Papers by Zhi Liu

39 papers
CODERL+: Improving Code Generation via Reinforcement with Execution Semantics Alignment (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large Language Models excel at code generation by learning from vast code corpora, but a fundamental semantic gap remains between training on textual patterns and the goal of functional correctness . reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) approaches are inefficient for establishing a well-aligned connection between the textual representation of code and its execution semantics.
Approach: They propose a novel approach that integrates execution semantics alignment into the RLVR training pipeline for code generation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline training and RLVR and shows strong applicability across RL and LLMs.
Learning from Contrasts: Synthesizing Reasoning Paths from Diverse Search Trajectories (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: MCTS methods retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding comparative signals present in the many explored paths.
Approach: They propose a framework that transforms supervision extraction into a synthesis procedure.
Outcome: The proposed framework matches or exceeds baselines on 60K CRPS-synthesized examples on out-of-domain benchmarks.
I-AM-G: Interest Augmented Multimodal Generator for Item Personalization (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: e-commerce and recommender systems lack a framework for personalized generation . a new framework extracts tags from multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with .
Approach: They propose a framework that extracts tags from multimodal information and rewrites item description . they then use a decoupled text-to-text and image-to image retriever to search for similar item text .
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate results aligned with user preferences . it can be used in e-commerce and recommender systems to win over diverse user base .
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a repository-level benchmark named DevEval to evaluate LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that the LLMs perform better in real-world code repositories than existing benchmarks.
Granular Entity Mapper: Advancing Fine-grained Multimodal Named Entity Recognition and Grounding (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors.
Approach: They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task.
BrailleLLM: Braille Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Braille Domain Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing Braille research focuses on isolated tasks while mixed-content Braille tasks face data scarcity and ambiguities.
Approach: They propose a syntax tree-based augmentation method tailored for Braille data.
Outcome: The proposed method improves Braille translation, formula-to-Braille conversion, and mixed-text translation.
Time-for-Accuracy: Formalizing Chain-of-Thought as an Expansion of Logical Depth (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can improve multi-step reasoning, but it is unclear what kind of additional sequential computation longer traces actually enable.
Approach: They propose a deletion-based measure of step necessity under a specified inference interface to operationalize realized depth beyond raw length.
Outcome: The proposed method combines effective logical depth with Bennett's logical depth to show that it is more efficient than a linear model.
Does RLVR Extend Reasoning Boundaries? Investigating Capability Expansion in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies suggest that RLVR amplifies behaviors inherent to the pre-training distribution rather than inducing new capabilities.
Approach: They propose a framework for RLVR that extends the spatial reasoning boundary . they use a mapping framework where the difficulty is precisely regulated by path length and number of turns .
Outcome: The proposed framework extends the spatial reasoning boundary on two real-world navigation benchmarks.
VIGIL: Defending LLM Agents Against Tool-Stream Injection via Verify-Before-Commit (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing defenses for indirect prompt injection are limited by static protection mechanisms . existing models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment, whereas static protections sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning.
Approach: They propose a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22% while more thandoubling utility under attack compared to static baselines.
A Novel Matching Paradigm: Unified Generative and Discriminative LLM with Prompt Compression for Relevance Learning (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to matching use Large Language Models as feature extractors, underutilizing their full modeling capabilities.
Approach: They propose a matching paradigm that integrates two-tower, single-towing, and generative tasks within a unified LLM framework via attention-mask partitioning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves superior performance and strong practical value in an industrial search engine.
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology.
Approach: They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks.
On Safety Risks in Experience-Driven Self-Evolving Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Experience-driven self-evolution has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving the autonomy of large language model agents, yet its reliance on self-curated experience introduces underexplored safety risks.
Approach: They investigate how experience accumulation and utilization in self-evolving agents affect safety performance across web-based and embodied environments.
Outcome: The findings expose inherent limitations of current self-evolving agents and call for more principled strategies to ensure safe and reliable adaptation.
Rethinking the Role of Prompting Strategies in LLM Test-Time Scaling: A Perspective of Probability Theory (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that scaling test-time compute can also effectively improve reasoning.
Approach: They propose a probabilistic method to efficiently predict scaling performance and identify the best prompting strategy under large sampling times.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the scaling performance of majority voting on large language models.
XQ-MEval: A Dataset with Cross-lingual Parallel Quality for Benchmarking Translation Metrics (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: averaging metric scores across languages is suspicious since translations of equal quality receive different scores across language.
Approach: They propose a semi-automatically built dataset to benchmark translation metrics using MQM-defined errors and a normalization strategy to mitigate cross-lingual scoring bias.
Outcome: The proposed model shows that translation metrics suffer from cross-lingual scoring bias . the proposed model is based on a semi-automatically built dataset covering nine translation directions .
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities.
Approach: They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention.
NeuroSym-Cal: Bridging the Reasoning-Execution Gap in Code Generation via Hierarchical Calibration (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing calibration methods rely on the assumption that consensus implies correctness . Existing methods fail under systematic errors, leading to miscalibrated high-confidence predictions.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical calibration framework that measures confidence at two levels . they propose sensitivity analysis to measure local curvature of deductive process .
Outcome: The proposed framework de-saturates overconfident errors and improves selective generation performance on OOD benchmarks.
LLM-Driven Implicit Target Augmentation and Fine-Grained Contextual Modeling for Zero-Shot and Few-Shot Stance Detection (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies on zero-shot and few-shot stance detection neglect implicit yet semantically important targets.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses Large Language Models to annotate implicit targets . they also propose 'DyMCA' to dynamically adjust text-target contributions based on context .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on a benchmark dataset.
Assist Non-native Viewers: Multimodal Cross-Lingual Summarization for How2 Videos (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing multimodal summarization methods are limited to monolingual videos . a proposed task aims to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs .
Approach: They propose a task to generate cross-lingual summaries from multimodal inputs of videos . they propose fusion network that integrates multimodal and cross-linguistic information .
Outcome: The proposed task outperforms existing methods on a reorganized How2 dataset on the reorganized How2 data set.
OPAL: Ontology-Aware Pretrained Language Model for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialogue (2023.tacl-1)

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Challenge: Existing task-oriented dialogue systems lack ontology-aware pretraining methods for task-orientated dialogue.
Approach: They propose an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD) . they propose to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data to bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves an exciting boost and obtains competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks.
KELE: A Multi-Agent Framework for Structured Socratic Teaching with Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Socratic teaching places high demands on teachers’ expertise and real-time feedback capabilities, making it difficult to scale in large educational settings.
Approach: They propose a multi-agent framework for structured Socratic teaching with LLMs that integrates a structured SocRule and a consultant-teacher collaborative teaching mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing LLMs in natural language generation and dialogue comprehension in the classroom.
Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Currently, long-context language models are limited by the lack of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding.
Approach: They propose to use a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU to evaluate LCLMs' long code comprehension ability for practical applications.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that current LCLMs are limited in their long code understanding ability, particularly when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows.
AMoPO: Adaptive Multi-objective Preference Optimization without Reward Models and Reference Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity.
Approach: They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards.
Outcome: Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% .
Make Large Language Model a Better Ranker (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate robust capabilities across various fields . current list-wise approaches fail in ranking tasks due to misalignment between ranking objectives and next-token prediction .
Approach: They propose a large language model framework with Aligned Listwise Ranking Objectives (ALRO) this framework provides explicit feedback in a listwise manner by introducing soft lambda loss .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing recommendation methods and embedding-based recommendations without additional computational burdens.
GEM: Gestalt Enhanced Markup Language Model for Web Understanding via Render Tree (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models that use plain HTMLs do not include crucial visual information in the rendered web.
Approach: They propose a Gestalt Enhanced Markup Language Model for hosting visual information without visual input.
Outcome: The proposed model can handle multiple downstream tasks without visual input.
Rethinking Repetition Problems of LLMs in Code Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on content repetition, but structural repetition is a more prevalent problem in code generation.
Approach: They propose a decoding approach that eliminates repetition problems in code generation by identifying grammar rules and strategically decaying the likelihood of critical tokens that contribute to repetitions.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms baselines and humanEval benchmarks on CodeRepetEval dataset and MBPP benchmarks, effectively reducing repetitions and enhancing the quality of generated code.
MLLM-I2W: Harnessing Multimodal Large Language Model for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for combining image retrieval are supervised and zero-shot . however, the challenge of mapping pseudo-words to images within the joint image-text embedding space is still a challenge.
Approach: They propose a novel image-text mapping network which converts description-related image information into pseudo-word markers for precise ZS-CIR.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on COCO, CIRR, and Fashion-IQ benchmarks.
Generalization or Memorization: Data Contamination and Trustworthy Evaluation for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Considering the vast size and wide-ranging sources of LLMs’ training data, it could explicitly or implicitly include test data.
Approach: They propose a Contamination Detection via output Distribution (CDD) which detects data contamination only by identifying the peakedness of LLM's output distribution.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance by 21.8%-30.2% on humanEval and TED: trustworthy evaluation via output distribution.
AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing LLM-based tools struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking.
Approach: They propose an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator that integrates rule-guided outline planning, sentence-level MCTS generation, MAP-Elites quality-diversity optimization and assessment-guide refiner simulation.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms strong LLMs and structured frameworks on 7 evaluation dimensions and shows higher alignment with expert-designed contexts.
Think and Recall: Layer-Level Prompting for Lifelong Model Editing (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for lifelong model editing suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting, which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs.
bert2BERT: Towards Reusable Pretrained Language Models (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful.
Approach: They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training.
Outcome: The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model.
Cross-lingual Contextualized Phrase Retrieval (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks.
Approach: They propose a task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual contextualized phrase retrieval . they extract pairs of cross-linguistic phrases using word alignment information .
Outcome: The proposed task formulation surpasses baselines on the phrase retrieval task and a downstream task, i.e., machine translation, and achieves top-1 accuracy 13 points higher.
Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have not exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning.
Approach: They propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction framework which captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information for reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed framework captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning.
MusTQ: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering Dataset for Multi-Step Temporal Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on fact-centered reasoning with limited attention to temporal reasoning.
Approach: They propose a new TKGQA dataset, MusTQ, which contains 666K multi-step temporal reasoning questions and a TKG.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art multi-step temporal reasoning ability with entity-time attention mechanism and optimized temporal knowledge graph representation.
Entropy-Aware Reshaping of Reinforcement Signals for Multi-Answer Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a standard post-training paradigm for large language models.
Approach: They propose a framework that reshapes how learning signals are normalized and aggregated.
Outcome: Experiments on MCTACO and MMLU-Multi show that the proposed framework improves accuracy, training stability and cross-dataset transfer performance.
GUI0: Self-Evolving Foundational GUI Agents in Super App Ecosystems (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Automated interaction with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is central to general artificial intelligence, but remains challenging within Super App ecosystems.
Approach: They propose a framework synergizing autonomous data synthesis with dual-agent co-evolution . GUI0 establishes a domain-aware foundation model via synthesized corpora and employs curriculum-driven reinforcement learning .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-4-Sonnet in the SuperAPP benchmark and has universal efficacy across base models.
CodeDPO: Aligning Code Models with Self Generated and Verified Source Code (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing training methods for code generation do not improve code correctness and efficiency.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates preference learning into code generation to improve code correctness and efficiency.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves code correctness and efficiency by integrating preference learning into code generation.
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored.
Approach: They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities.
RL-PLUS: Countering Capability Boundary Collapse of LLMs in Reinforcement Learning with Hybrid-policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks.
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text.
Approach: They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached.
Outcome: The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own.

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