Papers by Yutong Yao
From Scenes to Elements: Multi-Granularity Evidence Retrieval for Verifiable Multimodal RAG (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve evidence at coarse granularities, making failures unverifiable. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark that features real-world landmarks with annotations across multiple viewpoints and a framework that treats visual elements as first-class retrieval units through three stages: element-level detection and classification, multi-granularity cross-modal alignment for evidence retrieval, and attribution-constrained generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves up to 29.2% improvement over six strong baselines for this task. |
A Two-Stage Prediction-Aware Contrastive Learning Framework for Multi-Intent NLU (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Multi-intent natural language understanding (NLU) models lack the rich information between the shared intents, especially in low-data scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework for multi-intent natural language understanding to harness shared intent information by word-level pre-training and prediction-aware contrastive fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baselines on low-data and full-data scenarios. |
SGIC: A Self-Guided Iterative Calibration Framework for RAG (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) focus on extracting relevant documents or refinement of specialized instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides LLMs with specific cues to improve their calibration efficacy . they propose an iterative self-calibration training set that harnesses uncertainty scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance on both closed-source and open-source LLMs. |
Chain-of-Procedure: Hierarchical Visual-Language Reasoning for Procedural QA (2026.findings-acl)
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Guanhua Chen, Yutong Yao, Shenghe Sun, Ci-jun Gao, Shudong Liu, Lidia S. Chao, Feng Wan, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive results on standard image-text tasks, yet their capability in visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark specifically designed for visual procedural reasoning that synergizes cross-modal procedure retrieval, context-aware step decomposition, and the next step prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly outperforms baselines on visual procedure question answering (VP-QA) Experiments on six VLMs show that it performs better than baselines. |