Papers by Yukun Yan

PersLLM: A Personified Training Approach for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Masked diffusion models (MDMs) leverage bidirectional attention and a denoising process.
Approach:	They investigate the attention behaviors of Masked diffusion models by revealing the phenomenon of Attention Floating.
Outcome:	The proposed model doubles the performance of autoregressive models in knowledge-intensive tasks.

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Zheni Zeng, Jiayi Chen, Huimin Chen, Yukun Yan, Yuxuan Chen, Zhenghao Liu, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

KBAlign: Efficient Self Adaptation on Specific Textual Knowledge Bases (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Large language models exhibit human-like intelligence, enabling them to simulate human behavior and support various applications that require both humanized communication and extensive knowledge reserves.
Approach:	They propose a framework for better data construction and model tuning to unlock the potential of LLM personification by using Chain-of-Thought prompting and anti-induction.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves data construction and model tuning for insufficient data usage and rigid behavior patterns.

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Zheni Zeng, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Ruobing Wang, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Judge as A Judge: Improving the Evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation through the Judge-Consistency of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing methods for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) are limited and fine-tuning incurs prohibitive costs of external signals.
Approach:	They propose a self-supervised framework that enhances RAG systems through efficient model adaptation.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 90% of the performance gain obtained through GPT-4-supervised adaptation while relying entirely on self-annotation of much smaller models.

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Shuliang Liu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Cheng Yang, Zheni Zeng, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Ge Yu

Enhancing Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation through Error-Aware Self-Reflection (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing evaluation metrics cannot fairly evaluate the outputs of RAG models during training and evaluation.
Approach:	They propose a method which prompts LLMs to generate different judgments based on various combinations of judgment dimensions and utilizes the judge-consistency to evaluate these judgments.
Outcome:	The proposed method generates more accurate evaluations for RAG models across different RAG model and datasets.

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Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Zhiyuan Liu, Minghe Yu, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun

Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization (2025.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing studies treat SLMs as student models and use long-form Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) as supervision signals for Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). Existing research focuses on distilling reasoning ability from LLMs to enhance the mathematical reasoning performance of small-scale models.
Approach:	They propose a framework that refines teacher CoTs through an error-aware reflection process to enable the student model to construct more tailored teacher Cots.
Outcome:	Experiments on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that ORION improves performance by more than 2% over all baselines.

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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Zhenyang Li, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhumin Chen, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin

DeepNote: Note-Centric Deep Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Pre-trained large language models have been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance on downstream tasks, but instruction tuning may overfit them to specific task formats, compromising their generalization on unseen tasks.
Approach:	They propose to inject latent task adaptation and knowledge reinstatement into large language models to mitigate spurious correlations between inputs and targets.
Outcome:	The proposed method improves generalization on in-domain and out-of-domain unseen tasks.

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Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Daren Zha, Yuxuan Chen, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Yixuan Wang, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	. - (EN)
Approach:	. - (EN)
Outcome:	. - (EN)

Object-oriented Neural Programming (OONP) for Document Understanding (P18-1)

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Zhengdong Lu, Xianggen Liu, Haotian Cui, Yukun Yan, Daqi Zheng

MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Object-oriented Neural Programming (OONP) is a framework for semantically parsing documents in domains.
Approach:	They propose a framework for semantically parsing documents in specific domains using OONP . OOPN parsers use a rich family of operations to represent the semantics of the document .
Outcome:	The proposed framework can learn to handle fairly complicated ontology with training data of modest sizes.

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Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun

Multimodality

Challenge:	Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored.
Approach:	They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models.

MetaMem: Evolving Meta-Memory for Knowledge Utilization through Self-Reflective Symbolic Optimization (2026.findings-acl)

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Haidong Xin, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Cheng Yang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun

ClueAnchor: Clue-Anchored Knowledge Reasoning Exploration and Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing memory systems can support long-horizon human-LLM interactions by persisting historical interactions beyond limited context windows.
Approach:	They propose a framework that augments memory systems with a self-evolving meta-memory . meta-meso is iteratively distilling transferable knowledge utilization experiences . results show MetaMem outperforms strong baselines by over 3.6% .
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines by over 3.6% in the long-horizon human-LLM interaction.

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Hao Chen, Yukun Yan, Sen Mei, Wanxiang Che, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Xinze Li, Yuchun Fan, Pengcheng Huang, Qiushi Xiong, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

Mitigating Judgment Preference Bias in Large Language Models through Group-Based Polling (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Existing RAG systems often underutilize the retrieved documents, authors say . they fail to extract and integrate key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning .
Approach:	a new framework extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths . the framework optimizes the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path .
Outcome:	Experiments show that ClueAnchor outperforms baseline RAG frameworks in completeness and robustness.

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Shuliang Liu, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Minghe Yu, Yu Gu, Chong Chen, Huiyuan Xie, Ge Yu

ThinkNote: Enhancing Knowledge Integration and Utilization of Large Language Models via Constructivist Cognition Modeling (2026.findings-eacl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) are used as automatic evaluators to provide accurate and reliable assessments.
Approach:	They propose a framework that integrates LLM-based judgment models into a multi-agent system and simulates the interactive client-server polling mechanism.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms supervised models trained on annotated judgment data while requiring no human-labeled annotations.

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Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Shi Yu, Zheni Zeng, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Ge Yu, Chenyan Xiong

Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit suboptimal behaviors and inconsistencies when exposed to unfamiliar external information, underscoring their limitations in effectively leveraging such knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a framework that enhances the external knowledge utilization of Large Language Models through a two-stage constructivist cognitive modeling process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves a 10% improvement over baseline methods on various question-answering benchmarks.

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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Shuaiqiang Wang, Chong Meng, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin

Why Stop at One Error? Benchmarking LLMs as Data Science Code Debuggers for Multi-Hop and Multi-Bug Errors (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Large language models have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses, but their robustness is still far from optimal.
Approach:	They propose a two-stage training framework that helps a model generalize on following instructions via similar instruction augmentations.
Outcome:	The proposed training framework improves diversity and aligns the model with human expectations by differentiating subtle differences in similar responses.

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Zhiyu Yang, Shuo Wang, Yukun Yan, Yang Deng

Programming Languages in NLP

Challenge:	Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly reshaped software development practices, particularly in automating code generation and debugging.
Approach:	They propose to evaluate LLMs' capabilities on multi-hop error tracing and multi-bug detection in data science code debugging.
Outcome:	DSDBench adapts datasets from existing data science task benchmarks, such as DABench and MatPlotBench, featuring realistic data science debugging tasks with automatically synthesized multi-hop, multi-bug code snippets.

Chunks as Arms: Multi-Armed Bandit-Guided Sampling for Long-Context LLM Preference Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Shaohua Duan, Pengcheng Huang, Xinze Li, Zhenghao Liu, Xiaoyuan Yi, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun

ReCUT: Balancing Reasoning Length and Accuracy in LLMs via Stepwise Trails and Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Recent studies have explored fine-tuning Large Language Models with synthetic data to enhance their long-context capabilities.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages a Multi-Armed Bandit rollout strategy to identify the most informative chunks from the given long context for sampling high-quality and diverse responses.
Outcome:	The proposed framework achieves 4% improvement on long-context reasoning benchmarks on Llama and Qwen.

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Zhensheng Jin, Xinze Li, Yifan Ji, Chunyi Peng, Zhenghao Liu, Qi Shi, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Furong Peng, Ge Yu

Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method (2024.naacl-long)

Challenge:	Existing methods to train LLMs suffer from overthinking, leading to lengthy reasoning traces . Existing approaches to train large language models suffer from this problem .
Approach:	They propose a method to combine multiple reasoning chains for training LLMs . they use stepwise exploration and long-short switched sampling to evaluate reasoning paths .
Outcome:	The proposed method reduces reasoning lengths by approximately 30-50% . it also maintains or improves reasoning accuracy compared to baselines .

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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Guoliang Xing, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin

RankCoT: Refining Knowledge for Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Ranking Chain-of-Thoughts (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Recent literature reveals that Large Language Models (LLMs) hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization.
Approach:	They propose a self-detection method to detect which questions an LLM does not know by combining the two components to identify whether the model generates a non-factual response to the question.
Outcome:	The proposed method can detect which questions an LLM does not know across factoid question-answering, arithmetic reasoning, and commonsense reasoning tasks.

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Mingyan Wu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Xinze Li, Shi Yu, Zheni Zeng, Yu Gu, Ge Yu

Text Generation

Challenge:	Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models enable Large Language Models to access external knowledge.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge refinement method that incorporates reranking signals to generate CoT-based summarization based on query and retrieval documents.
Outcome:	RankCoT generates CoT-based summarization based on query and all retrieval documents . Rank CoT incorporates a self-reflection mechanism that refines the outputs .

DORA: A Dual-Objective Reinforcement Learning Framework for Effective and Efficient Multimodal Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)

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Guangming Qin, Yuhao Deng, Yukun Zhao, Zhenyang Li, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang, Yizhou Yan, Chengliang Chai, Lei Cao

Responsible & Trustworthy NLP

Challenge:	Existing methods to train large language models overlook quality of intermediate search results . existing methods often invoke search calls during reasoning, making inference inefficient .
Approach:	They propose a dual-objective reinforcement learning framework to improve search strategies of MLLMs . DORA outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving up to 8.4% higher accuracy .
Outcome:	The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods while reducing search calls by 9.7%.

CheckRLM: Effective Knowledge–Thought Coherence Checking in Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Dingling Xu, Ruobing Wang, Qingfei Zhao, Yukun Yan, Zhichun Wang, Daren Zha, Shi Yu, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Xu Han, Maosong Sun

ExpandR: Teaching Dense Retrievers Beyond Queries with LLM Guidance (2025.emnlp-main)

Challenge:	Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) have improved performance on complex tasks by extending the reasoning chain, but they are prone to factual errors, especially in knowledge-intensive tasks.
Approach:	They propose a framework that improves the reliability of the reasoning process by timely checking and correcting factual errors.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baselines and shows that it mitigates error accumulation with lower costs.

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Sijia Yao, Pengcheng Huang, Zhenghao Liu, Yu Gu, Yukun Yan, Shi Yu, Ge Yu

Information Retrieval

Challenge:	Existing methods for enhancing dense retrieval with query augmentation ignore the alignment between generation and ranking objectives.
Approach:	They propose a unified LLM-augmented dense retrieval framework that jointly optimizes both the LLM and the retriever.
Outcome:	Experimental results show that ExpandR outperforms strong baselines, achieving more than 5% improvement in retrieval performance.

Empirical Analysis of Decoding Biases in Masked Diffusion Models (2026.acl-long)

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Pengcheng Huang, Tianming Liu, Zhenghao Liu, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Tong Xiao, Zulong Chen, Maosong Sun

DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment (2023.findings-emnlp)

Challenge:	Existing MDMs employ uncertainty-based decoding strategies that limit their reasoning ability and ultimately degrade generation quality.
Approach:	They propose a framework that regularizes uncertainty-based decoding by incorporating two complementary priors to shape global decoding trajectories and promote content informativeness.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms existing decoding strategies by more than 7% while achieving comparable performance to autoregressive models of similar parameter scales.

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Yukun Zhao, Lingyong Yan, Weiwei Sun, Chong Meng, Shuaiqiang Wang, Zhicong Cheng, Zhaochun Ren, Dawei Yin

Natural Language Interfaces

Challenge:	Existing studies on dialogue quality assessment are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset . open-domain dialogue assessment is complicated and costly, but it can be done by recruiting human evaluators.
Approach:	They propose a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality.
Outcome:	The proposed dataset is openly accessible at https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dialogue_quality_evaluation.

Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation via Adaptive Prefix Alignment (2026.acl-long)

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Zhenghao Liu, Zhuoyang Wu, Xinze Li, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Zulong Chen, Yu Gu, Ge Yu, Maosong Sun

Lang2Act: Fine-Grained Visual Reasoning through Self-Emergent Linguistic Toolchains (2026.findings-acl)

Challenge:	Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially in solving complex mathematical problems.
Approach:	They propose a framework that exploits teacher CoTs for distillation through adaptive prefix alignment.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks by over 3%.

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Yuqi Xiong, Chunyi Peng, Zhipeng Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Zulong Chen, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Ge Yu

Multimodality

Challenge:	Existing frameworks depend on rigid, pre-defined external tools to extend perceptual capabilities of VLMs.
Approach:	They propose a framework that leverages self-emergent linguistic toolchains to enhance visual perception and reasoning.
Outcome:	The proposed framework improves the visual perception capabilities of large language models by incorporating external visual documents to address a given query.

UltraLink: An Open-Source Knowledge-Enhanced Multilingual Supervised Fine-tuning Dataset (2024.acl-long)

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Haoyu Wang, Shuo Wang, Yukun Yan, Xujia Wang, Zhiyu Yang, Yuzhuang Xu, Zhenghao Liu, Liner Yang, Ning Ding, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun

COAST: Enhancing the Code Debugging Ability of LLMs through Communicative Agent Based Data Synthesis (2025.findings-naacl)

Challenge:	Open-source large language models (LLMs) have gained strength across diverse fields, but the majority of studies focus on English.
Approach:	They propose a knowledge-grounded data augmentation approach to elicit more language-specific knowledge of LLMs by enhancing their ability to serve users from different countries.
Outcome:	The proposed method can prune the language-agnostic supervised fine-tuning dataset without any performance degradation.

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Weiqing Yang, Hanbin Wang, Zhenghao Liu, Xinze Li, Yukun Yan, Shuo Wang, Yu Gu, Minghe Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Ge Yu

Enhancing Open-Domain Task-Solving Capability of LLMs via Autonomous Tool Integration from GitHub (2025.acl-long)

Challenge:	Existing code debugging benchmarks focus on the Code Repair stage of the code generation process.
Approach:	They propose a framework to evaluate the debugging abilities of large language models by emulating the human debug process.
Outcome:	The proposed framework outperforms human-curated and GPT-4-generated training data, enabling 7B-scale LLMs to achieve comparable debugging performance to GPT-3.5.

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Bohan Lyu, Xin Cong, Heyang Yu, Pan Yang, Cheng Qian, Zihe Wang, Yujia Qin, Yining Ye, Yaxi Lu, Chen Qian, Zhong Zhang, Yukun Yan, Yankai Lin, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun