Papers by Yuxuan Yao
OpenWebAgent: An Open Toolkit to Enable Web Agents on Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Iat Long Iong, Xiao Liu, Yuxuan Chen, Hanyu Lai, Shuntian Yao, Pengbo Shen, Hao Yu, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
| Challenge: | OpenWebAgent integrates large language models and large multimodal models to improve web automation. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate large language models and large multimodal models into an open toolkit to optimize web automation. |
| Outcome: | The open toolkit integrates both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs) it enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. |
LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Li, Xinwei Guo, Jiashi Gao, Guanhua Chen, Xiangyu Zhao, Jiaxin Zhang, Quanying Liu, Haiyan Wu, Xin Yao, Xuetao Wei
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) generate outputs that stray from user input or contravene established knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a new phenomenon, Authority Bias, where LLMs favor one knowledge source over the other . they propose atomic information that generates conflicts and a Conflict Detection Enhanced Query framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces Authority bias in large language models . it detects conflicts, performs credibility assessment on conflicting paragraphs, and detects perturbed text . |
Adaptive Backtracking for Privacy Protection in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing privacy protection methods are prone to privacy leakage, but they are not effective in ensuring the privacy of users. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture latent leakage tendency of large language models during generation process and to construct a new benchmark for personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves privacy by up to 14% over strong baselines against adversarial attacks, avoiding the degradation of response utility. |
StorySparkQA: Expert-Annotated QA Pairs with Real-World Knowledge for Children’s Story-Based Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Shao Zhang, Bingsheng Yao, Yuanzhe Dong, Ying Xu, Yunyao Li, Qianwen Wang, Dakuo Wang, Yuling Sun
| Challenge: | Existing story reading systems fail to capture the nuances of how education experts think when conducting interactive story reading activities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing question-answering (QA) datasets to capture experts' annotations and thinking process to construct a story-based annotation framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures experts’ annotations and thinking process and can be used to generate 5, 868 expert-annotated QA pairs with real-world knowledge. |
Beyond Labels: Empowering Human Annotators with Natural Language Explanations through a Novel Active-Learning Architecture (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bingsheng Yao, Ishan Jindal, Lucian Popa, Yannis Katsis, Sayan Ghosh, Lihong He, Yuxuan Lu, Shashank Srivastava, Yunyao Li, James Hendler, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing low-resource learning techniques focus on label annotation while neglecting the natural language explanation of a data point. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel architecture that leverages an explanation-generation model to produce explanations guided by human explanations and a prediction model that utilizes generated explanations toward prediction faithfully. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture produces explanations guided by human explanations, a prediction model that utilizes generated explanations toward prediction faithfully, and a data diversity-based AL sampling strategy that benefits from the explanation annotations. |
LoRE-Merging: Exploring Low-Rank Estimation For Large Language Model Merging (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a framework for model merging is proposed without additional training . task vectors from fine-tuned models exhibit a limited number of dominant singular values . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for model merging based on low-rank estimation of task vectors without access to the base model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves models without additional training without additional inputs. |
LLMs for Now, Fine-Tuning for Later: An Ensemble Approach to Data Drift in Domain-Specific Tasks (2026.acl-srw)
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Yuxuan Lu, Bingsheng Yao, Shao Zhang, Yisi Sang, Yun Wang, Hansu Gu, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Deploying machine learning models in domain-specific scenarios is challenged by data drift and the scarcity of expert annotations. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that combines an LLM, an AL-assisted compact model and an automatic switch module to assist the active learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 96–98% switch accuracy and outperforms both models used alone. |
Can LLM Agents Simulate Multi-Turn Human Behavior? Evidence from Real Online Customer Behavior Data (2026.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Lu, Jing Huang, Yan Han, Bingsheng Yao, Sisong Bei, Yaochen Xie, Yisi Sang, Qi He, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that LLM Agents can generate “believable” human behaviors via prompt-only methods, leaving open questions of whether they can accurately generate step-by-step actions in multi-turn interaction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use shopping data to evaluate LLMs' ability to accurately generate step-by-step actions in a multi-turn interaction task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 17.26% action generation accuracy and 33.86% F1 score on final purchase prediction, representing improvements of 5.4% and 13.85% over baselines. |
SWE-Mutation: Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Suites in Software Engineering? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxuan Sun, Yuze Zhao, Yufeng Wang, Yao Du, Zhiyuan Ma, Jinbo Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Kai Zhang, Zhenya Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating software engineering capabilities is a core component of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-generated test suites that introduces mutated solutions that attempt to "fool" them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suites are based on 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and include a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. |
More Samples or More Prompts? Exploring Effective Few-Shot In-Context Learning for LLMs with In-Context Sampling (2024.findings-naacl)
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Bingsheng Yao, Guiming Chen, Ruishi Zou, Yuxuan Lu, Jiachen Li, Shao Zhang, Yisi Sang, Sijia Liu, James Hendler, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLM prompting focus on selecting a better set of data samples inside one single prompt input, but why not design and leverage multiple ICL prompts together to further improve the LLM’s performance? |
| Approach: | They propose a low-resource LLM prompting technique to optimize the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs to produce confident predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique can produce confident predictions by optimizing the construction of multiple ICL prompt inputs on four NLI datasets and one QA dataset. |
Multi-Agent-as-Judge: Aligning LLM-Agent-Based Automated Evaluation with Multi-Dimensional Human Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Xiaojie Wang, Huimin Zeng, Jing Huang, Jiri Gesi, Ying Xu, Bingsheng Yao, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Existing "LLM-as-a-judge" evaluation frameworks are limited by persona descriptions and are not generalizable to other tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can automatically construct multiple evaluator personas with distinct dimensions from relevant text documents and instantiate LLM agents with the persona. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can believably simulate human evaluators . it extracts stakeholders' diverse perspectives from the provided research papers and constructs personas for the agents . |
Fine-grained Conversational Decoding via Isotropic and Proximal Search (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text decoding methods are not tailoring for dialogue generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained conversational decoding method that generates a semantic-concentrated response while maintaining informativeness and discrimination against the context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing decoding strategies in the dialogue field across both automatic and human evaluation metrics. |