Papers by Yuchen Yan
Do Large Language Models excel in Complex Logical Reasoning with Formal Language? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs have focused on formal language, but evaluations of their performance are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a formal language to evaluate LLMs across logical reasoning problems using formal languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Instruct models in three dimensions, taxonomy of tasks, and format of trajectories, and achieves the best generalization performance across other languages. |
To Answer or Not to Answer (TAONA): A Robust Textual Graph Understanding and Question Answering Approach (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuchen Yan, Aakash Kolekar, Sahika Genc, Wenju Xu, Edward W Huang, Anirudh Srinivasan, Mukesh Jain, Qi He, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Existing studies assume that generated answers integrate all relevant information from the textual graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel GraphRAG model that integrates all relevant information from the textual graph into the generated answer. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments validate TAONA’s superior performance for both A-side and B-side tasks. |
Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Evidence Tree Search (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence retrieval is used to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) but in real-world applications, it often returns lengthy documents with redundant or irrelevant content, confusing downstream readers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates evidence retrieval as a dynamic tree expansion process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five datasets. |
SILC-EFSA: Self-aware In-context Learning Correction for Entity-level Financial Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)
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Senbin Zhu, ChenYuan He, Hongde Liu, Pengcheng Dong, Hanjie Zhao, Yuchen Yan, Yuxiang Jia, Hongying Zan, Min Peng
| Challenge: | Currently, most sentiment analysis corpora use sequence-level annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage approach to financial entity-level sentiment analysis called Self-aware In-context Learning Correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on the largest English and Chinese financial entity-level sentiment analysis datasets to date. |
CodeJudge-Eval: Can Large Language Models be Good Judges in Code Understanding? (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have showcased impressive code generation capabilities, primarily evaluated through language-to-code benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs’ code understanding abilities from the perspective of code judging rather than code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates 12 well-known large language models to determine the correctness of provided code solutions. |
Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT - A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a number of open-source large language models claim to be performing better than commercial ones . however, these models fall short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5 . |
| Approach: | They evaluate six popular large language models against each other to evaluate their performance . authors say open-source models are not as effective as those built by commercial models . |
| Outcome: | a new set of models claim to match or surpass the language understanding abilities of commercial models . the results show that the models performed far below the performance of closed-source models compared to open-source ones . |
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% . |
Adversarial Yet Cooperative: Multi-Perspective Reasoning in Retrieved-Augmented Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Can Xu, Lingyong Yan, Jiayi Wu, Haosen Wang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Yuchen Li, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms rely on outcome-oriented rewards, which provide insufficient signal for shaping the complex, multi-step reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large reasoning models with retrieval-augmented generation to improve reasoning fidelity and verification rigor. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. |
AskToAct: Enhancing LLMs Tool Use via Self-Correcting Clarification (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xuan Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Zhe Zheng, Linjuan Wu, Wenqi Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Qiuying Peng, Jun Wang, Weiming Lu
| Challenge: | Existing tools for ambiguous and incomplete queries are limited by manual construction and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits the mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions by removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. |
LogicPro: Improving Complex Logical Reasoning via Program-Guided Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Jin Jiang, Yuchen Yan, Yang Liu, Jianing Wang, Shuai Peng, Xunliang Cai, Yixin Cao, Mengdi Zhang, Liangcai Gao
| Challenge: | LogicPro is a data synthesis method that uses LeetCode-style algorithm problems and their corresponding Program solutions to generate complex logic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method which leverages LeetCode-style algorithm Problems and their corresponding Program solutions to synthesize complex logic data in text format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models for BBH27, LogicBench, DROP, AR-LSAT, and GSM8K, and a wide range of reasoning datasets. |
CoVerRL: Breaking the Consensus Trap in Label-Free Reasoning via Generator-Verifier Co-Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Teng Pan, Yuchen Yan, Zixuan Wang, Ruiqing Zhang, Guiyang Hou, Wenqi Zhang, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang Shen
| Challenge: | Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision . |
Harnessing Consistency for Robust Test-Time LLM Ensemble (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zhichen Zeng, Qi Yu, Xiao Lin, Ruizhong Qiu, Xuying Ning, Tianxin Wei, Yuchen Yan, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve LLM ensemble quality have focused on model consistency, but failures are often due to heterogeneous tokenization schemes and varying model expertise. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play technique that harnesses model consistency for robust LLM ensemble. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique improves ensemble performance and robustness against erroneous signals. |
MultiCodeAttack: Iterative Jailbreak Attacking on LLMs with Multi-Code Prompt Injection (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to jailbreak rely on fixed template design and a single programming language . however, existing approaches do not consider language diversity or adaptive template evolution . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured jailbreak framework that explores and optimizes multi-language code templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing jailbreak baselines and produces higher harmful outputs than baseline methods. |
Noisy Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Self-Training for Speculative Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Ruijie Wang, Baoyu Li, Yichen Lu, Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Yuchen Yan, Shengzhong Liu, Hanghang Tong, Tarek Abdelzaher
| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods fail in speculative reasoning task on knowledge graphs . state-of the-art approaches assume correctness of fact is determined by its presence in KG . |
| Approach: | They propose a speculative reasoning task on real-world knowledge graphs . they propose nPUGraph that estimates correctness of both collected and uncollected facts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the robustness of a label posterior-aware graph encoder against false positive links and identifies missing facts to provide high-quality grounds of reasoning. |
What Matters in Training a GPT4-Style Language Model with Multimodal Inputs? (2024.naacl-long)
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Yan Zeng, Hanbo Zhang, Jiani Zheng, Jiangnan Xia, Guoqiang Wei, Yang Wei, Yuchen Zhang, Tao Kong, Ruihua Song
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GPT-4V have demonstrated remarkable multi-modal capabilities in processing image inputs and following open-ended instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play technique to enhance multi-modal LLMs . they propose 'lynx' to train multi-modal LLM models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training strategy improves understanding accuracy and instruction-following proficiency of multi-modal models. |
GenWebNovel: A Genre-oriented Corpus of Entities in Chinese Web Novels (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature on nested entity recognition is insufficient partly due to insufficient annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes a pre-trained language model as an In-context learning example retriever to boost the performance of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly enhances entity recognition, matching state-of-the-art (SOTA) models without additional training data. |
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. |
A Survey of Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models under Data Scarcity: Challenges and Solutions (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyin Yu, Yuchen Mou, Juncheng Yan, Junyu Luo, Chunchun Chen, Xing Wei, Yunhui Liu, Hongru Sun, Yuxing Zhang, Jun Xu, Yatao Bian, Ming Zhang, Wei Ye, Tieke He, Jie Yang, Guanjie Zheng, Zhonghai Wu, Bo Zhang, Lei Bai, Xiao Luo
| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
Prune as You Generate: Online Rollout Pruning for Faster and Better RLVR (2026.acl-long)
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Haobo Xu, Sirui Chen, Ruizhong Qiu, Yuchen Yan, Chen Luo, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has improved reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an online pruning method that prunes rollouts while steering correct ones to enhance learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves average accuracy by +2.30 to +2.99 across GRPO and DAPO on Qwen-3 and LLaMA-3.2 models. |
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. |
CodeTransOcean: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Code Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing code translation datasets focus on a single pair of programming languages . early software systems are developed using programming languages such as Fortran and COBOL . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale comprehensive benchmark that supports the largest variety of programming languages for code translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports translations between multiple programming languages and a cross-framework dataset for deep learning code across different frameworks. |