Papers by Yizhe Yang
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. |
PUPPET: Neural-Symbolic Standardized Patients for Mental Health (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
PSST: A Benchmark for Evaluation-driven Text Public-Speaking Style Transfer (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer text style focus on sentence-level data, limiting performance . current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to transform official texts into public-speaking styles by analyzing real-world data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task aims to transform public speaking texts into public-speaking styles . the proposed framework analyzes characteristics and identifies problems of stylized texts . |
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. |
Improving Text Generation with Student-Forcing Optimal Transport (2020.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Unveiling and Addressing Pseudo Forgetting in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in continual learning have not been studied. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-guided replay framework that allows models to leverage their capabilities and provide partial external correct rationales to the original instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates pseudo forgetting while maintaining model plasticity. |
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. |