Papers by Yujun Li
Mapping the Minds of LLMs: A Graph-Based Analysis of Reasoning LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often display unstable behaviors, e.g., hallucinating unsupported premises, overthinking simple tasks, and displaying higher sensitivity to prompt variations. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based analytical framework that clusters long, verbose CoT outputs into semantically coherent reasoning steps, then constructs directed reasoning graphs to capture contextual and logical dependencies among these steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables quantitative evaluation of internal reasoning structure and quality beyond conventional metrics and provides practical insights for prompt engineering and cognitive analysis of LLMs. |
SLARD: A Chinese Superior Legal Article Retrieval Dataset (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results, a study finds . existing large language models lack prior knowledge of the content of superior legal articles . |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese superior legal article retrieval dataset to find relevant articles with higher legal effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing retrieval methods struggle to achieve ideal results. |
Syllogistic Reasoning for Legal Judgment Analysis (2023.emnlp-main)
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Wentao Deng, Jiahuan Pei, Keyi Kong, Zhe Chen, Furu Wei, Yujun Li, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren
| Challenge: | Legal judgment assistants are developing fast due to impressive progress of large language models. |
| Approach: | They construct and manually correct a syllogistic reasoning dataset for legal judgment analysis using large language models as benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 11,239 criminal cases covering 4 criminal elements, 80 charges and 124 articles. |
SCVQ: Sparse-Compensated Vector Quantization for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vector quantization methods incur inference overhead due to massive codebook storage and intensive index lookups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for vector quantization that incorporates a salience-aware weighted K-means clustering scheme with symmetry constraints to reduce codebook size and indexing costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a perplexity of 5.78 on WikiText-2 for LLaMA-2-7B at 2-bit quantization while delivering a 1.4 speedup over existing baselines. |
From Implicit Graph Encoding to Explicit Evidence: A Training-Free LLM Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Guo Tang, Ke Cheng, Huiming Fan, Heng Chang, Wenxiang Zheng, Xianhao Ou, Junjia Xiang, Ming Liu, Yujun Zhou, Li Lanyu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with implicit modality alignment and suboptimal graph linearization. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, test-time adaptive framework that reframes TKG prediction as explicit evidence-driven reasoning. |
| Outcome: | ExE-LLM outperforms fully trained graph neural networks on four benchmarks . it achieves SOTA performance in inductive settings, significantly outperforming fully trained neural networks . |
SemVink: Advancing VLMs’ Semantic Understanding of Optical Illusions via Visual Global Thinking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Vision-language models excel in semantic tasks but fail at detecting hidden content . current architectures prioritize abstract reasoning over low-level visual operations . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to test vision-language models that can detect hidden content . they propose HC-Bench to scale images to low resolutions to unlock 99% accuracy . |
| Outcome: | HC-Bench shows that leading VLMs achieve near-zero accuracy even with explicit prompting . et al.: current models prioritize abstract reasoning over low-level visual operations . they urge a shift toward hybrid models bridging gap between computational vision and human cognition . |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
A Structure-Aware Argument Encoder for Literature Discourse Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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Yinzi Li, Wei Chen, Zhongyu Wei, Yujun Huang, Chujun Wang, Siyuan Wang, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang, Libo Wu
| Challenge: | Existing research for argument representation learning treats tokens in sentences equally and ignores the implied structure information of argumentative context. |
| Approach: | They propose to separate tokens into two groups to capture structural information of arguments and to incorporate paragraph-level position information into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures structural information of arguments and is able to identify arguments automatically. |
Vulnerability of LLMs to Vertically Aligned Text Manipulations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research shows that vertical text input significantly degrades the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) in text classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the impact of vertical text input on the performance of LLMs . they find that chain of thought reasoning does not help LLM recognize vertical input . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can significantly mislead models, posing a risk of bypassing detection in real-world scenarios involving harmful or sensitive information. |
DT-Solver: Automated Theorem Proving with Dynamic-Tree Sampling Guided by Proof-level Value Function (2023.acl-long)
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Haiming Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Jing Xiong, Enze Xie, Han Shi, Yujun Li, Lin Li, Jian Yin, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural theorem-proving resort to large language models and tree searches. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic-Tree Driven Theorem Solver to accommodate general theoremes by guiding the search procedure with state confidence and proof-level values. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two popular theorem-proving datasets with a 6.65% improvement on average in terms of success rate. |
DRS: Deep Question Reformulation With Structured Output (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models like GPT-3 and Instruct-GPT lack the ability to reformulate unanswerable questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot method that combines the strengths of LLMs with a DFS-based algorithm to iteratively explore potential entity combinations and constrain outputs using predefined entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all baselines, including the GPT-3.5 model, on the unanswerable question reformulation task. |
GPS: Genetic Prompt Search for Efficient Few-Shot Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models are often finetuned for downstream tasks, which has been shown to improve performance over non-pretrained models. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic algorithm to automatically search for the best prompt for few-shot learning with pretrained language models by gradient-free algorithm. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on diverse datasets show that the proposed method outperforms manual prompts by 2.6 points. |
ZeroPrompt: Scaling Prompt-Based Pretraining to 1,000 Tasks Improves Zero-Shot Generalization (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that task scaling can be an efficient alternative to model scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask pretraining approach ZeroPrompt for zero-shot generalization . they focus on task scaling and zero-shooting to improve model performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot generalization efficiency by 30 times with task scaling. |