Papers by Yuxin Chen
When Evolution Strategy Meets Language Models Tuning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models with pretraining often display limited capability in effectively following instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose an on-policy approach to optimize models by harnessing the principle of biological evolution, namely survival of the fittest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve superior performance in various tasks and comparable performance in the human alignment task. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
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Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Approach: | They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. |
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Sheldon Yu, Yuxin Xiong, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Tong Yu, Xiang Chen, Ritwik Sinha, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Recent advances in chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated the ability of large language models to perform multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze latent dynamics of CoT trajectories for interpretability . they segment generated CoT into discrete reasoning steps and abstract each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework segments generated CoT steps into discrete reasoning steps, abstracts each step into a spectral embedding based on token-level Gram matrices, and clusters these embeddements into semantically meaningful latent states. |
Explaining Why: How Instructions and User Interfaces Impact Annotator Rationales When Labeling Text Data (2022.naacl-main)
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Jamar Sullivan Jr., Will Brackenbury, Andrew McNutt, Kevin Bryson, Kwam Byll, Yuxin Chen, Michael Littman, Chenhao Tan, Blase Ur
| Challenge: | In the context of data labeling, researchers are interested in having humans select rationales . |
| Approach: | They conducted an online user study to understand how humans select rationales . they found that participants were near unanimous in their data labels . |
| Outcome: | The results show that participants selected 12% of input tokens as rationales, but fewer if unable to drag over multiple tokens at once. |
MUZO: Leveraging Multiple Queries and Momentum for Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models incur memory overhead due to the need for activation storage for back-propagation (BP). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that estimates gradients through finite differences without activation storage for back-propagation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in fine-tuning various LLMs. |
UniSonate: A Unified Model for Speech, Music, and Sound Effect Generation with Text Instructions (2026.acl-long)
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Chunyu Qiang, Xiaopeng Wang, Kang Yin, Yuzhe Liang, Yuxin Guo, Teng Ma, Ziyu Zhang, Tianrui Wang, Cheng Gong, Yushen Chen, Ruibo Fu, Longbiao Wang, Jianwu Dang
| Challenge: | Generative audio modeling has been fragmented into specialized tasks such as text-to-speech (TTS), text- to-music (TTM), and text-ta (TTA) specialized models require reference audio for timbre cloning and strict phoneme alignment, whereas TTA models generate unstructured textures from open-ended captions. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified flow-matching framework capable of synthesizing speech, music, sound effects . they propose 'token injection mechanism' that projects unstructured environmental sounds into structured temporal latent space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in instruction-based TTS and TTM while maintaining competitive fidelity in TTA. |
AnnaAgent: Dynamic Evolution Agent System with Multi-Session Memory for Realistic Seeker Simulation (2025.findings-acl)
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Ming Wang, Peidong Wang, Lin Wu, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yuxin Chen, Bixuan Wang, Yifei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models of seeker simulations are limited by the cost and ethical concerns of involving real seekers in mental health research. |
| Approach: | They propose an emotional and cognitive dynamic agent system equipped with tertiary memory to enable dynamic control of the simulator's configurations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves more realistic seeker simulation compared to baselines. |
Automatic Prompt Engineering for Scalable Prompt Inversion in Text-to-Image Ad Generation (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | PRISM-DUEL is a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) PRIMS-DUEl is motivated by advertising workflows requiring low-latency, diverse variants faithful to a human-designed ad. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box framework that formalizes prompt optimization as Automatic Prompt Engineering (APE) they obtain label-free pairwise preferences and rationales from an LLM judge over pairs of generated images and use a dueling-bandit optimizer to optimize a prompt for generating controlled variations while matching the reference ad's visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework preserves visual similarity and semantic faithfulness while increasing diversity. |
GenPT: Beyond Self-Report for Reliable LLM Psychometrics via Generative Projective Testing (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Wang, Shuang Wu, Bixuan Wang, Lu Lin, Yuxin Chen, Xiaocui Yang, Daling Wang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Yufan Sun
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) inherit contamination from training corpora, directional bias under social-desirability framing, and limited responsiveness to context beyond the item text. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm reformulates TAT, Rorschach, and SCT with newly generated stimuli and organises assessment as a three-stage pipeline. |
A Study of Implicit Ranking Unfairness in Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior ability to serve as ranking models, but they will exhibit discriminatory ranking behaviors based on users’ sensitive attributes (gender). |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation method to investigate the severity of implicit ranking unfairness and a pair-wise regression method to conduct fair-aware data augmentation for LLM fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in ranking fairness, achieving this with only a small reduction in accuracy. |
Lion: Adversarial Distillation of Proprietary Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for transferring knowledge from a proprietary large language model to an open-source LLM have been criticized for not incorporating any feedback to boost student model's proficiency iteratively. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adversarial distillation framework that integrates feedback to identify challenging instructions where the student model’s performance falls short. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing state-of-the-art LLMs by 55.4% in challenging zero-shot reasoning benchmarks and 16.7% on AGIEval. |
NeuSym-RAG: Hybrid Neural Symbolic Retrieval with Multiview Structuring for PDF Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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Ruisheng Cao, Hanchong Zhang, Tiancheng Huang, Zhangyi Kang, Yuxin Zhang, Liangtai Sun, Hanqi Li, Yuxun Miao, Shuai Fan, Lu Chen, Kai Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieval augmented generation neglect PDF structure and layout . individual PDFs often exceed prompt limits and user queries may span multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural symbolic retrieval framework which combines both paradigms in an interactive process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework organizes semi-structured PDF content into relational database and vectorstore . it defeats both RAG and structured baselines on three PDF-based QA datasets . |
Crowd Comparative Reasoning: Unlocking Comprehensive Evaluations for LLM-as-a-Judge (2025.acl-long)
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Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Yuxin Jiang, Liangyou Li, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Fuyuan Lyu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on majority voting or criteria expansion to capture detailed and detailed details, often leading to incomplete outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which introduces additional crowd responses to compare with the candidate responses, thereby exposing deeper and more comprehensive details within the candidate answers. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves evaluation reliability and achieves an average gain of 6.7% across five benchmarks. |
VehicleWorld: A Highly Integrated Multi-Device Environment for Intelligent Vehicle Interaction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Yang, Jiajun Chen, Zhangyue Yin, Shuo Chen, Yuxin Wang, Yiran Guo, Yuan Li, Yining Zheng, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Traditional Function Calling (FC) approaches operate statelessly, requiring multiple exploratory calls to build environmental awareness before execution, leading to inefficiency and limited error recovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a state-based function call approach that maintains explicit system state awareness and implements direct state transitions to achieve target conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms traditional function calling approaches, achieving superior execution accuracy and reduced latency. |
AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Wentao Shi, Yu Wang, Yuyang Zhao, Yuxin Chen, Fuli Feng, Xueyuan Hao, Xi Su, Qi GU, Hui Su, Xunliang Cai, Xiangnan He
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification. |
GRPO-Guided Modality Selection Enhanced LoRA-Tuned LLMs for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to identify speakers’ emotional states by utilizing text, audio, and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive modality selection framework for multimodal emotion recognition in conversation that integrates all available modalities into one . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multimodal dialogue datasets and is available at https://github.com/youflyaway/Modality-Selection-Enhanced-LoRA-Tuned-LLMs. |
FIER: Fine-Grained and Efficient KV Cache Retrieval for Long-context LLM Inference (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Dongwei Wang, Zijie Liu, Song Wang, Yuxin Ren, Jianing Deng, Jingtong Hu, Tianlong Chen, Huanrui Yang
| Challenge: | Key-Value (KV) cache reading latency increases with context lengths hindering LLM inference . important tokens are sparsely distributed across the long context, making existing retrieval inaccurate . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to retain a small fraction of KV cache based on token importance . important tokens are often sparsely distributed across the long context . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces decoding latency by 1.2 to 1.5. |
A Multi-Modal Context Reasoning Approach for Conditional Inference on Joint Textual and Visual Clues (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues lack multimodal context reasoning capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal context reasoning approach that embeds textual semantics and objective image information into the pretrained language model to perform context reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on two data sets and shows 4.8% gain on the PMR. |
Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models produce unfaithful visual hallucinations, also known as visual halluinations, which hinders their application in multimodal understanding and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play train-free decoding algorithm for mitigating visual hallucinations . they leverage visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree . |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces visual hallucinations (VH) by leveraging visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree (CFTree) |
Deep-Reporter: Deep Research for Grounded Multimodal Long-Form Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Fangda Ye, Kuicai Dong, Xie Zhifei, Yuxin Hu, Yihang Yin, Shurui Huang, Shikai Dong, Chen Zhang, Jianzhu Bao, Shuicheng Yan
| Challenge: | Recent agentic search frameworks are text-centric, overlooking multimodal evidence . a pressing task is multimodal long-form generation, a new paper argues . |
| Approach: | They propose a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a unified agentic framework for grounded multimodal long-form generation. |
PsyAdvisor: A Plug-and-Play Strategy Advice Planner with Proactive Questioning in Psychological Conversations (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current psychological LLMs are constrained by passive response mechanisms, limiting their capacity to deploy proactive strategies for psychological counseling. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that provides a multi-turn conversation dataset with interpretive labels including strategy decision logic and reaction attribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves proactive questioning capacity, conversation depth, and response quality. |
CFSP: An Efficient Structured Pruning Framework for LLMs with Coarse-to-Fine Activation Information (2025.coling-main)
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Yuxin Wang, MingHua Ma, Zekun Wang, Jingchang Chen, Shan Liping, Qing Yang, Dongliang Xu, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing LLM pruning works focus on unstructured pruning, which typically requires special hardware support for a practical speed-up. |
| Approach: | They propose a network pruning framework that leverages both coarse and fine-grained activation information as an importance criterion to guide pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing pruning methods on diverse models across sparsity budgets. |