Papers by Yulin Chen
Enabling Self-Improving Agents to Learn at Test Time With Human-In-The-Loop Guidance (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Yufei He, Ruoyu Li, Alex Chen, Yue Liu, Yulin Chen, Yuan Sui, Cheng Chen, Yi Zhu, Luca Luo, Frank Yang, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Existing large language model (LLM) agents are unable to adapt to changing domain knowledge and rules. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM agent framework that continuously learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent improves on a customer due diligence name screening task on . the agent learns updated domain knowledge at test time. |
Sparse Low-rank Adaptation of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning pre-trained large language models in a parameter-efficient manner are gaining traction within the research community. |
| Approach: | They propose a method of low-rank adaptation that enables dynamic adjustments to the intrinsic rank during the adaptation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the current method with a fixed and unalterable intrinsic rank and a low-rank adaptation process. |
Exploring the Impact of Personality Traits on LLM Toxicity and Bias (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | anthropomorphic LLMs are being developed to serve diversified roles, but content safety concerns remain regarding their toxicity and toxicity. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign personality traits to large language models (LLMs) to reduce toxic language and social biases in their outputs by using the widely accepted HEXACO personality framework developed in social psychology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform on three toxic and bias benchmarks and shows that assigning personality traits reduces bias and toxicity similar to humans’ correlations between personality traits and toxic behaviors. |
OpenPrompt: An Open-source Framework for Prompt-learning (2022.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Prompt-learning is a new paradigm in natural language processing, adapting pre-trained language models to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt-learning that integrates pre-trained language models with a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is easy to use and flexible enough to integrate with other frameworks. |
Defense Against Prompt Injection Attack by Leveraging Attack Techniques (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent attacks leverage LLMs’ instruction-following abilities and their inabilities to distinguish instructions injected in the data content. |
| Approach: | They invert the intention of prompt injection methods to develop novel defense methods based on previous training-free attack methods by repeating the attack process with the original input instruction rather than the injected instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing defense approaches, achieving state-of-the-art results. |
TopicAttack: An Indirect Prompt Injection Attack via Topic Transition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent attacks have demonstrated potential, but their abrupt instruction injection often undermines their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prompts the LLM to generate a fabricated conversational transition prompt that gradually shifts the topic toward the injected instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with an attack success rate (ASR) over 90% in most cases, even when various defense methods are applied. |
Hide and Seek in Noise Labels: Noise-Robust Collaborative Active Learning with LLMs-Powered Assistance (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning from noisy labels are difficult to improve . existing methods identify noisy labels and use active learning to query experts . |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative learning framework to combine LLMs and small models for learning from noisy labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on synthetic and real-world noise datasets. |
Robustness via Referencing: Defending against Prompt Injection Attacks by Referencing the Executed Instruction (2026.findings-acl)
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Yulin Chen, Haoran Li, Yuan Sui, Yue Liu, Yufei He, Xiaoling Bai, Chi Fei, Li Yabo, Haozhe Ma, Yangqiu Song, Bryan Hooi
| Challenge: | Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt injection defense method that suppresses the model's instruction-following tendencies rather than suppressing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms prompt-engineering-based approaches and fine-tuning methods and reduces the ASR to nearly 0% in some scenarios. |
Few-shot Classification with Hypersphere Modeling of Prototypes (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fewshot learning use embeddings in space, but they lack expressivity and are difficult to perform statistically. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where class information is represented by hyperspheres with dynamic sizes with two sets of learnable parameters: the hypersphere’s center and the radius. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much more expressive than embeddings and performs better than statistical modeling. |
EvoMD-LLM: Learning the Language of Species Evolution in Reactive Molecular Dynamics (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models operate on static molecular representations or rely on external tools for reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates species-level molecular dynamics as a symbolic temporal language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms neural networks and language-based baselines on multiple temporal prediction tasks and generates plausible interpretations of reaction dynamics. |
Exploring Lottery Prompts for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize pre-trained language models are expensive and slow to scale. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for instance-level lottery prompts and generalize them to unseen data . they validate the assumption that for every instance, there is almost always a lottery prompt that induces the correct prediction from the PLM . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve comparable results with other gradient-free and optimization-free baselines. |
Weed Out, Then Harvest: Dual Low-Rank Adaptation is an Effective Noisy Label Detector for Noise-Robust Learning (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that PEFT can fine-tune language models without relying on perfectly labeled datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decouples sample selection from model training by introducing clean and noisy LoRA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decouples sample selection from model training. |
Few-NERD: A Few-shot Named Entity Recognition Dataset (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to few-shot named entity recognition (NER) focus on coarse-grained entities with few examples, while most unseen entities are fine-grounded. |
| Approach: | They present a human-annotated few-shot named entity recognition dataset . they construct benchmark tasks to assess the generalization capability of models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is the first few-shot NER dataset and the largest human-crafted NER data set. |
Can Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Be Detected and Removed? (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have developed various detection mechanisms to protect against prompt injection attacks. |
| Approach: | They investigate the feasibility of detecting and removing indirect prompt injection attacks . they use two methods to evaluate their performance and train detection models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a benchmark dataset and is available on github . it evaluates the performance of existing models and open-source detection models . |
Learning on Imbalanced Noisy Data via Debiased Sample Selection and LLM-Driven Annotation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning with noisy labels are prone to selection bias and training bias . obtaining large-scale high-quality datasets is expensive and time-consuming in practical scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose an imbalanced learning with noisy labels task to let model learn from noisy labels . they first conduct debiased sample selection to better separate clean samples from noisy samples . then they feed selected clean samples to active annotator large language models for re-annotating noisy samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on synthetic and real-world datasets. |
Fusing Highly Specialized Language Models for Comprehensive Expertise (2025.acl-long)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Ganqu Cui, Xingtai Lv, Weilin Zhao, Kaiyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Bowen Zhou, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Existing models that focus on language, programming code, and mathematical symbols are not able to achieve mastery of all three domains simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse highly-specialized models that are already sufficiently trained on different domains to achieve a highly-specific model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model could achieve mastery of the three crucial domains simultaneously. |
Both Matter: Enhancing the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models without Compromising the General Intelligence (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Emotional Intelligence (EI) is a key concept in the field of human intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enhance EI of large language models by naive fine-tuning on EI-related tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves EI of two LLM-based assistants without compromising GI. |
Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning tasks, but they tend to explore unproductive solution paths without effective backtracking or strategy adjustment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that empowers LLMs to “think about how to think” and dynamically adapts reasoning strategies in real-time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous SOTA methods by 9-12% in accuracy while reducing inference time by 28-35% under the same compute budget. |
MAVEN-ERE: A Unified Large-scale Dataset for Event Coreference, Temporal, Causal, and Subevent Relation Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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Xiaozhi Wang, Yulin Chen, Ning Ding, Hao Peng, Zimu Wang, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Peng Li, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing datasets only cover limited relation types at once, which prevents models from taking full advantage of relation interactions. |
| Approach: | They construct a large-scale human-annotated ERE dataset with improved annotation schemes to address these drawbacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is larger than existing datasets of all the ERE tasks by at least an order of magnitude. |
Backdoor-Powered Prompt Injection Attacks Nullify Defense Methods (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLMs are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks because of their instruction-following abilities and inability to distinguish the instructions in the data content. |
| Approach: | They propose backdoor-powered prompt injection attacks that trick LLMs into deviating from the original input instruction and executing the attackers’ target instruction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks trick the LLMs into deviating from the input instruction and executing the attackers’ target instruction. |
Revisiting Sparse Retrieval for Few-shot Entity Linking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking (EL) aims to link ambiguous mentions to their corresponding entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose an ELECTRA-based keyword extractor to denoise the mention context and construct a better query expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on the ZESHEL dataset by a significant margin. |
Do Current Video LLMs Have Strong OCR Abilities? A Preliminary Study (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark evaluates video-based optical character recognition (Video OCR) performance of multi-modal models in videos . the benchmark aims to improve video LLMs' ability to extract text from video content . previous benchmarks have focused on video QA, but not video-related QA. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the video OCR performance of multi-modal models in videos . they use a semi-automated approach that integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes 1,028 videos and 2,961 question-answer pairs . it integrates the OCR ability of image LLMs with manual refinement . |
Exclusion of Thought: Mitigating Cognitive Load in Large Language Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Multiple-Choice Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used and vital assessment format for evaluating large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning prompt strategy that redirects the model's attention away from erroneous options and eliminates incorrect options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning prompt reduces cognitive load by steering the model’s attention away from erroneous options, enabling the model to focus more effectively on reasonable answers. |
A Read-and-Select Framework for Zero-shot Entity Linking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on the candidate retrieval stage and ignore the essential candidate ranking stage, which disambiguates among entities and makes the final linking prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a read-and-select framework that models the main components of entity disambiguation . they use mention context to output mention-aware entity representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on established zero-shot entity linking dataset ZESHEL with 2.55% micro-average accuracy gain, with no need for laborious multi-phase pre-training used in most of the previous work. |
Prompt-learning for Fine-grained Entity Typing (2022.findings-emnlp)
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Ning Ding, Yulin Chen, Xu Han, Guangwei Xu, Xiaobin Wang, Pengjun Xie, Haitao Zheng, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Hong-Gee Kim
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on fine-grained entity typing under fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot settings show the effectiveness of prompt-learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-learning pipeline that stimulates versatile knowledge of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by constructing entity-oriented verbalizers and templates and conducting masked language modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to fine-grained entity typing in fully supervised, few-shot, and zero-shot scenarios. |
ContextLens: Modeling Imperfect Privacy and Safety Context for Legal Compliance (2026.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Yulin Chen, Huihao Jing, Wenbin Hu, Tsz Ho Li, Chanhou Lou, Hong Ting Tsang, Sirui Han, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to contextualize safety and privacy assessments assume the availability of complete and clear context, whereas real-world contexts tend to be ambiguous and incomplete. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-rule-based framework that leverages large language models to ground the input context in the legal domain and explicitly identify both known and unknown factors for legal compliance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can significantly improve existing baselines without training and can identify the ambiguous and missing factors. |
Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study validates the effectiveness of chat language models by fine-tuning instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale dataset of instructional conversations to fine-tune a conversational model on instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in key metrics including scale, average length, diversity, coherence, etc. |
Privacy Checklist: Privacy Violation Detection Grounding on Contextual Integrity Theory (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy studies focus on sub-fields, but they focus on a few sub-domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 as an example to develop a checklist that covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed checklist covers social identities, private attributes, and existing privacy regulations. |
Detecting RAG Extraction Attack via Dual-Path Runtime Integrity Game (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems augment large language models with external knowledge, but introduce a critical security vulnerability: Knowledge Base Leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a runtime defense mechanism inspired by stack canaries in software security . canaryRAG embeds carefully designed canary tokens into retrieved chunks and reformulates RAG extraction defense as a dual-path runtime integrity game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can detect and prevent RAG Knowledge Base Leakage in real time . it can be integrated into arbitrary RAG pipelines without retraining or structural modifications . |
PrivaCI-Bench: Evaluating Privacy with Contextual Integrity and Legal Compliance (2025.acl-long)
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Haoran Li, Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Yulin Chen, Qi Hu, Sirui Han, Tianshu Chu, Peizhao Hu, Yangqiu Song
| Challenge: | Recent advances in generative large language models (LLMs) have enabled wider applicability, accessibility, and flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextual privacy evaluation benchmark that covers the entire relevant social context through private information flows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover legal compliance, real court cases, privacy policies, and synthetic data. |