Papers by Zhicheng Li
GER-LLM: Efficient and Effective Geospatial Entity Resolution with Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating spatial data from diverse sources are limited by their reliance on large amounts of training data and their inability to incorporate commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large language models into the GER pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on real-world geospatial datasets and shows that it is more efficient than state-of-the-art methods. |
When Inverse Data Outperforms: Exploring the Pitfalls of Mixed Data in Multi-Stage Fine-Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for o1-level performance focus on unidirectional supervised fine-tuning (SFT), overlooking the intricate interplay between diverse reasoning patterns. |
| Approach: | They construct a reverse reasoning dataset and examine how it is supervised . they find that naively mixing forward and reverse data during SFT weakens the directional distinction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy by 1.6%–6.8% over a standard model. |
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)
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Yongkang Wu, Meng Han, Yutao Zhu, Lei Li, Xinyu Zhang, Ruofei Lai, Xiaoguang Li, Yuanhang Ren, Zhicheng Dou, Zhao Cao
| Challenge: | SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples. |
RetroLLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Retrieve Fine-grained Evidence within Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on separate retrievers to fetch top-k text chunks for generating evidence, and they lack joint optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates retrieval and generation into a single, auto-regressive process, enabling LLMs to directly generate fine-grained evidence from the corpus with constrained decoding. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five open-domain QA datasets demonstrate the proposed framework’s superior performance across both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker. |
Hierarchical Document Refinement for Long-context Retrieval-augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Jiajie Jin, Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Yuyao Zhang, Yutao Zhu, Yongkang Wu, Zhonghua Li, Ye Qi, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the structural characteristics of long documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on seven QA datasets show that LongRefiner achieves competitive performance in various scenarios while using 10x fewer computational costs and latency compared to baseline. |
Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xiaoxi Li, Guanting Dong, Jiajie Jin, Yuyao Zhang, Yujia Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Peitian Zhang, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive long stepwise reasoning capabilities through large-scale reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances large reasoning models with an agentic retrieval-augmented generation mechanism and a Reason-in-Documents module for refining retrieved documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances LRMs with an agentic retrieval-augmented generation mechanism and Reason-in-Documents module for refining retrieved documents. |
Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrievers for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rely on similarity-based retrievers, but similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented-generation retriever that integrates reasoning with retrieval . they use local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility . |
| Outcome: | The proposed retriever outperforms existing retrievers on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop searches. |
Value Compass Benchmarks: A Comprehensive, Generative and Self-Evolving Platform for LLMs’ Value Evaluation (2025.acl-demo)
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Jing Yao, Xiaoyuan Yi, Shitong Duan, Jindong Wang, Yuzhuo Bai, Muhua Huang, Yang Ou, Scarlett Li, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu, Zhicheng Dou, Maosong Sun, James Evans, Xing Xie
| Challenge: | Current evaluation methods for large language models face two key challenges: 1. evaluation validity and 2. Result interpretation reduce the pluralistic and incommensurable values to one-dimensional scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) that provides a generative evaluation paradigm that automatically creates real-world test items co-evolving with ever-advancing LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform provides a framework for comprehensive value diagnosis of large language models (LLMs) with fine-grained scores and case studies across 27 value dimensions for 33 leading LLMs, customized comparisons, and visualized analysis of LLM’s alignment with cultural values. |
Prompt-Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Non-Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on retrieval to solve knowledge-intensive tasks, but the potential of retrieval for non-knowledge-intensive (NKI) tasks remains under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic retrieval framework for NKI tasks that uses a static index and a prompt-guided reranker to re-rank the nearest evidence according to task-specific relevance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art retrieval-augmented methods on NKI tasks and will be released for further research. |
Web Sitemap Knowledge Can Enhance Autonomous Browsing (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuyao Zhang, Hongyu Lu, Jiajie Jin, Hongjin Qian, Shiyu Li, Zhao Yang, Yutao Zhu, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou
| Challenge: | Existing web agents suffer from limited robustness, efficiency and task success due to lack of structural understanding of websites and lack of browsing priors in pre-trained models. |
| Approach: | They propose an agent-oriented sitemap protocol that integrates structured website knowledge into web agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent-oriented sitemap improves robustness, efficiency and effectiveness without extra training. |
ModelScope-Agent: Building Your Customizable Agent System with Open-source Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Chenliang Li, He Chen, Ming Yan, Weizhou Shen, Haiyang Xu, Zhikai Wu, Zhicheng Zhang, Wenmeng Zhou, Yingda Chen, Chen Cheng, Hongzhu Shi, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to comprehend human intentions, engage in reasoning, and design planning-like behavior. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that equips large language models with tool-use capabilities . they propose LLaMA and Chat-GLM as controllers, and a model-based agent framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework equips open-source LLMs with tool-use capabilities . it provides a user-friendly system library with a customizable engine design . |
ATG: Benchmarking Automated Theorem Generation for Generative Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative language models (LMs) can generate new or reusable theorems, but their ability to generate new theorels is under-explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Metamath library to generate new theorems that can be saved as reusable knowledge for future theoretical proving. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates whether an agent can generate valuable (and possibly brand new) theorems that are applicable for downstream theoretic proving as reusable knowledge. |
RAG-Critic: Leveraging Automated Critic-Guided Agentic Workflow for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages a critic-guided agentic workflow to improve RAG capabilities autonomously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves RAG capabilities autonomously by leveraging a critic-guided agentic workflow. |
RLSeek: Evidence-Grounded Reasoning for RAG Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaoheng Huang, Dacheng Wen, Yutao Zhu, Xiaoying Lian, Yushi Liang, Kai Hao, Nan Li, Liangjie Zhang, Qi Zhang, Ji-Rong Wen, Zhicheng Dou, Fangzhao Wu
| Challenge: | Recent work addresses this problem by training span-level hallucination detectors using reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly enforces active evidence seeking during CoT reasoning by requiring quotation of relevant source segments at each verification step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves hallucination span detection performance with limited reasoning overhead and improved robustness in out-of-domain settings. |
StableToolBench: Towards Stable Large-Scale Benchmarking on Tool Learning of Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhicheng Guo, Sijie Cheng, Hao Wang, Shihao Liang, Yujia Qin, Peng Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have witnessed remarkable advancements in recent years, prompting the exploration of tool learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual API server and stable evaluation system to assess the stability of large-scale real-time APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks demonstrate the stability of the proposed system and its caching system. |
Multi-Scale Progressive Attention Network for Video Question Answering (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA show our method has achieved state-of-the-art performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale progressive attention network to fuse visual and text information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmarks: TGIF-QA, MSVD-QA and MSRVTT-QA. |
Neuro-Symbolic Query Compiler (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are limited in their ability to process information in open-source environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a neuro-symbolic framework inspired by linguistic grammar rules and compiler design to formalize complex queries using a minimal yet sufficient Backus-Naur Form grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a backus-naur form grammar and compiler design that maintains completeness while minimizing redundancy. |
A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | gist-based context compression methods can achieve only slight performance loss on tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA, but it faces challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies to improve gist-based context compression in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve only slight performance loss on retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA tasks, but they face challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
Chinese SimpleQA: A Chinese Factuality Evaluation for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Yingshui Tan, Weixun Wang, Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hangyu Guo, Chengwei Hu, Boren Zheng, Zhuoran Lin, Dekai Sun, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Current frontier models sometimes generate false outputs or answers that are not substantiated by evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose Chinese SimpleQA, a Chinese benchmark to evaluate LLMs' factuality . they focus on Chinese language over 6 major topics with 99 diverse subtopics . |
| Outcome: | The Chinese SimpleQA benchmark evaluates the factuality ability of LLMs . the questions and answers are short and easy-to-evaluate . |
SRAP-Agent: Simulating and Optimizing Scarce Resource Allocation Policy with LLM-based Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on the allocation of public scarce resources has limitations due to data scarcity and data scariness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Large Language Models into economic simulations . they conduct extensive policy simulation experiments to verify the framework's effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between theoretical models and real-world dynamics by integrating large language models into economic simulations. |
Few-shot Knowledge Graph-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for KG-to-text generation are based on pretrained language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically generate a text that describes the facts in knowledge graph (KG) they leverage the excellent capacities of pretrained language models (PLMs) in language understanding and generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all comparison methods on fully-supervised and fewshot settings. |
Can Large Language Models Detect Errors in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Yancheng He, Shilong Li, Jiaheng Liu, Weixun Wang, Xingyuan Bu, Ge Zhang, Z.y. Peng, Zhaoxiang Zhang, Zhicheng Zheng, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Recent advances in o1-like models have generated long Chain-of-Thought reasoning steps to improve the reasoning abilities of existing Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a DeltaBench to analyze the quality and effectiveness of o1-like models and measure their ability to detect errors in long COT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect errors in long COT reasoning. |