Papers by Yuekun Yao
Reason to Rote: Rethinking Memorization in Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models readily memorize arbitrary training instances, such as label noise . however, such memorization does not affect generalizable reasoning abilities . |
| Approach: | They investigate how large language models memorize label noise and why it affects generalizability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on reasoning tasks even when memorized labels are missing . the proposed model is able to generalize to correctly answer "87+19=106" |
Predicting generalization performance with correctness discriminators (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models estimate accuracy of models on unlabeled test data, but they hide their own uncertainty. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that establishes upper and lower bounds on the accuracy without requiring gold labels for the unseen data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model establishes upper and lower bounds on accuracy without requiring gold labels for the unseen data. |
SLOG: A Structural Generalization Benchmark for Semantic Parsing (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing compositional generalization benchmarks focus on lexical generalisation, the interpretation of novel lexicals in syntactic structures familiar from training. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic parsing dataset that extends COGS with 17 structural generalization cases to evaluate how well models generalize to new complex linguistic expressions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generalization accuracy is far below the near-perfect accuracy of existing models on COGS, demonstrating the role of SLOG in foregrounding the large discrepancy between models’ lexical and structural generalization capacities. |
Simple and effective data augmentation for compositional generalization (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Compositional generalization is the ability of a system to correctly predict the meaning of complex sentences when trained on simpler sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use data augmentation methods to generate additional training data by sampling from an augmentation distribution to generalize to the out-of-distribution test data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods that sampled from the training distribution and outperformed existing methods. |
Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | LMs are highly flexible learners, capable of acquiring linguistic patterns beyond those learnable by humans. |
| Approach: | They train LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages . they find that the model does not achieve perfect separation between attested and unattest languages - suggesting some human-like inductive biases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can largely distinguish attested from impossible languages, but does not achieve perfect separation between them and their impossible counterparts. |
Language models can learn implicit multi-hop reasoning, but only if they have lots of training data (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies explore the ability of language models to solve multi-hop reasoning tasks without chain of thought. |
| Approach: | They propose to use GPT2-style language models to train k-hop reasoning models . they show that the required training data grows exponentially in k . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can learn implicit reasoning without chain-of-thoughts, the authors show . their training data grows exponentially in k, and the required number of transformer layers grows linearly in the model. |
Structural generalization is hard for sequence-to-sequence models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sequence-to-sequence models have been successful across many NLP tasks, but they have low generalization accuracy . |
| Approach: | They propose to use linguistic knowledge to overcome generalization limitations of seq2seq models . they show that human beings are able to understand and produce linguistic structures they have never observed before . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can overcome this limitation by having linguistic knowledge built in. |