Papers by Yuqian Zhang
Are All Steps Equally Important? Benchmarking Essentiality Detection in Event Processes (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of event processing do not understand the essentiality of step events towards a goal event. |
| Approach: | They propose to deconstruct a goal event into a discrete representation of finer-grained (step) events, which are not equally important to the goal. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand the essentiality of different step events towards a goal event. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods (2026.acl-long)
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Chenfei Liao, Wensong Wang, Zichen Wen, Xu Zheng, Yiyu Wang, Haocong He, Yuanhuiyi Lyu, Lutao Jiang, Xin Zou, Yuqian Fu, Bin Ren, Linfeng Zhang, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
PILOT: Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories for Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models lack the capacity to formulate global strategies due to latency and availability constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance by synthesizing a query-conditioned Latent Guide. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on mathematical and coding benchmarks with negligible inference latency. |
A Survey of Uncertainty Estimation Methods on Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities but could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct extensive experimental evaluations of LLM uncertainty estimation methods . large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method could produce biased, hallucinated, or non-factual responses . a lack of comprehensive surveys on LLM uncertainty estimation is a problem . |
AVA: Attentive VLM Agent for Mastering StarCraft II (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing StarCraft II benchmarks rely on abstract state representations that deviate from human perception . Existing systems rely only on abstract representations, creating an artificial gap between how humans process battlefield information and limiting ecological validity of learned behaviors. |
| Approach: | They introduce AVACraft, the first multimodal benchmark environment for complex decision-making in StarCraft II. |
| Outcome: | The AVACraft benchmark supports both traditional and modern multi-agent reinforcement learning paradigms. |
Towards Open-Domain Topic Classification (2022.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised classification models are insensitive to class names, but are no longer effective in open-domain tasks where the taxonomy is unbounded. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic classification system that accepts user-defined taxonomy in real time . they train a pretrained language model on a new Wikipedia dataset and train it on Wikipedia . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves over existing zero-shot models and performs competitively with weakly-supervised models trained on in-domain data. |
RLAE: Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Ensemble for LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing ensemble methods for ensembling large language models rely on fixed weighting strategies that fail to adapt to dynamic, context-dependent characteristics of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates LLM ensemble through a Markov Decision Process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 3.3% on a diverse set of tasks while achieving lower time latency. |
Exploring the Hidden Reasoning Process of Large Language Models by Misleading Them (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Guanyu Chen, Peiyang Wang, Yizhou Jiang, Yuqian Liu, Chujie Zhao, Ying Fang, Tianren Zhang, Feng Chen
| Challenge: | Existing large language models can perform abstract reasoning tasks but are they actually engaging in rule-based reasoning beyond mere memorization? |
| Approach: | They propose a method to examine whether large language models perform abstract reasoning . they fine-tune the model to learn those contradictory rules and assess its generalization ability . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach examines whether large language models perform abstract reasoning by altering their original understanding of fundamental rules. |
Extracting or Guessing? Improving Faithfulness of Event Temporal Relation Extraction (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for event temporal relation extraction are based on data-driven machine learning . however, TEMPREL extraction is not accurate under distribution shifts. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct counterfactual analysis to attenuate the effects of two types of training biases: the event trigger bias and the frequent label bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extracts TempRel and timelines more faithfully compared to SOTA methods . it is based on two perspectives: one is to extract genuinely based upon contextual description . the other is to provide proper uncertainty estimation and abstain from extraction when no relation is described in the text . |