Papers by Yudong Zhang
An Empirical Study of Position Bias in Modern Information Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new evaluation framework is used to assess the extent and impact of position bias in information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They introduce a position-aware retrieval benchmark and a diagnostic metric to quantify position bias . they compare models with BM25, dense embedding models, ColBERT-style late-interaction models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates retrieval models for position bias from a worst-case perspective. |
One Cognitive Loop Is Enough: SODA unlocks Pure-Text Spatial Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Shunwen Bai, Jiahuan Zhang, Haoran Huang, Yurun Wang, Jiale Liu, Yanxi Wu, Ningzhe Yu, Yudong Gao, Mingjun Cheng
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) lack visual input, leading to errors in basic numerical comparisons. |
| Approach: | They propose a spatial OODA framework that integrates the OODAC cognitive loop into multiple control tasks and integrates it into LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the spatial reasoning capabilities of large language models across multiple scenarios including SPOD-Bench, SPACE and applications. |
Weakly-Supervised Methods for Suicide Risk Assessment: Role of Related Domains (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Among social media platforms, Reddit has emerged as the most promising one due to its anonymity and its focus on topic-based communities (subreddits) . a challenge for previous work on suicide risk assessment has been the small amount of labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use social media to collect user data from r/SuicideWatch subreddit and annotate it with user-level suicide risk: no-risk, low-risk and high-risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves by using pseudo-labeling based on related issues around mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) |
Code Needs Comments: Enhancing Code LLMs with Comment Augmentation (2024.findings-acl)
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Demin Song, Honglin Guo, Yunhua Zhou, Shuhao Xing, Yudong Wang, Zifan Song, Wenwei Zhang, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu, Dahua Lin
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require a deep understanding of programming languages and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation method that generates comments for existing code and a filtering strategy that filters out code data poorly correlated with natural language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the model trained on the augmented data and the model further trained on data without augmentation on two widely-used programming skill benchmarks. |
AgentAsk: Multi-Agent Systems Need to Ask (2026.acl-long)
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Bohan Lin, Kuo Yang, Zelin Tan, Yingchuan Lai, Chen Zhang, Guibin Zhang, Xinlei Yu, Miao Yu, Xu Wang, Yudong Zhang, Yang Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems fail to consistently outperform strong single-a agent baselines due to error propagation at inter-aggent message handoffs. |
| Approach: | They propose an edge-level error taxonomy that identifies four main errors in multi-agent interactions as data gaps, signal corruption, referential drift and capacity gaps as primary sources of failure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module outperforms existing systems on five benchmarks and is architecture-agnostic. |
Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve self-correction performance of Large Language Models are based on intrinsic selfcorrectione, which allows the model to check and revise its selfgenerated answers without external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the self-correction capability into confidence and critique capabilities and a metric for overall self-corretion capability evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla SFT and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
MusiLingo: Bridging Music and Text with Pre-trained Language Models for Music Captioning and Query Response (2024.findings-naacl)
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Zihao Deng, Yinghao Ma, Yudong Liu, Rongchen Guo, Ge Zhang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Emmanouil Benetos
| Challenge: | Large Language Models have shown immense potential in multimodal applications, but convergence between textual and musical domains remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that aligns music representations with a frozen LLM . they train the system on an extensive music caption dataset and fine-tune it with instructional data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system bridges the gap between music audio and textual contexts by combining music captions with a frozen model . it performs well in generating music caption and composing music-related Q&A pairs . the proposed system is available for free download at http://www.musilingo.com/ . |
CAR: Empowering Agents with Dynamic Tool Synthesis and Global Trajectory Rectification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLM agents are brittle in open-ended environments due to two limitations: 1) a closed action space; 2) myopic error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that augments the action space and revises global strategies by adding a reflective replanning mechanism to the system. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CAR outperforms baselines in a diagnostic benchmark with pruned toolsets to simulate tool scarcity. |
LLM-Powered Test Case Generation for Detecting Bugs in Plausible Programs (2025.acl-long)
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Kaibo Liu, Zhenpeng Chen, Yiyang Liu, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Yudong Han, Yun Ma, Yihong Dong, Ge Li, Gang Huang
| Challenge: | TrickCatcher generates test cases that pass existing tests yet contain bugs . a recent study found that tricky bugs are not detected by test suites . |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered approach to generating test cases for uncovering bugs in plausible programs . they use a PUT and specification to generate program variants, an input generator and an Llm to construct test inputs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves recall, precision, and F1 scores that are 1.80, 2.65, and 1.66 . trickCatcher generates program variants based on the program under test and its specification . |
CSL: A Large-scale Chinese Scientific Literature Dataset (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets centered around the English language restrict development of Chinese scientific NLP. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese scientific literature dataset based on Chinese papers . they use semi-structured data as a natural annotation for many supervised NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can serve as a Chinese corpus and perform many supervised tasks. |
Audio-centric Video Understanding Benchmark without Text Shortcut (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yudong Yang, Jimin Zhuang, Guangzhi Sun, Changli Tang, Yixuan Li, Peihan Li, Yifan Jiang, Wei Li, Zejun Ma, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) focus on visual abilities, but audio is essential for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an audio-centric video understanding benchmark to evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal LLMs with a particular focus on auditory information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed video understanding benchmarks evaluate video comprehension capabilities of multimodal models with a particular focus on auditory information. |
The Security Threat of Compressed Projectors in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Mainstream VLPs have significant security implications, but their security implications have not been thoroughly examined. |
| Approach: | a study evaluates the security of visual language projectors by comparing them to uncompressed projector. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation reveals significant differences in security profiles between compressed and uncompressed projectors. |
A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict accuracy curves and improve accuracy over multiple rounds. |
QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Currently, large vision-language models are limited in their ability to provide correct answers for multimodal tasks . however, they can still provide correct responses for multiple images associated with a single image . a query-agnostic visual attack (QAVA) provides robust adversarial examples that generate incorrect responses to unspecified and unknown questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-agnostic visual attack to create adversarial examples that generate incorrect answers to unspecified and unknown questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on images when the question is unknown compared to known target questions . |