Papers by Zhi Yu
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 . |
Exploring Schema Generalizability of Text-to-SQL (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
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. |
LGESQL: Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL Model with Mixed Local and Non-Local Relations (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode text-to-SQL data are node-centric and ignore semantics embedded in the topological structure of edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL model to mine relational features without constructing meta-paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing. |
BrailleLLM: Braille Instruction Tuning with Large Language Models for Braille Domain Tasks (2025.emnlp-main)
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Tianyuan Huang, Zepeng Zhu, Hangdi Xing, Zirui Shao, Zhi Yu, Chaoxiong Yang, Jiaxian He, Xiaozhong Liu, Jiajun Bu
| 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. |
ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas . a new architecture, ShadowGNN, processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels . |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models on a text-to-sql benchmark . it uses domain-independent representations to extract logical linking between question and schema . |
TabularMath: Understanding Math Reasoning over Tables with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms math word problems into scalable tabular reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. |
Line Graph Enhanced AMR-to-Text Generation with Mix-Order Graph Attention Networks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-to-sequence approaches use graph neural networks as encoders, but they lack the structure information needed to translate AMR into the graph-based data. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence task which aims to recover natural language from Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) they adopt graph attention networks with higher-order neighborhood information to explore the edge relations in AMR graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on English AMR benchmark datasets and is able to translate the AMR semantics into the natural language. |
AdapterShare: Task Correlation Modeling with Adapter Differentiation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | AdapterShare is an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.90 points improvement on five dialogue understanding tasks and 2.33 points gain on NLU tasks. |
Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step. |
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. |
Neural Graph Matching Networks for Chinese Short Text Matching (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation can be erroneous, ambiguous or inconsistent, causing performance problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence matching framework that uses paired word lattices as input instead of a character sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art short text matching models on two Chinese datasets. |
Detection, Diagnosis, and Explanation: A Benchmark for Chinese Medial Hallucination Evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in recent years, but their practical use is hindered by their tendency to generate hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ICD-10 and MeSH to evaluate LLMs' ability to detect medical hallucinations and make accurate diagnoses in noisy environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate LLMs’ ability to detect medical hallucinations, make accurate diagnoses in noisy conditions, and provide plausible explanations. |
Decoupled Dialogue Modeling and Semantic Parsing for Multi-Turn Text-to-SQL (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data. |
NL2Lean: Translating Natural Language into Lean 4 through Multi-Aspect Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yue Fang, Shaohan Huang, Xin Yu, Haizhen Huang, Zihan Zhang, Weiwei Deng, Furu Wei, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Existing formal proof assistants rely on instruction tuning and lack fine-grained structural and semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that enables LLMs to translate natural language into formal language such as Lean 4 . they use a model with basic translation ability to refine the model's reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline models on NL-to-Lean 4 tasks. |
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have improved the performance of Large language models on well-defined mathematical benchmarks, but they often overlook ill-defined problems. |
| Approach: | They develop a large-scale benchmark that contains over 5,000 ill-defined mathematical problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability. |
MLeVLM: Improve Multi-level Progressive Capabilities based on Multimodal Large Language Model for Medical Visual Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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Dexuan Xu, Yanyuan Chen, Jieyi Wang, Yue Huang, Hanpin Wang, Zhi Jin, Hongxing Wang, Weihua Yue, Jing He, Hang Li, Yu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing MVQA models ignore multi-level progressive capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level visual language model for medical visual question answering (MVQA) which covers multi- level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models on a multi-level instruction dataset and a feature alignment module. |
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. |
Optimizing Instruction Synthesis: Effective Exploration of Evolutionary Space with Tree Search (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, but they introduce safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark to assess the trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates truthfulness, safety and efficiency on 26 models. |
Is Cognition Consistent with Perception? Assessing and Mitigating Multimodal Knowledge Conflicts in Document Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in document understanding due to different types of annotation noise in training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs . they propose to use annotation noise to train models to understand document content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces C&P knowledge conflicts across all tested MLLMs and enhances their performance in both cognitive and perceptual tasks. |
DocHieNet: A Large and Diverse Dataset for Document Hierarchy Parsing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document hierarchy parsing are limited due to the small scale and inconsistency of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a document hierarchy parsing dataset to compensate for the data scarcity problem and propose 'dHP' framework to grasp fine-grained text content and coarse-grounded pattern at layout element level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework grasps both fine-grained text content and coarse-grounded pattern at layout element level, enhancing the capacity of pre-trained text-layout models in handling multi-page and multi-level challenges. |
Bridging Kernel Drivers and Virtual Device Models with LLM-Powered Automation (2026.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Linux kernel device drivers are tightly coupled with hardware, making them difficult to execute and test without physical devices. |
| Approach: | They present a tool that generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool generates QEMU-based virtual devices directly from Linux driver source code. |