Papers by Yue Gu
Advancing Vision-Language Models with Adapter Ensemble Strategies (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | CLIP revolutes vision-language pretraining by using contrastive learning on paired web data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a "adapter ensemble" with traditional machine learning techniques to augment large-scale pretrained vision-language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and derives improvement when the number of ensemble parameters increases. |
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)
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Henry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
WebClipper: Efficient Evolution of Web Agents with Graph-based Trajectory Pruning (2026.acl-long)
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Junjie Wang, Zequn Xie, Dan Yang, Jie Feng, Yue Shen, Duolin Sun, Meixiu Long, Yihan Jiao, Zhehao Tan, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Open-source web agents rely on long tool-call trajectories with cyclic reasoning loops and exploration of unproductive branches. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses web agent trajectories via graph-based pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces tool-call rounds by 20% while improving accuracy and efficiency while maintaining the same level of performance as existing models. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Learning to Plan for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models from Knowledge Graphs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Junjie Wang, Mingyang Chen, Binbin Hu, Dan Yang, Ziqi Liu, Yue Shen, Peng Wei, Zhiqiang Zhang, Jinjie Gu, Jun Zhou, Jeff Pan, Wen Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Recent studies have attempted to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in complex question-answering (QA) tasks by combining step-wise planning with external retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing LLMs’ planning capabilities by using planning data derived from knowledge graphs (KGs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves LLMs’ planning capabilities by using knowledge graphs (KGs) the proposed framework is compared with existing frameworks on multiple datasets and shows that it is effective for large language models. |
Perplexity-Aware Data Scaling Law: Perplexity Landscapes Predict Performance for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive capabilities across a wide range of domains, but their generalpurpose pre-training objectives often leave them illsuited for specialized applications such as healthcare. |
| Approach: | They propose a perplexity-aware data scaling law that establishes a predictive relationship between the perplexities of domain-specific data and the test loss. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on medical and general-domain benchmarks show that the proposed scaling law consistently identifies near-optimal training subsets with significantly reduced data consumption. |
Muffin or Chihuahua? Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models with Multipanel VQA (2024.acl-long)
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Yue Fan, Jing Gu, Kaiwen Zhou, Qianqi Yan, Shan Jiang, Ching-Chen Kuo, Yang Zhao, Xinze Guan, Xin Wang
| Challenge: | Multipanel images are a common form of visual representations, and humans can achieve approximately 99% accuracy on these questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that tests multipanel visual reasoning models with 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 6,600 triplets of questions, answers, and multipanel images that challenge state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) human users can attain approximately 99% accuracy on these questions, compared with previous benchmarks. |
InquireMobile: Teaching VLM-based Mobile Agent to Request Human Assistance via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (2026.acl-long)
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Qihang Ai, Pi Bu, Yue Cao, Yingyao Wang, Jihao Gu, Jingxuan Xing, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Zhicheng Zheng, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled mobile agents to perceive and interact with real-world mobile environments based on human instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model that actively seeks human confirmation at critical decision points and a model inspired by reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an improvement of 46.8% in inquiry success rate and the best overall success rate among existing baselines on InquireBench. |
ETR: Entropy Trend Reward for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to shorten CoTs use length penalties or global entropy reduction . Existing approaches to CoT reasoning have significant practical drawbacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that shortens CoTs by length penalties or global entropy reduction . they integrate ETR into Group Relative Policy Optimization and evaluate it . |
| Outcome: | The proposed objective improves accuracy–efficiency trade-off by +9.9% while reducing CoT length by 67% across four benchmarks. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiao Liu, Xuanyu Lei, Shengyuan Wang, Yue Huang, Andrew Feng, Bosi Wen, Jiale Cheng, Pei Ke, Yifan Xu, Weng Lam Tam, Xiaohan Zhang, Lichao Sun, Xiaotao Gu, Hongning Wang, Jing Zhang, Minlie Huang, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references. |
| Outcome: | The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references. |
Convert Language Model into a Value-based Strategic Planner (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate the emotional distress of individuals through effective conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that bootstraps the planning during ESC and determines the optimal strategy based on long-term returns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on ESC datasets and can be used to guide the LLM to response. |
Learning While Staying Curious: Entropy-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Adaptive Self-Distillation for Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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Hao Wang, Hao Gu, Hongming Piao, Kaixiong Gong, Yuxiao Ye, Xiangyu Yue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Dapeng Wu
| Challenge: | Recent advances establish "SFT-then-RL" as the defacto paradigm for enhancing large reasoning mod- els on automatically verifiable tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-preserving SFT method to enhance exploration capabilities through intrinsic curiosity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the vanilla method on reasoning tasks by 2.5 points . it also outperformed the vanilla SFT by 2.9 points on out-of-distribution tasks . |
Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaohan Wang, Shengyu Mao, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods can modify concept-level definitions, but they can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset ConceptEdit and establish new metrics for evaluation to investigate the editing capability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can modify concept definitions but can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
ClinAlign: Scaling Healthcare Alignment from Clinician Preference (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiwei Lyu, Xidong Wang, Hao Zhu, Lei Liu, Chaohe Zhang, Jian Wang, Jinjie Gu, Benyou Wang, Yue Shen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning open-ended outputs with fine-grained clinician preferences are weakly grounded in professional guidelines. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to align large language models' outputs with fine-grained clinician preferences . they propose 119 broadly reusable, clinically grounded principles organized by clinical dimensions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on HealthBench-Hard and Deepseek-R1 and o3. |
BLADE: Benchmarking Language Model Agents for Data-Driven Science (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Ken Gu, Ruoxi Shang, Ruien Jiang, Keying Kuang, Richard-John Lin, Donghe Lyu, Yue Mao, Youran Pan, Teng Wu, Jiaqian Yu, Yikun Zhang, Tianmai Zhang, Lanyi Zhu, Mike Merrill, Jeffrey Heer, Tim Althoff
| Challenge: | Language model-based agents can be used to conduct and support data-driven science, but evaluating them on open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. |
| Outcome: | BLADE evaluates agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions using data from 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature. |
Diagnosing Hidden Instabilities in Model Editing via Uncertainty Quantification (2026.acl-long)
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Zihan Gu, TianYi Zhang, Xinyan Zhang, Zhiyuan Wang, Han Zhang, Yuhao Wei, Jiacheng Lu, Tianyi Ma, Xingsheng Zhang, Hua Zhang, Yue Hu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to update large language models (LLMs) without expensive retraining are fragile under single-edit evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that characterizes activation-based editing as a constrained intervention on intermediate representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals local knowledge conflicts invisible to existing benchmarks. |
Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yue Zhao, Xiaoyu Wang, Dan Wang, Zhonglin Jiang, Qingqing Gu, Teng Chen, Ningyuan Xi, Jinxian Qu, Yong Chen, Luo Ji
| Challenge: | a framework for constructing dialogue world models for natural language tasks is currently lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be used to train a dialogue world model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict future utterances and user beliefs . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on emotion classification and sentiment identification . |
ReEfBench: Quantifying the Reasoning Efficiency of LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Chain-of-Thought evaluations do not distinguish between genuine reasoning and mere verbosity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for the non-intrusive, comprehensive process-centric evaluation of reasoning grounded in First-Order Logic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies four distinct behavioral prototypes and diagnoses the failure modes. |
AutoSUIT Bench - Automated Security UnIt Test Benchmark for LLM Coding (2026.findings-acl)
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Samuel Osebe, Fan Yang, Junyi Li, Yue Gu, Yongxin Wang, Satyapriya Krishna, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan, Rahul Gupta, Weitong Ruan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly on code generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to automate the vulnerability code benchmark creation with iterative auto validation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 232 CWE categories across C/C++, Java, and Python languages. |
Multimodal Affective Analysis Using Hierarchical Attention Strategy with Word-Level Alignment (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to classify human affect and subjective information from multiple data sources are limited by the lack of high-level feature associations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multimodal architecture with attention and word-level fusion to classify utterance-level sentiment and emotion from text and audio data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on published datasets and visualizes and interprets synchronized attention over modalities. |
Clues Before Answers: Generation-Enhanced Multiple-Choice QA (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) uses text-to-text framework . but, there is an under-utilization of the decoder and knowledge that can be decoded . |
| Approach: | They propose a generative multiple-choice question answering model which generates a clue from the question and leverages it to enhance a reader for MCQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms text-to-text models on multiple MCQA datasets. |
GroupRank: A Groupwise Paradigm for Effective and Efficient Passage Reranking with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Meixiu Long, Duolin Sun, Dan Yang, Yihan Jiao, Lei Liu, Jiahai Wang, Binbin Hu, Yue Shen, Jie Feng, Zhehao Tan, Junjie Wang, Lianzhen Zhong, Jian Wang, Peng Wei, Jinjie Gu
| Challenge: | Existing rankers excel in lexical-matching scenarios, while they struggle with complex queries requiring deep reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm that balances flexibility and context awareness to unlock the full potential of groupwise reranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a state-of-the-art 65.2 NDCG@10 on BRIGHT and surpasses baselines by 2.1 points on R2MED while delivering a 6.4 inference speedup. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
Hybrid Attention based Multimodal Network for Spoken Language Classification (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Using linguistic content and vocal characteristics for multimodal deep learning is difficult for computers to interpret human meaning . |
| Approach: | They propose a deep multimodal network with feature attention and modality attention to classify utterance-level speech data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art or competitive results on three published multimodal datasets. |
Symbolization, Prompt, and Classification: A Framework for Implicit Speaker Identification in Novels (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for speaker identification in novel dialogues are limited to handling explicit narrative patterns and complex cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which identifies implicit speakers in novels via symbolization, prompt, and classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 4.8% accuracy on the web novel collection, which reduces 47% of speaker identification errors, and outperfies the emerging ChatGPT. |
Large Language Models Can Be Contextual Privacy Protection Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yijia Xiao, Yiqiao Jin, Yushi Bai, Yue Wu, Xianjun Yang, Xiao Luo, Wenchao Yu, Xujiang Zhao, Yanchi Liu, Quanquan Gu, Haifeng Chen, Wei Wang, Wei Cheng
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable linguistic comprehension and generation capability, but when applied to specialized industries, they face challenges such as hallucination, insufficient domain knowledge, and failing to incorporate the latest domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm for fine-tuning LLMs that effectively injects domain-specific knowledge while safeguarding inference-time data privacy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model protects private data while enhancing the model's knowledge. |
Unified Hallucination Detection for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Xiang Chen, Chenxi Wang, Yida Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Xiaoyan Yang, Qiang Li, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | despite significant strides in multimodal tasks, MLLMs are plagued by the critical issue of hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation benchmark to facilitate evaluation of advancements in hallucination detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework validates hallucinations robustly and provides strategic insights . MHaluBench is a meta-evaluation benchmark designed to facilitate evaluation . |
KnowAgent: Knowledge-Augmented Planning for LLM-Based Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuqi Zhu, Shuofei Qiao, Yixin Ou, Shumin Deng, Shiwei Lyu, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) fail to effectively guide the planning trajectories during task solving and result in planning hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to enhance the planning capabilities of large language models by incorporating explicit action knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve comparable or superior performance to existing baselines on HotpotQA and ALFWorld. |
Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training (2026.acl-long)
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Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jingxuan Xing, Yue Cao, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ziming Wang, Yingxiu Zhao, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
R2H: Building Multimodal Navigation Helpers that Respond to Help Requests (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing dialog-based embodied datasets are not sufficient to develop intelligent navigation-helper agents capable of navigating users in unfamiliar areas. |
| Approach: | They introduce a novel benchmark, Respond to Help Requests, to promote the development of multi-modal navigation helpers capable of responding to requests for help . they also propose two approaches to construct the navigation-helper agent, including fine-tuning a task-oriented multi-mod response generation model that can see and respond, named SeeRee, and employing . a multi-module large language model in a zero-shot manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model and the proposed model on two tasks based on human evaluations and automatic benchmarking. |