Papers by Zhengliang Shi
Retrieval Models Aren’t Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) suffer from inherent inabilities to interact with the physical world and access vast, up-to-date knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool retrieval benchmark for large language models (LLMs) that includes 7.6k diverse retrieval tasks and a corpus of 43k tools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the heterogeneous tool retrieval benchmark, resulting in low pass rate and low retrieval quality. |
Bridging the Capability Gap: Joint Alignment Tuning for Harmonizing LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Minghang Zhu, Zhengliang Shi, Zhiwei Xu, Shiguang Wu, Lingjie Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhaochun Ren, Zhumin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning agents are often inadequate . a multi-agent system can solve complex tasks by dividing responsibilities among specialized agents . |
| Approach: | a new framework is proposed to improve agents collaboration through iterative alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on held-in and held-out tasks. |
TTPA: Token-level Tool-use Preference Alignment Training Framework with Fine-grained Evaluation (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing tool-learning methods often overlook fine-grained optimization of internal tool call details. |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm for constructing token-level tool-use preference datasets . reversed dataset construction is a method for creating high-quality, multi-turn tool-user datasets by reversing the generation flow. |
| Outcome: | a new training paradigm improves tool-using performance and generalizes results. |
Generate-then-Ground in Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solve multi-hop question are constrained by the retriever and the noise in the retrieved documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates parametric knowledge of large language models with external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the parametric knowledge of LLMs and external documents to solve a multi-hop question. |
Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengliang Shi, Shen Gao, Xiuyi Chen, Yue Feng, Lingyong Yan, Haibo Shi, Dawei Yin, Pengjie Ren, Suzan Verberne, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) use one agent to iterate and execute tools, but they suffer from performance degradation when addressing practical tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool learning framework that coordinates three specialized agents for tool selection, tool execution, and action calibration separately. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on three datasets with 14% higher success rate. |
RADE: Reference-Assisted Dialogue Evaluation for Open-Domain Dialogue (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is challenging because of the one-to-many problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-based dialogue evaluation approach that leverages the pre-created utterance as reference other than the gold response to relieve the one-to-many problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art evaluation methods on three datasets and two existing benchmarks. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: On the Emergence of LLM Agents as the Welfare Dictator (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Xinbei Ma, Xingyu Chen, Mengru Wang, Qu Yang, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ziyang Chen, Shanyi Wang, Cixing LI, Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Zhaochun Ren, Liefeng Bo
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 20 state-of-the-art Large language models (LLMs) and 20 LLM dictators to create a social welfare function benchmark. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model creates dilemma between maximizing collective efficiency and ensuring distributive fairness. |
Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Entity-Centric Multimodal Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jiulong Wu, Zhengliang Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jizhou Huang, Dawei Yin, Lingyong Yan, Min Cao, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference alignment methods focus on aligning model responses with human preferences while neglecting image-text modality alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose Entity-centric Multimodal Preference Optimization to improve modality alignment . they use open-source instruction datasets to automatically construct high-quality preference data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucination rates by 80.4% on Object HalBench and 52.6% on MM HalBech. |
Towards a Unified Framework for Reference Retrieval and Related Work Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for related work generation use human-annotated references as information sources. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which combines reference retrieval and related work generation processes in a unified framework based on the large language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two wide-applied datasets. |
360∘REA: Towards A Reusable Experience Accumulation with 360∘ Assessment for Multi-Agent System (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on optimizing the agent team or employing self-reflection to iteratively solve complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical multi-agent framework that uses 360 assessment to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on corporate organizational practices and employs a dual-level experience pool for agents to accumulate experience through fine-grained assessment. |
BatonVoice: An Operationalist Framework for Enhancing Controllable Speech Synthesis with Linguistic Intelligence from LLMs (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Wang, Ruotian Ma, Xingyu Chen, Zhengliang Shi, Morunliu Yang, Wanshun Chen, Huang Liu, Jiadi Yao, Xin He, Qu Yang, Qingxuan Jiang, Fanghua Ye, Juntao Li, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Liefeng Bo, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches often fail to leverage the linguistic intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing models lack the ability to follow text instructions for controllable Text-to-Speech (TTS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where an LLM acts as a conductor, understanding user instructions and generating a textual plan - explicit vocal features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open- and closed-source models in speech synthesis and achieves zero-shot cross-lingual generalization. |
MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Weiwei Sun, Zhengliang Shi, Wu Long, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Yiding Liu, Min Cao, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren
| Challenge: | Existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task instruction-tuned IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on instruction-tuned models than non-instruction-tunned models on MAIR. |
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallel tool invocation framework that decomposes tasks into parallel tool-using subtasks while aggregating results for subsequent decisions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time. |