Papers by Yuntao Li
Learning SQL Like a Human: Structure-Aware Curriculum Learning for Text-to-SQL Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models struggle with complex queries, especially multi-table joins and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a model with synthetic training samples and a structure-aware curriculum learning framework for enhancing SQL generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the existing model on the Spider and Bird benchmarks. |
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Kailin Jiang, Ning Jiang, Yuntao Du, Yuchen Ren, Yuchen Li, Yifan Gao, Jinhe Bi, Yunpu Ma, Bin Li, Lei Liu, Qing Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are constrained by static representations, inadequately evaluating their ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types to evaluate temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 tasks, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. |
M2PA: A Multi-Memory Planning Agent for Open Worlds Inspired by Cognitive Theory (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Xiaodong Li, Yuntao Liu, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Zhenyu Li, Jinlong Tian, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Open-world planning poses a challenge due to complex environments and task diversity . recent work shows that large language models (LLMs) lack the ability to connect to agents' experiences . |
| Approach: | They propose an open-world multi-memory planning agent that combines large language models with human-like multi-mesh systems to leverage their strengths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms state-of-the-art agents on 50 Minecraft tasks in zero-shot learning. |
“What Do You Mean by That?” A Parser-Independent Interactive Approach for Enhancing Text-to-SQL (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In Natural Language Interfaces to Databases systems, text-to-SQL parsers allow users to query databases by using natural language questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a parser-independent interactive approach that interacts with users using multi-choice questions and can easily work with arbitrary parsers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance with limited interaction turns by using simulation and human evaluation on two cross-domain datasets with five state-of-the-art parsers. |
Activation Steering Decoding: Mitigating Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models through Bidirectional Hidden State Intervention (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) suffer from hallucination where generated textual descriptions fail to align accurately with visual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach that mitigates hallucination through targeted intervention in the model’s intermediate activations by identifying directional patterns of hallucinism in the activation space using a small calibration set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucination across multiple benchmarks while maintaining performance on general visual understanding tasks. |
Structural Reward Model: Enhancing Interpretability, Efficiency, and Scalability in Reward Modeling (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Xiaoyu Liu, Di Liang, Hongyu Shan, Peiyang Liu, Yonghao Liu, Muling Wu, Yuntao Li, Xianjie Wu, Li Miao, Jiangrong Shen, Minlong Peng
| Challenge: | Generative RMs (GRMs) lack contextual and background information during inference, leading to incomplete evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular and interpretable framework that integrates side-branch models as auxiliary feature generators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms scalar and saline reward models in robustness and alignment with human preferences. |
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)
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Shaoting Tan, Ning Liu, Yuntao Du, Shuyue Wei, Wu Shuai, Qian Li, Yanyu Xu, Wei Zhang, Lizhen Cui, Haitao Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation . |
| Outcome: | GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50–68% to 79–93% while reducing test costs by 20–54%. |
What Factors Affect LLMs and RLLMs in Financial Question Answering? (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on large language models and reasoning large language model (RLLMs) however, there are few studies that explore what methods can fully unlock the performance of LLMs and RLLM in the financial domain. |
| Approach: | They examine the effects of prompting methods, agentic frameworks, and multilingual alignment methods on financial question-answering tasks. |
| Outcome: | The results show that prompting methods and agent frameworks improve LLMs' performance . the authors suggest that these frameworks can be used to enhance LLM performance if they are implemented in financial domains. |
Improving Semantic Matching through Dependency-Enhanced Pre-trained Model with Adaptive Fusion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on dependency prior structure integration into pre-trained models is still unclear. |
| Approach: | They propose a dependency-based fusion attention paradigm which explicitly introduces dependency prior structure into pre-trained models and adaptively fuses it with semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on 10 public datasets, demonstrating the benefits of adaptively fusing dependency structure in semantic matching task. |
Let Me Check the Examples: Enhancing Demonstration Learning via Explicit Imitation (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing work only concatenates answered examples as demonstrations to prompt template without any additional operation, neglecting the prompt-demonstration dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose to concatenate answered examples as demonstrations to prompt template without any additional operation, neglecting the prompt-demonstration dependencies. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 5 out of 14 classification corpus. |
CE-GPPO: Coordinating Entropy via Gradient-Preserving Clipping Policy Optimization in Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for proximal policy optimization discard valuable gradient signals from low-probability tokens due to the clipping mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that reintroduces gradients from clipped tokens in native PPO in a gentle and bounded manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong baselines on reasoning benchmarks on different model scales. |
AutoGUI: Scaling GUI Grounding with Automatic Functionality Annotations from LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for UI-VLMs contain large-scale context-free element annotations or contextualized functional descriptions for elements at a small scale. |
| Approach: | They propose an auto-annotation pipeline that generates massive UI element functionality annotations based on UI content changes induced by interacting with the elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves accuracy and scales well with human evaluation of a high-quality AutoGUI-704k dataset. |
Dynamic Graph Neural ODE Network for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-based multimodal emotion recognition methods fail to capture dynamic changes in emotions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dynamic Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation Network (DGODE) which combines dynamic changes of emotions to capture temporal dependencies of speakers’ emotions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the temporal dependencies caused by dynamic changes in emotions and can improve on two publicly available multimodal emotion recognition datasets. |
Automated Profile Inference with Language Model Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protections for large language models (LLMs) are limited due to the potential for malicious applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated profile inference framework that can extract personal information from public online activities by an adversary with the help of large language model (LLM) based agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is highly effective and efficient and the inferred attributes are both identifiable and sensitive, posing significant privacy risks. |
DABERT: Dual Attention Enhanced BERT for Semantic Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for semantic sentence matching lack the ability to capture subtle differences. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Transformer-based pre-trained language model to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs by introducing a dual attention module and a fusion module to learn the aggregation of difference and affinity features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to capture fine-grained differences in sentence pairs. |
Entropy Ratio Clipping as a Soft Global Constraint for Stable Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhenpeng Su, Leiyu Pan, Minxuan Lv, Tiehua Mei, Zijia Lin, Yuntao Li, Wenping Hu, Ruiming Tang, Kun Gai, Guorui Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language model post-training often adopts an off-policy training paradigm . however, the off-poliicy training model introduces distribution shifts that push the policy beyond the trust region. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the entropy ratio as a global metric to measure the relative change in policy exploration throughout updates. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed metric improves performance across multiple benchmarks. |
Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations (2023.findings-acl)
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Ethan Perez, Sam Ringer, Kamile Lukosiute, Karina Nguyen, Edwin Chen, Scott Heiner, Craig Pettit, Catherine Olsson, Sandipan Kundu, Saurav Kadavath, Andy Jones, Anna Chen, Benjamin Mann, Brian Israel, Bryan Seethor, Cameron McKinnon, Christopher Olah, Da Yan, Daniela Amodei, Dario Amodei, Dawn Drain, Dustin Li, Eli Tran-Johnson, Guro Khundadze, Jackson Kernion, James Landis, Jamie Kerr, Jared Mueller, Jeeyoon Hyun, Joshua Landau, Kamal Ndousse, Landon Goldberg, Liane Lovitt, Martin Lucas, Michael Sellitto, Miranda Zhang, Neerav Kingsland, Nelson Elhage, Nicholas Joseph, Noemi Mercado, Nova DasSarma, Oliver Rausch, Robin Larson, Sam McCandlish, Scott Johnston, Shauna Kravec, Sheer El Showk, Tamera Lanham, Timothy Telleen-Lawton, Tom Brown, Tom Henighan, Tristan Hume, Yuntao Bai, Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Jack Clark, Samuel R. Bowman, Amanda Askell, Roger Grosse, Danny Hernandez, Deep Ganguli, Evan Hubinger, Nicholas Schiefer, Jared Kaplan
| Challenge: | Prior work creates evaluations with crowdwork or existing data sources, which are not always available. |
| Approach: | They generate evaluations automatically with language models (LMs) using crowdwork or existing data sources to find out how they behave . |
| Outcome: | The results show that large LMs repeat back a dialog user’s preferred answer and express greater desire to pursue concerning goals like resource acquisition and goal preservation. |
Metagent-P: A Neuro-Symbolic Planning Agent with Metacognition for Open Worlds (2025.findings-acl)
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YanfangZhou YanfangZhou, Yuntao Liu, Xiaodong Li, Yongqiang Zhao, Xintong Wang, Jinlong Tian, Zhenyu Li, Xinhai Xu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promising potential through their world knowledge and language processing capabilities in open-world planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates the world knowledge of large language models, symbolic reasoning capabilities of cognitive architectures, and metacognition to improve experience utilization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in Minecraft and reduces the average replanning counts by 34% and exceeds the human success rate by 18.96%. |