Papers by Yuan Qi

44 papers
Self-Criticism: Aligning Large Language Models with their Understanding of Helpfulness, Honesty, and Harmlessness (2023.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have shown that large language models are useful, honest, harmless (HHH) however, RLHF requires high hardware resources and human efforts.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows LLMs to align themselves with HHH . they use IF and reinforcement learning from human feedback to fine-tune their models .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves similar performance to RLHF and human-generated models with a minimal alignment tax.
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors.
Approach: They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios.
ULMR: Unlearning Large Language Models via Negative Response and Model Parameter Average (2024.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have attracted significant interest from the research community due to their broad applicability in many language-oriented tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework which uses pre-training datasets to rewrite instructions and generate negative responses to preserve the performance of the original LLM.
Outcome: The proposed framework can erase the pre-training data while maintaining the performance of the original model.
On LLM-Based Scientific Inductive Reasoning Beyond Equations (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research on inductive reasoning models emphasizes rule design without grounding them in specific scenarios.
Approach: They propose to use LLMs to learn underlying patterns from limited examples in entirely new environments.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates the inductive reasoning abilities of large language models in scientific settings.
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored.
Approach: They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency.
Infinity-Parser: Layout-Aware Reinforcement Learning with High-quality Document Parsing Dataset (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing supervised fine-tuning methods struggle to generalize across document types, leading to poor performance.
Approach: They propose layoutRL, a reinforcement learning framework that optimizes layout understanding through composite rewards integrating normalized edit distance, paragraph count accuracy, and reading order preservation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms specialized document parsing systems and general-purpose vision-language models on a broad range of document types, languages, and structural complexities.
MCS: An In-battle Commentary System for MOBA Games (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: In-battle commentary is an important component of live streaming of e-sports competitions and is applicable to a wide range of scenarios like combat information analysis and live streaming.
Approach: They propose a generative system for in-battle real-time commentary in mobile MOBA games and propose 'transform' method to convert match statistics and utterances into consistent encoding space.
Outcome: The proposed system is based on real-time match statistics and events and can be used for live streaming, e-sports commentary and combat information analysis.
Turn the Combination Lock: Learnable Textual Backdoor Attacks via Word Substitution (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies show that neural natural language processing models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks.
Approach: They propose to inject neural models with backdoors activated by word substitution . their results raise a serious alarm to the security of NLP models, they argue .
Outcome: The proposed backdoors are activated by a learnable combination of word substitution and exhibit higher invisibility than previous methods.
Word-level Textual Adversarial Attacking as Combinatorial Optimization (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing word-level attack models are far from perfect because of unsuitable search space reduction methods and inefficient optimization algorithms.
Approach: They propose a novel adversarial adversarialist model that incorporates word substitution and particle swarm optimization to solve two problems separately.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves much higher success rates and crafts more high-quality adversarial examples as compared to baseline methods.
ONION: A Simple and Effective Defense Against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2021.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Backdoor attacks can manipulate the output of deep neural networks and possess high insidiousness.
Approach: They propose a textual backdoor defense based on outlier word detection that can handle all the textual attacks.
Outcome: The proposed method can handle all the textual backdoor attack situations.
Leveraging Argumentation Knowledge Graph for Interactive Argument Pair Identification (2021.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing researches focus on sentence matching but the interaction of opinions requires reasoning of knowledge, which is beyond textual information.
Approach: They propose to leverage external knowledge to enhance the identification of interactive argument pairs by analyzing the discussion thread of the target topic in an online forum.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the benchmark dataset.
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models by Self-Injecting Hallucinations (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection.
Approach: a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies.
Outcome: a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation.
Evaluating LLMs’ Assessment of Mixed-Context Hallucination Through the Lens of Summarization (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models generate coherent text and follow instructions across diverse tasks, but a critical challenge in scaling LLM applications is hallucination, where the generated content lacks factual grounding or deviates from the intended discourse context.
Approach: They use summarization as a representative task to evaluate LLMs' capability in detecting mixed-context hallucinations, specifically distinguishing between factual and non-factual hallucinos.
Outcome: The proposed model distinguishes between factual and non-factual hallucinations, and their performance bottlenecks.
TEF: Causality-Aware Taxonomy Expansion via Front-Door Criterion (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing research still faces spurious query-anchor matching due to unobserved factors.
Approach: They propose a model that uses the front-door criteria to decompose the expansion process into a parser module and a connector to isolate confounding effects.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on three benchmarks validate the effectiveness of the proposed model.
PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current outcome-centric verification paradigms neglect potential errors in the derivation process.
Approach: They propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms the baseline verification paradigm on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME models.
OpenAttack: An Open-source Textual Adversarial Attack Toolkit (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Various attack models are distinct and implemented with different programming frameworks and settings, which hinders quick utilization and fair comparison of attack models.
Approach: They propose an open-source textual adversarial attack toolkit to solve these issues by combining 15 typical attack models into one toolkit.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit supports all attack types, multilinguality, and parallel processing.
PILLOW: Enhancing Efficient Instruction Fine-tuning via Prompt Matching (2023.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) has been used to adapt Large Language Models to a variety of tasks, but it requires substantial computational resources to perform.
Approach: They propose a low-rank adaptive learning approach that leverages LoRA's in-context learning capability through prompt matching via reinforcement learning in resource-constrained environments.
Outcome: The proposed model improves LoRA performance on evaluation metrics and utilises consumer-grade GPU resources.
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints.
Approach: They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration.
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs.
Can LLMs Simulate L2-English Dialogue? An Information-Theoretic Analysis of L1-Dependent Biases (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners interfered with by their native first language (N1) knowledge.
Approach: They use large language models to simulate non-native-like English use observed in human second language (L2) learners, and then compare their outputs to real L2 learner data.
Outcome: The proposed models replicate L1-dependent patterns observed in human second language (L2) learners, with distinct influences from various languages.
DiffuVST: Narrating Fictional Scenes with Global-History-Guided Denoising Models (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for visual storytelling suffer from low inference speed and are not well-suited for synthetic scenes.
Approach: They propose a diffusion-based system that generates visual descriptions as a single conditional denoising process.
Outcome: The proposed system improves inter-sentence coherence and image-to-text fidelity.
Unified Dual-view Cognitive Model for Interpretable Claim Verification (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies constructing direct interactions between the claim and each single user response to capture evidence have shown remarkable success in interpretable claim verification.
Approach: They propose a Dual-view model based on the views of Collective and Individual Cognition (CICD) that captures word-level semantics based . on individual cognition, they adjust the proportion between them to generate global evidence.
Outcome: The proposed model is based on the views of collective and individual cognition and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation.
Approach: They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP.
Do LLMs Overcome Shortcut Learning? An Evaluation of Shortcut Challenges in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various tasks, but may rely on dataset biases as shortcuts for prediction.
Approach: They propose to use a test suite to evaluate the impact of shortcuts on LLMs' performance.
Outcome: The proposed test suite incorporates six shortcut types, five evaluation metrics, and four prompting strategies.
R3-RAG: Learning Step-by-Step Reasoning and Retrieval for LLMs via Reinforcement Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: RAG systems that integrate external knowledge with Large Language Models often become bottlenecks due to their limited parameters compared to LLMs and their inability to perform step-by-step reasoning.
Approach: They propose a model that integrates external knowledge with Large Language Models to enhance factual correctness and mitigate hallucination.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and can transfer well to different retrievers.
Unveiling the Deficiencies of Pre-trained Text-and-Layout Models in Real-world Visually-rich Document Information Extraction (2026.findings-eacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: PTLMs have shown remarkable success in multiple information extraction tasks . however, their performance in real-world scenarios falls short of expectations .
Approach: They propose to use an entity-centric dataset to evaluate PTLMs' performance . they find that inadequate annotations in benchmark datasets lead to spurious correlations .
Outcome: The proposed dataset disentangles the falsely-coupled segment and entity annotations that arises from the block-level annotation of FUNSD.
Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models of layout reading order do not convey the complete reading order information in the layout.
Approach: They propose to model layout reading order as ordering relations over layout elements . they propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on a visual-rich document dataset and on eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA tasks without targeted optimization.
Parameter-Aware Contrastive Knowledge Editing: Tracing and Rectifying based on Critical Transmission Paths (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of knowledge in their parameters, but the acquired knowledge can be incorrect or outdated over time, necessitating rectification after pre-training.
Approach: They propose a method that captures key information flows that influence model predictions . they propose 'critical transmission paths' to improve model editing .
Outcome: The proposed method improves on two prominent datasets and three widely used LLMs.
CENTAUR: Bridging the Impossible Trinity of Privacy, Efficiency, and Performance in Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing privacy-preserving Transformer Inference frameworks suffer from high computational overhead and performance losses.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates random permutations and SMPC to address the "impossible trinity" CENTAUR resists diverse data reconstruction attacks and boosts inference speed by 5.030.4 times .
Outcome: CENTAUR achieves an unprecedented balance between privacy, efficiency, and performance.
SaFER: A Robust and Efficient Framework for Fine-tuning BERT-based Classifier with Noisy Labels (2023.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing noise-handling methods could not improve performance of BERT on noisy datasets . existing methods could only improve performance on noisy data, authors say .
Approach: They propose a fine-tuning framework for BERT-based text classifiers that combats label noises without access to clean data for training or validation.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior performance on multiple text classification benchmarks.
OpenCoder: The Open Cookbook for Top-Tier Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Code LLMs lack reproducible data pipelines and training protocols for reproducible advancements in code intelligence.
Approach: They propose a top-tier code LLM that releases model weights and inference code . reproducible data pipelines, rigorous experimental ablation results and training protocols are included .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable performance to leading models and serves as an "open cookbook" reproducible training data, rigorous experimental ablation results, and detailed training protocols are also included in the model.
SpellGCN: Incorporating Phonological and Visual Similarities into Language Models for Chinese Spelling Check (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese take external input or just heuristic rules.
Approach: They propose to incorporate phonological and visual similarity knowledge into Chinese language models by using a specialized graph convolutional network.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing models on three human-annotated datasets.
Towards Better Entity Linking with Multi-View Enhanced Distillation (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Entity linking is a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), connecting mentions within unstructured contexts to their corresponding entities in a Knowledge Base (KB).
Approach: They propose a dual-encoder framework that can efficiently match mentions to two-encoding frameworks by a global-view.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on several entity linking benchmarks.
Harnessing Negative Signals: Reinforcement Distillation from Teacher Data for LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in model distillation show that data from advanced reasoning models can effectively train smaller student models.
Approach: They propose a method to use both positive and negative distilled reasoning traces to maximize LLM reasoning performance in offline settings.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing methods in the distillation context.
Try to Substitute: An Unsupervised Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation Method Based on HowNet (2020.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing unsupervised methods for word sense disambiguation cannot work for HowNet-based WSD because of its uniqueness.
Approach: They propose a method which exploits the masked language model task of pre-trained language models to conduct word sense disambiguation using a lexical knowledge base as the sense inventory.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves significantly better performance than baseline methods.
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: evolving generic Large Language Models into specialized Large Reasoning Models requires effective post-training.
Approach: They propose a plasticity-ceiling framework to harness expert trajectories . they establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard .
Outcome: The proposed framework overcomes stability and premature convergence deficits in synchronized approaches.
GuideLLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing (2025.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated their effectiveness in human-guided dialogues, but tasks in the real world are more complex and require greater autonomy from LLMs.
Approach: They propose to characterize LLM-guided conversation into three fundamental components: Goal Navigation, Context Management, Empathetic Engagement and implement an interviewing environment for the evaluation of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed LLM outperforms baseline LLMs in interviewing quality and autobiography generation quality.
Few-shot Intent Classification and Slot Filling with Retrieved Examples (2021.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for few-shot learning are based on labeled examples, but they are non-trivial . few-sshot learning is challenging due to the imbalance in the amount of data between the source and target domains.
Approach: They propose retrieval-based methods for intent classification and slot filling tasks . they use a batch-softmax objective to learn similar contextualized representations for spans .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms previous systems on the CLINC and SNIPS benchmarks.
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families.
QA-Driven Zero-shot Slot Filling with Weak Supervision Pretraining (2021.acl-short)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to predict slots and their values do not encode enough semantic information, limiting the models’ zero-shot capability.
Approach: They propose a QA-driven slot filling model which extracts slot-filler spans from utterances with a span-based QA model.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines by over 5% on the SNIPS benchmark.
PrivLM-Bench: A Multi-level Privacy Evaluation Benchmark for Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: generative large language models (LLMs) exhibit surprising capability and integrate previous tasks into a unified text generation formulation.
Approach: They propose a privacy evaluation benchmark to quantify the privacy leakage of language models.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark compares PPLMs with different privacy implementations to find out how privacy leakage is handled.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
Named Entity Recognition in Multi-level Contexts (2020.aacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Controllable Memory Usage: Balancing Anchoring and Innovation in Long-Term Human–Agent Interaction (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing systems that use memory as an "all-or-nothing" approach to memory usage are often static and rely on experience-following tendencies.
Approach: They propose a framework that allows users to dynamically regulate memory reliance by adding context into the model's prompt.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms prompting and memory masking strategies in multiple scenarios.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations