Papers by Yongbin Yu
How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid malicious user inputs. |
| Approach: | They employ weak classifiers to explain LLM safety through the intermediate hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can identify malicious and normal inputs and detect malicious ones without jailbreak. |
IOPO: Empowering LLMs with Complex Instruction Following via Input-Output Preference Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms to improve the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to improve the ability to follow complex instructions by using a IOPO alignment method to take input and output preference into consideration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm shows 8.15%, 2.18% improvements on in-domain data and 5.91%, 2.83% on out-of-domain datasets compared to SFT and DPO respectively. |
Doc2Bot: Accessing Heterogeneous Documents via Conversational Bots (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Documents contain various structures that hinder the ability of machines to comprehend . user information needs are often underspecified, and the nature of heterogeneous documents poses challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for building machines that help users seek information via conversations . their dataset contains over 100,000 turns based on Chinese documents from five domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tasks are challenging and worthy of further research. |
Semi-Supervised Lifelong Language Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Yinhe Zheng, Bowen Yu, Zhiliang Tian, Dongkyu Lee, Jian Sun, Yongbin Li, Nevin L. Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn languages only focus on supervised learning, and unlabeled data is underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised lifelong language learning setting where a model learns sequentially arriving language tasks with both labeled and unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on various language tasks and is effective and superior to existing models. |
Improving Question Generation with Multi-level Content Planning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies suggest key phrase selection is essential for question generation, yet it is difficult to connect disjointed phrases into meaningful questions, especially for long context. |
| Approach: | They propose a QG framework that uses multi-level content planning to generate questions from a given context and an answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on two popular QG datasets. |
Unified Language Representation for Question Answering over Text, Tables, and Images (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to answer complex questions are limited to text or structured data. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that transforms images and tables into unified language representations to simplify QA problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two datasets and the WebQA leaderboard. |
DeepSolution: Boosting Complex Engineering Solution Design via Tree-based Exploration and Bi-point Thinking (2025.acl-long)
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Zhuoqun Li, Haiyang Yu, Xuanang Chen, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Fei Huang, Xianpei Han, Yongbin Li, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing studies in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) do not sufficiently address the design of complex engineering solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation system that leverages tree-based exploration and bi-point thinking mechanism to generate reliable solutions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed system achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the SolutionBench, highlighting its potential to enhance the automation and reliability of complex engineering solution design in real-world applications. |
Speech-Text Pre-training for Spoken Dialog Understanding with Explicit Cross-Modal Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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Tianshu Yu, Haoyu Gao, Ting-En Lin, Min Yang, Yuchuan Wu, Wentao Ma, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing speech-text pre-training methods are limited to one or two specific tasks, despite their success in speech-language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a temporal position prediction task to capture the speech-text alignment . they use a textual dialog pre-training task to generalize a response selection task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior in learning speech-text alignment and multi-turn dialog context. |
ExpSeek: Self-Triggered Experience Seeking for Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenyuan Zhang, Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Shuaiyi Nie, Bingli Wu, Juwei Yue, Tingwen Liu, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating experience into web agents are struggling to adapt to dynamically changing contextual observations during agent-environment interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that shifts experience toward step-level proactive seeking by estimating step- level entropy thresholds and designing step-Level tailored experience content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 9.3% and 7.5% performance improvements on Qwen3-8B and 32B models across four challenging web agent benchmarks. |
DEMO: Reframing Dialogue Interaction with Fine-grained Element Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) enabled dialogue systems are one of the central modes in human-machine interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark task for dialogue element MOdeling and Element Awareness and a new benchmark for dialogue agent interaction that allows the agent to model dialogue elements via imitation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs well in both dialogue element modeling and out-of-domain tasks. |
Domain Incremental Lifelong Learning in an Open World (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to lifelong learning (LL) models require access to task identities in the testing phase or cannot handle samples from unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic architecture-based lifelong learning model that tries to learn a sequence of tasks with a prompt-enhanced language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in handling unseen tasks and focuses on task-level prompts to capture knowledge from different granularities. |
Transferable Post-training via Inverse Value Learning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for post-training large datasets are requiring a large computational effort. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the changes at logits level during post-training using a separate neural network . they demonstrate that the value network can be seamlessly integrated with another pre-trained model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be integrated with another pre-trained model during inference, enabling similar capability enhancements. |
Causal Document-Grounded Dialogue Pre-training (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Bowen Li, Haiyang Yu, Jinyang Li, Chao Wang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Nevin Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-grounded dialogue (DocGD) rely on general pre-trained language models without a tailored pre-training approach that explicitly captures causal relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose a causally-complete dataset construction strategy for developing million-scale DocGD pre-training corpora and a perturbation-based strategy to capture causality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy yields significant and consistent improvements in fully-supervised, low-resource, few-shot, and zero-shot settings. |
Towards Generalized Open Information Extraction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) models are evaluated on in-domain test sets aside from the training corpus, which violates the initial task principle of domain-independence. |
| Approach: | They propose to generalize OpenIE over unseen target domains with different data distributions from source training domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats the previous methods in both in- and out-of-domain settings by 6.0% in F1 score absolutely. |
Scaling Data Diversity for Fine-Tuning Language Models in Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can reveal toxic or offensive content inadvertently or intentionally. |
| Approach: | They propose to control the diversity of both sides according to the number of samples for fine-tuning, which can directly reflect their impact. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models after fine-tuning. |
EIFBENCH: Extremely Complex Instruction Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focusing on single-task environments with limited constraints lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Segment Policy Optimization algorithm to enhance the LLM's ability to accurately fulfill multi-task workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that existing benchmarks lack the complexity required to fully reflect the evolution of large language models. |
Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA (2024.emnlp-main)
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Minzheng Wang, Longze Chen, Fu Cheng, Shengyi Liao, Xinghua Zhang, Bingli Wu, Haiyang Yu, Nan Xu, Lei Zhang, Run Luo, Yunshui Li, Min Yang, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating long-context language models employ irrelevant noise texts to artificially extend the length of test cases, diverging from the real-world scenarios of long-constituency applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-context benchmark, Loong, aligning with realistic scenarios through extended multi-document question answering (QA) . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can scale up the context window of large language models to perform in-depth analysis of multiple long documents. |
Universal Information Extraction with Meta-Pretrained Self-Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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Xin Cong, Bowen Yu, Mengcheng Fang, Tingwen Liu, Haiyang Yu, Zhongkai Hu, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li, Bin Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for IE are task-specific, resulting in specialized and isolated approaches for different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retrieve task-specific knowledge from pretrained language models to enhance universal IE by using a Meta-Pretraining Algorithm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves the new state-of-the-art on 4 IE tasks, 12 datasets under fully-supervised, low-resource and few-shot scenarios. |
Diversify Question Generation with Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing question generation systems focus on the internal knowledge within the textual passage or the semantic word space for diverse content planning. Existing solutions focus on relying on the knowledge of the text and the semantic words, but have not considered the potential of external knowledge for expression diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Retrieval-Augmented Style Transfer that utilizes the style of diverse templates for question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on diversity while being comparable in terms of consistency scores. |
TLUE: A Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2025.emnlp-main)
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Fan Gao, Cheng Huang, Yutong Liu, Nyima Tashi, Xiangxiang Wang, Thupten Tsering, Ban Ma-bao, Renzeng Duojie, Gadeng Luosang, Rinchen Dongrub, Dorje Tashi, Xiao Feng Cd, Yongbin Yu, Hao Wang
| Challenge: | Low-resource languages, like Tibetan, remain underrepresented in large language models' evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Tibetan Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark to assess LLMs' proficiency in Tibetan . they use a multi-task understanding benchmark and a safety benchmark to evaluate models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark shows that most large language models perform below the random baseline, especially in Tibetan language processing. |
RanLoRA: Residual-aware Nonlinear Low-Rank Adaptation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) relying on linear low-rank projections restricts adaptation to linear subspaces, limiting flexibility on complex downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a nonlinear low-rank Adaptation approach that leverages pretrained weights to decompose them into principal components that are kept frozen and residual components that can be used for task-specific adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms vanilla LoRA and representative variants on commonsense reasoning, image classification, and mathematical reasoning tasks. |
EvoRoute: Experience-Driven Self-Routing LLM Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | EvoRoute is a self-evolving model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Approach: | They propose a model routing paradigm that transcends static, pre-defined model assignments. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GAIA and BrowseComp+ show that EvoRoute reduces execution cost and latency by over 70%. |
API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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Minghao Li, Yingxiu Zhao, Bowen Yu, Feifan Song, Hangyu Li, Haiyang Yu, Zhoujun Li, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li
| Challenge: | Recent research has demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can enhance their capabilities by utilizing external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a runnable evaluation system consisting of 73 API tools and an annotation system for 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark assesses the effectiveness of existing LLMs by analyzing 314 tool-use dialogues with 753 API calls. |
MemPO: Self-Memory Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruoran Li, Xinghua Zhang, Haiyang Yu, Shitong Duan, Xiang Li, Wenxin Xiang, Chonghua Liao, Xudong Guo, Yongbin Li, Jinli Suo
| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-horizon agents introduce the external memory module and look up the relevant information from the stored memory, which prevents the model from proactively managing its memory content and aligning with the agent’s overarching task objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm which enables agents to autonomously manage their memory during interaction with environment and selectively retain crucial information. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieves absolute F1 score gains of 25.98 over the base model and 7.1 over the previous SOTA baseline while preserving task performance. |
Tree-Instruct: A Preliminary Study of the Intrinsic Relationship between Complexity and Alignment (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the importance of data complexity as a crucial metric, but the impact of complexity remains relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to add a specified number of nodes to instructions’ semantic trees to enhance the instruction complexity in a controllable manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms diverse yet complex instructions under the same token budget and can control the difficulty level of modified instructions. |
SoFA: Shielded On-the-fly Alignment via Priority Rule Following (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods fail to adapt to the diversity of preferences and regulatory standards. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for prioritizing rules over user instructions to minimize misalignments in Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach minimizes misalignments and adapts smoothly to various unseen rules, ensuring they are shielded from hijacking and that the model responds appropriately. |