question that is closely related to the ‘positive' set but far away from the ‘negative' set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms several strong baselines, as measured by automatic metrics and human evaluation. |