Papers by Yu Rong
Towards Self-Evolving Agents: Enabling Autonomy through Interactive Experience Refinement (2026.findings-acl)
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Cheng Yang, Xuemeng Yang, Licheng Wen, Daocheng Fu, Jianbiao Mei, Rong Wu, Pinlong Cai, Yufan Shen, Nianchen Deng, Jia Xu, Botian Shi, Yu Qiao, Haifeng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models struggle with complex, multi-step operational tasks because they remain static during inference and cannot learn from past experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that organizes cross-domain insights to facilitate orchestration of long-horizon workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on the TAC productivity benchmark and shows strong cross-task transferability. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Attention Mechanism with Energy-Friendly Operations (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that attention mechanism can be improved from the energy consumption aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace multiplications with either selective operations or additions to reduce energy consumption. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitable accuracy while saving 99% and 66% energy during alignment calculation and the whole attention procedure. |
ReasonMed: A 370K Multi-Agent Generated Dataset for Advancing Medical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yu Sun, Xingyu Qian, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Chenghao Xiao, Long Li, Deli Zhao, Wenbing Huang, Tingyang Xu, Qifeng Bai, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Existing medical reasoning datasets are limited in scale and typically rely on incomplete data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ReasonMed to train medical reasoning models using a multi-agent generation, verification, and refinement pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The largest medical reasoning dataset to date surpasses the prior best sub-10B models by 4.17% and even exceeds LLaMA3.1-70B on PubMedQA by 4.60%. |
Fixing Distribution Shifts of LLM Self-Critique via On-Policy Self-Play Training (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models show impressive performance in a wide range of linguistic tasks, but their performance on complex reasoning tasks is still signif-icantly lower than the human level. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework to synchronize the reasoning and critique capabilities of language models by using Monte Carlo sampling to give appropriate rewards to the model's critique content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the model's reasoning and critique capabilities by 5.40 and 3.66 points, respectively, compared to the best baseline approach. |
Analyzing LLMs’ Knowledge Boundary Cognition Across Languages Through the Lens of Internal Representations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Understanding the knowledge boundaries of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial to prevent hallucination, but research on the knowledge boundary perceptions of LLMs has predominantly focused on English. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free alignment method that effectively transfers knowledge boundary perception ability across languages, thereby helping reduce hallucination risk in low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination risk in low-resource languages by fine-tuning on bilingual question pair translation. |
Be Selfish, But Wisely: Investigating the Impact of Agent Personality in Mixed-Motive Human-Agent Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | A natural way to design a negotiation dialogue system is via self-play RL: train an agent that learns to maximize its performance by interacting with a simulated user that has been designed to imitate human-human dialogue data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use RL to train an agent that learns to maximize its performance by interacting with a simulated user that has been designed to imitate human-human dialogue data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system fails to learn the value of compromise in a negotiation, which can lead to no agreements, and ultimately hurt the model's overall performance. |
Disentangling Language and Culture for Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive evaluations of large language models (LLMs) are conducted on a wide range of models, revealing a notable cultural-linguistic synergy phenomenon, where models exhibit better performance when questions are culturally aligned with the language. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual Evaluation Framework to comprehensively assess the multilingual capabilities of large language models by decomposing evaluation along dimensions of linguistic medium and cultural context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows for a nuanced analysis of LLMs’ ability to process questions within both native and cross-cultural contexts cross-lingually. |
Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent retrieval-augmented generation approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability . they find different retrievers exhibit distinct optimal query styles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves training stability and improves retrieval-aware systems. |
FineReason: Evaluating and Improving LLMs’ Deliberate Reasoning through Reflective Puzzle Solving (2025.acl-long)
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Guizhen Chen, Weiwen Xu, Hao Zhang, Hou Pong Chan, Chaoqun Liu, Lidong Bing, Deli Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Yu Rong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) highlight an important shift from the “System 1” way of quick reactions to the “system 2” style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a logic-puzzle benchmark for systematic evaluation of large language models' reasoning capabilities that decomposes each puzzle into atomic steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on state checking and state transition tasks and demonstrates gains in reasoning by up to 5.1%. |
Learning to Generalize to More: Continuous Semantic Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) tasks require large amounts of parallel data to augment training. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation paradigm that augments each training instance with an adjacency semantic region that could cover adequate variants of literal expression under the same meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm improves on the state-of-the-art in supervised neural machine translation tasks. |
GeoPQA: Bridging the Visual Perception Gap in MLLMs for Geometric Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models, but the impact on multimodal LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage RL framework that enhances visual perception and fosters reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves geometric reasoning by 9.7% and problem-solving by 9.1% compared to direct reasoning training approach. |
A Survey of Large Language Model-Based Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Yunjia Xi, Jianghao Lin, Yongzhao Xiao, Zheli Zhou, Rong Shan, Te Gao, Jiachen Zhu, Weiwen Liu, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized web search, but their integration is static and cannot handle complex contexts. |
| Approach: | They analyze existing research and analyze existing work from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can comprehend user intentions and context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. |
A Comprehensive Survey of Process Reward Models: Data Generation, Model Construction, and Usage (2026.acl-long)
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Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan, Zeyu Zheng, Mengyue Yang, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains dominated by outcome reward models that judge only final answers. |
| Approach: | They summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents . goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables finer credit assignment, richer diagnostics, and improved robustness. |
Scaling Law for Multimodal Large Language Model Supervised Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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YiFan Zhang, Tao Yu, Feng Li, Chaoyou Fu, Yibo Hu, Kun Wang, Qingsong Wen, Zhang Zhang, Liang Wang, Rong Jin
| Challenge: | supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is crucial for multimodal large language models, yet a comprehensive scaling law is lacking . et al.: scaling laws focus on model size, pre-training tokens, and MLLM SFT data volumes . |
| Approach: | They propose two scaling laws to guide optimal model-data configuration . they propose one applicable when training data volumes are well defined by researchers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws provide valuable recommendations for optimal resource allocation . they show that the proposed laws are more accurate than existing models . |
Generation Meets Verification: Accelerating Large Language Model Inference with Smart Parallel Auto-Correct Decoding (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models generate tokens sequentially and are memory-bound, resulting in a memory-based inference stage that is memory-limited. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to accelerate the inference speed of large language models with billions of parameters by integrating semi-autoregressive inference and speculative decoding capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach has demonstrated inference speedups of 2.7x-4.0x on humanEval-X while maintaining output quality. |