Papers by Yue Peng
Distilling Instruction-following Abilities of Large Language Models with Task-aware Curriculum Planning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning aims to align large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instructions and human-preferred responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-round distillation framework that uses an oracle LLM to select instructions that are difficult for a student LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms large language models and user-tuned models on several widely recognized benchmarks and multiple student LLMs. |
Gentopia.AI: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Binfeng Xu, Xukun Liu, Hua Shen, Zeyu Han, Yuhan Li, Murong Yue, Zhiyuan Peng, Yuchen Liu, Ziyu Yao, Dongkuan Xu
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Augmented Language Models lack flexibility, democratization, and holistic evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight and extensible framework for Augmented Language Models called Gentopia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates language models, task formats, prompting modules, and plugins into a unified paradigm. |
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. |
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. |
Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing controllable story generation systems ignore the psychological changes of the protagonists and focus on the appointed keywords or emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Psychology-guided Controllable Story Generation System (PICS) that generates stories that adhere to the given leading context and desired psychological state chains for the protagonist. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms baselines and shows that it can generate stories with more consistent psychological changes. |
PaCoRe: Learning to Scale Test-Time Compute with Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Jingcheng Hu, Yinmin Zhang, Shijie Shang, Xiaobo Yang, Yue Peng, Zhewei Huang, Hebin Zhou, Xin Wu, Jie Cheng, Fanqi Wan, Xiangwen Kong, Chengyuan Yao, Kaiwen Yan, Ailin Huang, Hongyu Zhou, Qi Han, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Heung-Yeung Shum
| Challenge: | Parallel Coordinated Reasoning (PaCoRe) overcomes a central limitation of contemporary language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) far beyond sequential reasoning under a fixed context window. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-and-inference framework to overcome a central limitation of language models: their inability to scale test-time compute (TTC) under a fixed context window. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model scales to multi-million-token effective TTC without exceeding context limits. |
HIRAG: Hierarchical-Thought Instruction-Tuning Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-depth research on the specific capabilities needed by the RAG generation model is lacking, leading to inconsistent document quality and retrieval system imperfections. |
| Approach: | They propose that RAG models should possess three progressively hierarchical abilities: (1) Filtering: the ability to select relevant information; (2) Combination: the capability to combine semantic information across paragraphs; (3) RAG-specific reasoning: the capacity to further process external knowledge using internal knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves the model’s open-book examination capability on datasets such as RGB, PopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA, and PubmedQA. |
TaxPraBen: A Scalable Benchmark for Structured Evaluation of LLMs in Chinese Real-World Tax Practice (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models excel in general domains but lack real-world practical capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Chinese taxation practice that combines 10 traditional application tasks with 3 pioneering real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 10 traditional tasks with 3 pioneering real-world scenarios. |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios. |
Bi-directional CognitiveThinking Network for Machine Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reading comprehension are still in their infancy at the level of cognitive intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a bi-directional cognitive knowledge framework to simulate reverse thinking and inertial thinking in the brain to answer questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that bi-directional knowledge helps the QA task. |
RelationalCoder: Rethinking Complex Tables via Programmatic Relational Transformation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Semi-structured tables remain a major obstacle for automated data processing and analytics. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique called Loop Reference Decoding which identifies expandable groups and replicates each group using a concise loop over its repetitive region. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique reduces output length from O(N M) to approximately O(K) Extensive experiments on HiTab and MultiHiertt show that it boosts Llama-2 and Mistral models by more than 20%, and GPT-4o by over 4%. |
HiddenDetect: Detecting Jailbreak Attacks against Multimodal Large Language Models via Monitoring Hidden States (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on posthoc alignment techniques, but the underlying safety mechanisms within LVLMs remain unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a tuning-free framework that leverages internal activations to enhance safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in detecting jailbreak attacks against large vision-language models. |
COMMA: Modeling Relationship among Motivations, Emotions and Actions in Language-based Human Activities (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for modeling motivations, emotions and actions in language-based human activities have been limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to model motivations, emotions and actions in language-based human activities using a dataset called Story Commonsense. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can better reveal the essential relationship between motivations, emotions and actions than existing methods. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
Praetor: A Fine-Grained Generative LLM Evaluator with Instance-Level Customizable Evaluation Criteria (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Leng, Renren Jin, Yue Chen, Zhuowen Han, Ling Shi, Jianxiang Peng, Lei Yang, Juesi Xiao, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods are inadequate to evaluate large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained generative LLM evaluator with instance-level customazable evaluation criteria that can be used to evaluate large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing LLM evaluators and instruction-tuned LLMs on multiple benchmarks and sets new SOTA results. |
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)
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Lei Yang, Leiyu Pan, Bojian Xiong, Renren Jin, Shaowei Zhang, Yue Chen, Ling Shi, Jiang Zhou, Junru Wu, Zhen Wang, Jianxiang Peng, Juesi Xiao, Tianyu Dong, Zhuowen Han, Zhuo Chen, Yuqi Ren, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks. |
Building a Family of Data Augmentation Models for Low-cost LLM Fine-tuning on the Cloud (2025.coling-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for learning large language models are expensive and difficult to build and fine-tune. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of data augmentation models to improve model fine-tuning efficiency . they leverage powerful LLMs to expand, refine and re-write instructions and responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve the efficiency of model fine-tuning by leveraging small datasets and quality assessment techniques. |
TableCoder: Table Extraction from Text via Reliable Code Generation (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Structured table extraction from unstructured text is critical for automating data processing tasks across industries where accuracy and reliability are paramount. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language-based method for extracting structured tables from text . they use Python classes or SQL statements to explicitly construct table structures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves F1 scores and mitigates hallucinations . it integrates with standard SQL databases and Python workflows, ensuring seamless deployment . |
A Survey on MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding: Methods, Challenges, and Emerging Trends (2026.findings-acl)
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Yihao Ding, Siwen Luo, Yue Dai, Yanbei Jiang, Zechuan Li, Qiang Sun, Geoffrey Martin, Wei Liu, Yifan Peng
| Challenge: | Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) frameworks are a key area of research . early approaches to VRDU relied on manually crafted rules and domain-specific heuristics . conventional deep learning approaches do not integrate the diverse modalities in documents . |
| Approach: | They review recent advances in MLLM-based Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU) their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are scalable, reliable, and adaptable, the authors argue . their findings highlight emerging trends and promising research directions . |
Improving Chinese Pop Song and Hokkien Gezi Opera Singing Voice Synthesis by Enhancing Local Modeling (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Singing Voice Synthesis (SVS) synthesizes pleasing vocals based on music scores and lyrics . current acoustic models ignore the significance of local modeling within the sequence and the hard-to-synthesize parts in the predicted mel-spectrogram . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance local modeling in the acoustic model by focusing on phoneme tokens located before and after the phoneme. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves local modeling in the acoustic model by focusing on the hard-to-synthesize parts of the predicted mel-spectrogram. |
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. |
Exploring Reasoning Reward Model for Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Kaixuan Fan, Kaituo Feng, Manyuan Zhang, Tianshuo Peng, Zhixun Li, Yilei Jiang, Shuang Chen, Xiangyu Yue
| Challenge: | Existing methods for agentic reinforcement learning rely on sparse outcome-based reward for training, leading to suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-based reward model that produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories, including an explicit reasoning trace and a focused critique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces structured feedback for agentic trajectories including an explicit reasoning trace, a focused critique, and an overall score that evaluates process performance. |
Uncertainty Calibration for Tool-Using Language Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Language agents are increasingly used to perform tasks and interact with a variety of external tools to achieve specific, goal-oriented objectives. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool calibration tool called ProbeCal which recalibrates the internal probabilities of tool-using language agents to better reflect the actual effectiveness of tool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves off-the-shelf language models in tool-using applications. |
COSMOS: Connectivity-Oriented Submodular Maximization for Optimal Subgraph Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms treat facts independently or employ myopic search, failing to optimize collective subgraph utility. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that formalizes evidence retrieval as a constrained submodular maximization problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the trade-off between information relevance and structural complexity. |
One2Set + Large Language Model: Best Partners for Keyphrase Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing selection methods make redundant selections, causing poor recall and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate keyphrases from a one2set-based model and an LLM as selector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art models in absent keyphrase prediction. |
AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
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Yun He, Wenzhe Li, Hejia Zhang, Songlin Li, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla, Yuanhao Xiong, Nanshu Wang, Xiaoliang Peng, Beibin Li, Shengjie Bi, Shishir G Patil, Qi Qi, Shengyu Feng, Julian Katz-Samuels, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hunter Lang, Yue Yu, Yundi Qian, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Licheng Yu, Amine Benhalloum, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Manaal Faruqui
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF) remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following abilities of large language models, achieving a 6.7% gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. |
Natural Language Processing Meets Quantum Physics: A Survey and Categorization (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has focused on quantum-inspired algorithms for NLP and quantum-based algorithms for cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize quantum-inspired algorithms according to quantum theory, linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods are categorized according to the use of quantum theory, the linguistic targets that are modeled, and the downstream application. |
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)
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Xiao Wang, Qin Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Yicheng Zou, Xin Zhou, Jiacheng Ye, Yongxin Zhang, Rui Zheng, Zexiong Pang, Qinzhuo Wu, Zhengyan Li, Chong Zhang, Ruotian Ma, Zichu Fei, Ruijian Cai, Jun Zhao, Xingwu Hu, Zhiheng Yan, Yiding Tan, Yuan Hu, Qiyuan Bian, Zhihua Liu, Shan Qin, Bolin Zhu, Xiaoyu Xing, Jinlan Fu, Yue Zhang, Minlong Peng, Xiaoqing Zheng, Yaqian Zhou, Zhongyu Wei, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang
| 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. |