Papers by Zhaoyang Liu
ExecVerify: White-Box RL with Verifiable Stepwise Rewards for Code Execution Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for code execution reasoning are limited by the difficulty of the training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses reinforcement learning to reward correct answers from execution traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves pass@1 by up to 5.9% on code generation tasks over strong baselines. |
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a tailored learning approach to distill the exclusive reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate democratization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach enables the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability by leveraging the black-box model as a reasoning teacher. |
UECA-Prompt: Universal Prompt for Emotion Cause Analysis (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods adopt fine-tuning paradigm to solve certain types of ECA tasks. Existing models suffer from dataset bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a universal prompt tuning method to solve different ECA tasks in a unified framework and a sequential learning module to ease the dataset bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance on the ECA datasets. |
Remember Me, Refine Me: A Dynamic Procedural Memory Framework for Experience-Driven Agent Evolution (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks treat memory as a static append-only archive . Existing systems focus on passive accumulation, resulting in a 'passive accumulation' of memory. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for experience-driven agent evolution that integrates procedural memory with contextual information to create a high-quality experience pool. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on BFCL-V3 and AppWorld show that ReMe outperforms memoryless Qwen3-8B. |
RMLM: A Flexible Defense Framework for Proactively Mitigating Word-level Adversarial Attacks (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing defenses focus on improving robustness of the victim model in training, but neglect to mitigate adversarial attacks during inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that confuses attackers and corrects adversarial contexts . their framework helps improve the robustness of the victim model during inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the robustness of the victim model in training . it also corrects abnormal contexts in the representation level and filtering out examples . |
d-TreeRPO: Towards More Reliable Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods suffer from reliability bottlenecks due to reward sparsity and intractable computations . d-TreeRPO provides fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable reinforcement learning framework for diffusion large language models that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and achieves significant improvements across reasoning benchmarks. |
OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bowen Yang, Kaiming Jin, Zhenyu Wu, Zhaoyang Liu, Qiushi Sun, Zehao Li, JingJing Xie, Zhoumianze Liu, Fangzhi Xu, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Qingyun Li, Yu Qiao, Zun Wang, Zichen Ding
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack visual-aware tutorial retrieval and historical visual context curation and pruning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates an orchestrator and a Reflection-Memory Agent for robust automation. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across model scales. |
Experience-Driven Multi-Agent Optimization for Black-Box Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreak have poor transferability and high sensitivity to preprocessing . EMJO provides an effective and scalable paradigm for systematic jailbreak optimization . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that couples agents into a closed-loop "probe–evaluate–revise” process . they propose EMJO, which can be query-efficient and transferable, under black-box access. |
| Outcome: | a new approach outperforms existing jailbreak baselines on diverse LLMs . it achieves up to 11% improvement in attack success rate while reducing query cost . |
VISIAR: Empower MLLM for Visual Story Ideation (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhaoyang Xia, Somdeb Sarkhel, Mehrab Tanjim, Stefano Petrangeli, Ishita Dasgupta, Yuxiao Chen, Jinxuan Xu, Di Liu, Saayan Mitra, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | Existing literature on visual storytelling has not explored the ideation process fully. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual story ideation task that automates the selection and arrangement of visual assets into coherent sequences that convey expressive storylines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses baseline by 33.5% and 18.5%, respectively, on three metrics. |
Concise Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yifan Wu, Jingze Shi, Bingheng Wu, Jiayi Zhang, Xiaotian Lin, Yizhang Zhu, Zhaoyang Yu, Bang Liu, Chenglin Wu, Nan Tang, Yuyu Luo
| Challenge: | Human experts tackle difficult math problems by identifying and executing a few pivotal steps rather than listing every intermediate thought. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for producing training data that mirrors concise human reasoning by rewriting a problem's solution to retain only the essential steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms models trained on 800k long CoT and cuts training and inference costs. |