Papers by Yongliang Ma
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks. |
SynET: Synonym Expansion using Transitivity (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to find synonyms from text corpora are distributed and pattern based, but they suffer from low precision and low recall. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of synonym expansion using transitivity and propose auxiliary task to reduce the impact of noisy sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces the impact of noisy sentences and reduces noise in a real-world dataset. |
DB-Explore: Automated Database Exploration and Instruction Synthesis for Text-to-SQL (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-SQL systems that use large language models struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | a framework that aligns large language models with database knowledge is proposed . DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas . |
| Outcome: | a new framework outperforms existing text-to-SQL systems by outperforming existing systems. |
Pause or Fabricate? Training Language Models for Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiwen Qiu, Linjuan Wu, Yizhou Liu, Yuchen Yan, Jin Ma, Xu Tan, Yao Hu, Daoxin Zhang, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% . |
Leveraging Outline-Optimized Generative Interactions and Critique for Self-Refining Outlines with Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Logic-RL is a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on FreshWiki and WikiOutline . it can be iteratively applied, with improved quality continuing through three refinement rounds before diminishing returns. |
Logic: Long-form Outline Generation via Imitative and Critical Self-refinement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-form outline generation have low knowledge density and lack detail . retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to maintain logical coherence across retrieved information . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that mimics human writers' refinement process by mimicking outlines through imitation and critical self-refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the FreshWiki and WikiOutline datasets and establishes a coherent planning framework and structured knowledge base. |
Multi-View Reasoning: Consistent Contrastive Learning for Math Word Problem (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex semantics and diverse equations are limited by a fixed view. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning approach that decouples human reasoning into two independent but consistent views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on complex problems on multiple languages. |
UI-Copilot: Advancing Long-Horizon GUI Automation via Tool-Integrated Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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Zhengxi Lu, Fei Tang, Guangyi Liu, Jin Ma, Kaitao Song, Xu Tan, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yueting Zhuang, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
An Expression Tree Decoding Strategy for Mathematical Equation Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate mathematical equations from natural language ignore parallel or dependent relations between math expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate tree structure into the expression-level generation and advocate an expression tree decoding strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods for generating mathematical equations from natural language. |
Locate and Label: A Two-stage Identifier for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates span proposals and labels them with categories . they use boundary information of entities and partially matched spans to locate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on nested NER datasets. |
A Hybrid Detection and Generation Framework with Separate Encoders for Event Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on event extraction tasks has been based on classification-based methods . a new generation-based method is being developed to extract event triggers and event arguments from plain text. |
| Approach: | They propose to use independent encoders to model event detection and event argument extraction, respectively, and use token-level features to precisely control the fusion between two encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids feature interference and achieves joint training . it is compared with other methods and achieved competitive results on standard benchmarks . |
Multimodal Self-Instruct: Synthetic Abstract Image and Visual Reasoning Instruction Using Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenqi Zhang, Zhenglin Cheng, Yuanyu He, Mengna Wang, Yongliang Shen, Zeqi Tan, Guiyang Hou, Mingqian He, Yanna Ma, Weiming Lu, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios. |
Adversarial Self-Supervised Data-Free Distillation for Text Classification (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation algorithms rely on the accessibility of the training dataset, which may be unavailable due to privacy issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-free distillation method for a pre-trained transformer-based model that uses plug & play Embedding Guessing to craft pseudo embeddings from the teacher's hidden knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is the first data-free distillation framework designed for NLP tasks. |