Papers by Zhicong Li
Multi-Agent Comedy Club: Investigating Community Discussion Effects on LLM Humor Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of multi-turn interaction and feedback for LLM writing focus on prompts and localized feedback. |
| Approach: | They build a controlled multi-agent sandbox that instantiates a small standup comedy community and allows it to manipu-late whether public reception is generated, logged, and fed back into later rounds. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves craft/clarity and social response with occasional increases in aggressive humor. |
No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Current methods for training Large Language Model agents rely on static or offline critic models, which fail to adapt as the policy evolves. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a critique and a policy to optimize the policy and critic through a synchronized co-evolutionary loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework yields more stable training and higher long-horizon task success across open-world environments. |
Original Content Is All You Need! an Empirical Study on Leveraging Answer Summary for WikiHowQA Answer Selection Task (2022.coling-1)
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Liang Wen, Juan Li, Houfeng Wang, Yingwei Luo, Xiaolin Wang, Xiaodong Zhang, Zhicong Cheng, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Existing answer selection approaches for community question answering lack additional answer summaries due to redundancy and lengthiness issues of crowdsourced answers. |
| Approach: | They constructed a dataset which contains a corresponding reference summary for each original lengthy answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of a question and candidate answer on a WikiHowQA dataset. |
Fingerprinting LLMs via Prompt Injection (2026.acl-long)
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Yuepeng Hu, Zhengyuan Jiang, Mengyuan Li, Osama Ahmed, Zhicong Huang, Cheng Hong, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
| Challenge: | Existing provenance detection methods for large language models are infeasible for already published models and compare outputs using hand-crafted or random prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a detection framework that constructs fingerprints by exploiting LLMs’ inherent vulnerability to prompt injection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high true positive rates while keeping false positive rates near zero. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
Rethinking the Reversal Curse of LLMs: a Prescription from Human Knowledge Reversal (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhicong Lu, Li Jin, Peiguang Li, Yu Tian, Linhao Zhang, Sirui Wang, Guangluan Xu, Changyuan Tian, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by their aggressive sample permutation and lack a detailed understanding of the underlying reasons for the reversal curse. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which enhances bidirectional entity correlation modeling and pairwise relationship reasoning to overcome the reversal curse. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overcomes the reversal curse by augmenting the samples with entity order-reversals and semantically preserved question-answer pairs. |
Exploring the Limitations of Mamba in COPY and CoT Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Inference overhead of Transformers increases linearly with the sequence length, posing challenges for modeling long sequences. |
| Approach: | They analyze Mamba's expressive ability to perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks using a defined sequence length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform COPY operations and Chain of Thought reasoning tasks with a constant size while reducing computational costs. |
PIPER: Benchmarking and Prompting Event Reasoning Boundary of LLMs via Debiasing-Distillation Enhanced Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Zhicong Lu, Changyuan Tian, PeiguangLi PeiguangLi, Li Jin, Sirui Wang, Wei Jia, Ying Shen, Guangluan Xu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on Large Language Models (LLMs) have failed to evaluate their performance in event reasoning with a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' event reasoning capability using a single event relational type or reasoning format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 10K diverse instruction-tuning demonstrations to alleviate event reasoning-oriented data scarcity. |