Papers by Yongfeng Huang
GLoCIM: Global-view Long Chain Interest Modeling for news recommendation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts to extract local subgraph information from click graphs have hindered collaboratively utilizing global click graph information. |
| Approach: | They propose a global-view long chain interests model that models a click graph with neighbor interest to enhance news recommendation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses baseline methods on two real-world datasets. |
Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation Model Learning (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of user behavior data for model training, which may lead to privacy concerns and risks due to the privacy-sensitive nature of user behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a privacy-preserving method where user behavior data is locally stored on user devices to train accurate news recommendation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can train accurate news recommendation models without centralized storage of user behavior data. |
Uni-FedRec: A Unified Privacy-Preserving News Recommendation Framework for Model Training and Online Serving (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods rely on user behavior data to model user interests and user interests. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified news recommendation framework that uses user data locally stored in user clients to train models and serve users in a privacy-preserving way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and effectively protects user privacy. |
Reviews Meet Graphs: Enhancing User and Item Representations for Recommendation with Hierarchical Attentive Graph Neural Network (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn user and item representations from review texts do not take into account the user-user and item-item relatedness of the user. |
| Approach: | They propose to use review content and user-item graphs to integrate them as different views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can learn user and item representations from review content and user-item graphs. |
Hierarchical User and Item Representation with Three-Tier Attention for Recommendation (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn user and item representations from reviews are limited . existing methods learn user representations based on ratings given by users . |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical user and item representation model with three-tier attention to learn user and items from reviews for recommendation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn user and item representations from reviews on four benchmark datasets. |
Neural News Recommendation with Heterogeneous User Behavior (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods rely on news click history to model user interest, but data sparsity is a problem . other kinds of user behaviors such as webpage browsing and search queries can provide useful clues of users’ news reading interest. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit heterogeneous user behaviors to learn news representations from their titles via CNN networks and apply attention networks to select important words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach exploits heterogeneous user behaviors on a real-world dataset. |
SEMA-RAG: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Medical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Standard RAG frameworks treat retrieval as a static, single-round auxiliary step . compressed workflow makes it difficult to form reliable evidence chains . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples tasks and allows for dynamic multi-round exploration . they propose retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to mitigate hallucinations and knowledge obsolescence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the strongest baseline by *+6.46* accuracy points on average across five benchmarks and five LLM backbones. |
NoisyTune: A Little Noise Can Help You Finetune Pretrained Language Models Better (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for finetuning pretrained language models (PLMs) have risks in overfitting the pretraining tasks and data, which may lead to suboptimal performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which adds noise to parameters of PLMs before fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used on GLUE English and XTREME multilingual benchmarks. |
Mitigate Position Bias in LLMs via Scaling a Single Hidden States Channel (2025.findings-acl)
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Yijiong Yu, Huiqiang Jiang, Xufang Luo, Qianhui Wu, Chin-Yew Lin, Dongsheng Li, Yuqing Yang, Yongfeng Huang, Lili Qiu
| Challenge: | Long-context language models exhibit position bias, also known as "lost in the middle" research shows that even long-contemporary LLMs fail to utilize all context information effectively . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate position bias by scaling positional hidden states . they propose to use a channel of hidden states to modify positional Hidden states a LCLM's positional bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve performance by 15.2% in a "lost in the middle" benchmark. |
DA-Transformer: Distance-aware Transformer (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that capture token distances are not optimal for modeling the orders and relations of contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a distance-aware Transformer that can exploit the real distances between tokens to re-scale the raw self-attention weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing Transformer and its variants on five benchmark datasets and can improve the performance of many tasks. |
KnowVrDU: A Unified Knowledge-aware Prompt-Tuning Framework for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
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Yunqi Zhang, Yubo Chen, Jingzhe Zhu, Jinyu Xu, Shuai Yang, Zhaoliang Wu, Liang Huang, Yongfeng Huang, Shuai Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating layout and image features into pre-training language models are not suitable for few-shot settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to reformulate VrDU tasks into a single question-answering format with task-specific prompts and train the pre-trained model with the parameter-efficient prompt tuning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used in few-shot settings and reduces data requirements. |
Knowledge Poisoning Attacks on Medical Multi-Modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Peiru Yang, Haoran Zheng, Tong Ju, Shiting Wang, Wanchun Ni, Jiajun Liu, Shangguang Wang, Yongfeng Huang, Tao Qi
| Challenge: | Existing studies have investigated knowledge poisoning attacks in medical RAG systems . knowledge poison attacks can disrupt model outputs and undermine system reliability . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge poisoning framework that injects misinformation into textual data . they propose to use paired visual data as a query-agnostic trigger to promote retrieval . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces clinically plausible but incorrect generations on five LLMs and datasets. |
Attentive Pooling with Learnable Norms for Text Representation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing pooling methods that use fixed pooling norms may not be optimal for learning text representations in different tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn pooling norms in an end-to-end manner to automatically find the optimal ones for text representation in different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on four benchmark datasets on a neural NLP model. |
Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers? (2025.coling-main)
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Mingyu Jin, Qinkai Yu, Jingyuan Huang, Qingcheng Zeng, Zhenting Wang, Wenyue Hua, Haiyan Zhao, Kai Mei, Yanda Meng, Kaize Ding, Fan Yang, Mengnan Du, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks, but mechanisms by which they encode tasks of varying complexity remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to explore the possibility that LLMs process concepts in different layers . they propose to categorize concepts based on their level of abstraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process complex concepts in shallow layers, the authors show . the proposed model could be used to prob complex tasks in shallow ones . |
One Teacher is Enough? Pre-trained Language Model Distillation from Multiple Teachers (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have huge model sizes and computational complexity, making it difficult to deploy them to low-latency and high-concurrence online systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-teacher knowledge distillation framework for pre-trained language model compression that can train high-quality student model from multiple teacher PLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can train high-quality student model from multiple teacher PLMs with shared pooling and prediction layers to align output space for better collaborative teaching. |
HieRec: Hierarchical User Interest Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods learn a single user embedding for each user from their previous behaviors to represent their overall interest. Existing methods only learn 'one' embeddable representation vectors to model user interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a news recommendation method with hierarchical user interest modeling that captures user interest in news rather than a single user embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can better capture multi-grained user interest in news. |
Learning Reasoning Patterns for Relational Triple Extraction with Mutual Generation of Text and Graph (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on learning text patterns from explicit mentions but failed to extract the implicitly implied triples. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct a relational graph from a sentence and apply multi-layer graph convolutions to capture the type inference logic of the paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can find multi-hop reasoning paths and capture type inference logic with the sentence's supplementary relational expressions. |
Thought-Action Graph Reasoning: Faithful and Efficient Reasoning of Large Language Models via Reusing Past Experience (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhixiao Qi, Feng Huang, Yunqi Zhang, Shijie Zhang, Qingqing Sun, Yongfeng Huang, Minghu Jiang, Shuai Chen, Tianyi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating knowledge graphs with LLMs suffer from poor generalization or low reasoning efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a thought-action Graph (TAG) that decomposes LLM-KG interaction trajectories into fine-grained semantic operators and guides LLM to execute on them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on KGQA benchmarks while reducing the number of LLM calls and generated tokens. |
Provably Secure Generative Linguistic Steganography (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of linguistic steganography generate high-security stegotext with statistical differences between the conditional probability distributions of stegot and natural text, which brings about security risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which embeds secret information by Adaptive Dynamic Grouping of tokens according to their probability given by an off-the-shelf language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates steganographic text with perfect security . it is based on three public corpora and proves its security based upon mathematical tests . |
Hi-Transformer: Hierarchical Interactive Transformer for Efficient and Effective Long Document Modeling (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to model long documents are difficult due to the quadratic complexity of text length. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical interactive Transformer for efficient long document modeling. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets validate the efficiency and effectiveness of Hi-Transformer in long document modeling. |
Two Birds with One Stone: Unified Model Learning for Both Recall and Ranking in News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommender systems conduct news recall and ranking separately with different models, but maintaining multiple models leads to high computational cost and high latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified method for recall and ranking in news recommendation that uses historical news click behaviors to extract user embeddings for ranking from the user's attention query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves recall and ranking efficiency and effectiveness on a benchmark dataset. |
Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Hierarchical Knowledge (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Haoyu Huang, Yongfeng Huang, Yang Junjie, Zhenyu Pan, Yongqiang Chen, Kaili Ma, Hongzhi Chen, James Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing RAG methods do not utilize hierarchical knowledge in human cognition, which limits the capabilities of RAG systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based approach that utilizes hierarchical knowledge to enhance the semantic understanding and structure capturing capabilities of RAG systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art methods. |
Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | despite their extensive context window, long-context language models fail in some basic cases . a recent study shows that long-cot methods are not necessary for long-constituency tasks . |
| Approach: | a new study evaluates long-context language models with a large context window . the authors propose a method that can be well addressed with arbitrary reasoning steps . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. |
PTUM: Pre-training User Model from Unlabeled User Behaviors via Self-supervision (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for user modeling cannot exploit useful information in unlabeled data . Existing models only model task-specific user information and do not exploit universal user information encoded in user behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train user models from large-scale unlabeled user behavior data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can model relatedness between historical and future behaviors on two real-world datasets. |
Jointly Extracting Explicit and Implicit Relational Triples with Reasoning Pattern Enhanced Binary Pointer Network (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relational triple extraction ignore implicit triples that lack explicit expressions, leading to incomplete knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a binary pointer network to extract explicit and implicit relational triples from sentences and to retain the information of extracted triples in an external memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extracts overlapping triples relevant to each word sequentially and retains the information of extracted triples in an external memory. |
PP-Rec: News Recommendation with Personalized User Interest and Time-aware News Popularity (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized news recommendation methods have difficulties in making accurate recommendations to cold-start users. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate news popularity information to improve cold-start recommendations . they propose to use a popularity-aware user encoder to eliminate popularity bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and diversity of personalized news recommendation on two real-world datasets. |
SentiRec: Sentiment Diversity-aware Neural News Recommendation (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods rank candidate news based on relevance to users’ historical browsed news, but if browsed data is dominated by certain kinds of sentiment, the model may recommend news with the same sentiment. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentiment diversity-aware neural news recommendation approach which can recommend news with more diverse sentiment without performance sacrifices. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can improve the sentiment diversity in news recommendation without performance sacrifice. |
Neural News Recommendation with Multi-Head Self-Attention (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Precisely modeling news and users is critical for news recommendation, and capturing the contexts of words and news is important to learn news and user representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural news recommendation approach with multi-head self-attention to model the interactions between words and news and use multi-headed self- attention to capture relatedness between the news. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can learn representations from news titles by modeling the interactions between words and users and capture relatedness between the news. |
MemRec: Collaborative Memory-Augmented Agentic Recommender System (2026.acl-long)
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Weixin Chen, Yuhan Zhao, Jingyuan Huang, Zihe Ye, Mingxuan Ju, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Li Chen, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing recommender systems rely on semantic user and item memories to make predictions, but these memories are kept in isolation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that architecturally decouples memory management from reasoning to decouple memory management and reasoning from the user and item memories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples memory management from reasoning and achieves state-of-the-art performance on four benchmarks. |
Neural News Recommendation with Topic-Aware News Representation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning accurate news representations do not consider topic information in news. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural news recommendation approach with topic-aware news representations using CNN networks and attention networks to select important words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on a topic-aware news encoder and user encoder. |
Triad: A Framework Leveraging a Multi-Role LLM-based Agent to Solve Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances with LLMs have shown promising results across various tasks, but their use in answering questions from knowledge bases remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes an LLM-based agent with multiple roles for KBQA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the LC-QuAD and YAGO-QA benchmarks yielding F1 scores of 11.8% and 20.7%, respectively. |
Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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Xinyu Zhu, Junjie Wang, Lin Zhang, Yuxiang Zhang, Yongfeng Huang, Ruyi Gan, Jiaxing Zhang, Yujiu Yang
| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) can be used to solve math word problems, but they lack fast adaptivity as humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving the math word problem . they use system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier to generate reasoning paths . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieves 9.6% improvement over baselines. |
DebiasGAN: Eliminating Position Bias in News Recommendation with Adversarial Learning (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods use click behaviors for interest inference and model training, but position biases can be inaccurate in targeting user interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a news recommendation method that eliminates position biases by adversarial learning by a candidate-aware click model and a bias-invariant click model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively alleviate position biases on click behaviors and capture unbiased user interest. |
RelU-Net: Syntax-aware Graph U-Net for Relational Triple Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on capturing semantic information but failed to incorporate syntactic structures of the sentence, which is proved to contain rich relational information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture syntactic information for relational triple extraction by contracting dependency tree into a core relational topology and eliminating redundant information with graph pooling operations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates syntactic information for relational triple extraction. |
H-Mem: Hybrid Multi-Dimensional Memory Management for Long-Context Conversational Agents (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for long-context conversational agents struggle to organize information across dimensions like time and topic, leading to poor retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hybrid Multi-Dimensional Memory architecture that stores conversational facts in two parallel hierarchical data structures: a temporal tree that organizes information chronologically and a semantic tree that arranges it conceptually. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture improves performance on long-context QA datasets by 8.4% compared to current systems. |
Named Entity Recognition in Multi-level Contexts (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition are unsatisfactory for recognizing entities in limited or ambiguous sentence-level contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to incorporate multi-level contexts for named entity recognition using TagLM as a baseline model and an auxiliary task to mine word-level contextual information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a set of sentence-level contexts and a document-level task to mine word-level contextual information. |
ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Qiming Peng, Yinxu Pan, Wenjin Wang, Bin Luo, Zhenyu Zhang, Zhengjie Huang, Yuhui Cao, Weichong Yin, Yongfeng Chen, Yin Zhang, Shikun Feng, Yu Sun, Hao Tian, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for visually rich document understanding lack layout-centered knowledge . experimental results show that ERNIE-Layout improves layout awareness . |
| Approach: | They propose a document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on key downstream tasks. |
NewsBERT: Distilling Pre-trained Language Model for Intelligent News Application (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models are pre-trained and distilled on general corpus like Wikipedia, which has gaps with the news domain and may be suboptimal for news intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to distill existing language models on Wikipedia to enable efficient news intelligence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to build and test a news intelligence application on Wikipedia and Wikipedia. |
MVP-Tuning: Multi-View Knowledge Retrieval with Prompt Tuning for Commonsense Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense reasoning rely on multi-hop knowledge retrieval and suffer low accuracy due toembedded noise in the acquired knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-hop knowledge retrieval to model knowledge and input text together. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on 5 commonsense reasoning datasets and is number one on theleaderboard. |
CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Yanyang Li, Jianqiao Zhao, Duo Zheng, Zi-Yuan Hu, Zhi Chen, Xiaohui Su, Yongfeng Huang, Shijia Huang, Dahua Lin, Michael Lyu, Liwei Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based platform that assesses Chinese LLMs using a standardized workflow and a unique sampling strategy. |
| Outcome: | CLEVA evaluates Chinese LLMs on a standardized workflow and a competitive leaderboard with minimal coding. |