Papers by Yuan Zeng
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
AdDriftBench: A Benchmark for Detecting Data Drift and Label Drift in Short Video Advertising (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yinghao Song, Xiangji Zeng, Shuai Cui, Lu Sun, Zhaowei Liu, Yuan Yuan, Yulu Wang, Hai Zhou, Zhaohan Gong
| Challenge: | Short video advertising scenarios present unique challenges due to data drift (DD) and label drift (LD). |
| Approach: | They propose to use data drift and label drift to evaluate models under rapidly shifting content distributions and labeling scenarios to assess their generalization capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs moderately in short video advertising contexts, particularly in handling fine-grained semantics and adapting to shifting instructions. |
Modeling Conceptual Attribute Likeness and Domain Inconsistency for Metaphor Detection (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Metaphor detection aims to distinguish between metaphorical and literal expressions in text. |
| Approach: | They propose an attribute likeness and domain inconsistency learning framework for wordpair metaphor detection based on conceptual metaphor theory . they model attribute likeity with an attribute siamese network and devise a domain contrastive learning strategy to learn semantic inconsistentness of concepts in source and target domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing word-pair and token-level methods on four datasets. |
DRAMA: Dynamic Multi-Granularity Graph Estimate Retrieval over Tabular and Textual Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | TableTextQA tasks require tabular and textual data, gaining increasing attention . however, row-based approaches suffer from limitations such as lack of interaction between rows . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates an interaction mechanism among multiple rows . Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model is effective on tabFact and HybridQA datasets. |
Data Efficient RLVR via Off-Policy Influence Guidance (2026.acl-long)
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Erle Zhu, Dazhi Jiang, Yuan Wang, Xujun Li, Jiale Cheng, Yuxian Gu, Yilin Niu, Aohan Zeng, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang, Hongning Wang
| Challenge: | Existing data selection methods for RLVR are heuristic-based, lacking theoretical guarantees and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose an off-policy influence estimation method that approximates data influence using offline trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational cost of policy rollouts and improves storage and computation efficiency. |
i-Code V2: An Autoregressive Generation Framework over Vision, Language, and Speech Data (2024.findings-naacl)
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Ziyi Yang, Mahmoud Khademi, Yichong Xu, Reid Pryzant, Yuwei Fang, Chenguang Zhu, Dongdong Chen, Yao Qian, Xuemei Gao, Yi-Ling Chen, Robert Gmyr, Naoyuki Kanda, Noel Codella, Bin Xiao, Yu Shi, Lu Yuan, Takuya Yoshioka, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | i-Code V2 is one of the first models capable of generating natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Approach: | They propose to create a model that can generate natural language from any combination of Vision, Language, and Speech data. |
| Outcome: | i-Code V2 matches or outperforms state-of-the-art single- and dual-modality baselines on 7 multimodal tasks. |
Beyond Black-Box Interventions: Latent Probing for Faithful Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Linfeng Gao, Qinggang Zhang, Baolong Bi, Bo Zeng, Zheng Yuan, Zerui Chen, Zhimin Wei, Shenghua Liu, Linlong Xu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve contextual faithfulness treat the LLM as a black box, generating responses that are inconsistent with the provided context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for faithful RAG that operates in three stages: (i) fine-grained knowledge pruning to filter irrelevant context, (ii) latent conflict probing to identify hard conflicts in the model’s latent space, and (iv) conflict-aware attention to modulate attention heads toward faithful context integration. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ProbeRAG significantly improves both accuracy and contextual faithfulness. |
Whispers that Shake Foundations: Analyzing and Mitigating False Premise Hallucinations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate hallucinated text when confronted with false premise questions . authors propose a method to mitigate false premises hallucinosity . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to constrain false premise attention heads during the model inference process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance by constraining false premise attention heads . it yields a notable increase of nearly 20% of model performance . |
Dr. Assistant: Enhancing Clinical Diagnostic Inquiry via Structured Diagnostic Reasoning Data and Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Guo, Fanfu Wang, Jianwei Lv, Xincheng Shi, Yuchen Li, Youya Wang, Yunsheng Zeng, Yujing Liu, Yunhao Qiao, Gen Li, Junfeng Wang, Bo Yuan
| Challenge: | Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSSs) provide reasoning and inquiry guidance for physicians, yet they face high maintenance costs and low generalization capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a clinical diagnostic model with clinical reasoning and inquiry skills, the Dr. Assistant, and a pipeline to capture abstract reasoning logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models and achieves competitive performance to closed-source model. |
History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for Multi-session Open-domain Dialogue System (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain dialogue systems conduct one-session conversations, but multi-session MSCs are under-investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose a History-Aware Hierarchical Transformer for multi-session open-domain dialogue . they propose to encode history conversations into a history memory and leverage historical information to generate well-informed responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on a large-scale MSC dataset. |
BizCompass: Benchmarking the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Business Knowledge and Applications (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on narrow tasks and leave a fundamental question unanswered . Existing models only focus on specific tasks, requiring rigorous reasoning and knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to connect theoretical foundations with practical business knowledge and applications. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark systematically evaluates both open-source and commercial LLMs . it reveals how theoretical knowledge translates into practical performance in business . |
OpenAttack: An Open-source Textual Adversarial Attack Toolkit (2021.acl-demo)
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Guoyang Zeng, Fanchao Qi, Qianrui Zhou, Tingji Zhang, Zixian Ma, Bairu Hou, Yuan Zang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| 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. |
Multi-View Incongruity Learning for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection (2025.coling-main)
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Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Yanbing Liu, Guangjie Zeng, Xiaoyan Yu, Hao Peng, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sarcasm detection rely on spurious correlations, demonstrating poor generalizability beyond training environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates multimodal incongruities via contrastive learning for multimodal sarcasm detection by using three views to drive multi-view learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on benchmark datasets and shows that it is more generalizable than existing methods. |
Protecting Privacy in Multimodal Large Language Models with MLLMU-Bench (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language models (MLLMs) trained on vast web corpora can memorize and disclose individuals’ confidential and private data, raising legal and ethical concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess unlearning algorithms from multiple perspectives and provide a baseline for existing generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 500 fictitious profiles and 153 profiles for public celebrities, evaluated from both multimodal (image+text) and unimodal (text) perspectives. |
Grounded Multimodal Procedural Entity Recognition for Procedural Documents: A New Dataset and Baseline (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract procedural knowledge from documents focus on text-only settings, which is insufficient for entity disambiguation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to detect the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects the entity and the corresponding bounding box groundings in image (i.e., visual entities) it is based on a dataset of a WikiHow 1 and EHow 2 document and the results are compared with existing models. |
Dirichlet Latent Variable Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder in Dialogue Generation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing work assumes the Gaussian priors of the latent variable, which are incapable of representing complex latent variables effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Dirichlet distribution with flexible structures to characterize latent variables in place of the Gaussian priors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on the dialogue generation task. |
RISER: Orchestrating Latent Reasoning Skills for Adaptive Activation Steering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for domain-specific reasoning with large language models require updating parameter updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play intervention framework that adaptively steers LLM reasoning in activation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves zero-shot accuracy improvements of 3.4–6.5% over the base model while outperforming chain-of-thought-style reasoning with 2–3 higher token efficiency and robust accuracy gains. |
KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent legislation of the "right to be forgotten" has led to the interest in machine unlearning . MU can be used to forget specific training instances as if they have never existed . |
| Approach: | They propose a general unlearning framework called KGA to induce forgetfulness . they propose several unlearning evaluation metrics with pertinence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on large-scale datasets and provides insight into unlearning for NLP tasks. |
Global Context or Local Detail? Adaptive Visual Grounding for Hallucination Mitigation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yubo Jiang, Xin Yang, Abudukelimu Wuerkaixi, Zheming Yuan, Xuxin Cheng, Cao Liu, Ke Zeng, Fengying Xie, Zhiguo Jiang, Haopeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large vision–language models suffer from object-existence hallucinations when multi-step deliberation decouples from visual evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates visual computation by uncertainty . they propose highlighting retains global context, while selective zoom-in performs local verification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the complexity of multimodal reasoning by minimizing the operator trade-off. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
Detecting AI-Generated Content on Social Media with Multi-modal Language Models (2026.acl-industry)
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Chenyang Yang, Shen Yan, Yibo Yang, Litao Hu, Yuchen Liu, Yuan Zeng, Hanchao Yu, Yinan Zhu, Sumedha Singla, Brian Vanover, Huijun Qian, Zihao Wang, Fujun Liu, Aashu Singh, Jianyu Wang, Xuewen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for AI-generated content detection face poor generalization to newer models, reliance on single modalities, and lack of interpretable explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that curates diverse social media data and trains a vision-language model for detection and explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art detection performance on public benchmarks and observes positive downstream impacts on user engagement. |
CharTide: Data-Centric Chart-to-Code Generation via Tri-Perspective Tuning and Inquiry-Driven Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangxi Zheng, Kuang He, Jiayi Hu, Ping Yu, Rui Yan, Yuan Yao, Peng Hou, Anxiang Zeng, Alex Jinpeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to chart-to-code generation are constrained by data-centric limitations . authors present a new framework that redesigns both training and alignment data . |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric framework that redesigns both training and alignment data for chart-to-code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source baselines and is competitive with GPT-5. |
i-Code Studio: A Configurable and Composable Framework for Integrative AI (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Yuwei Fang, Mahmoud Khademi, Chenguang Zhu, Ziyi Yang, Reid Pryzant, Yichong Xu, Yao Qian, Takuya Yoshioka, Lu Yuan, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Integrative AI lack flexibility and composability to handle multimodal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a configurable framework for Integrative AI that orchestrates multiple pre-trained models to conduct complex multimodal tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves impressive results on zero-shot multimodal tasks . it can communicate and personalize for users, and it can be used in a multimodal agent . |
An LLM-Enabled Knowledge Elicitation and Retrieval Framework for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Stance Identification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research is conducted in monolingual setting on English datasets, whereas in other low-resource languages, it lacks sufficient data for training quality stance detection models. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge elicitation and retrieval framework that leverages the capability of large language models for stance knowledge acquisition and matches the target language input to the most relevant stance information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on multilingual datasets and competitive baselines. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations. |