Papers by Zhiwei Yang
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)
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Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Jiahong Zou, Liu Yang, Zhiwei Xu, Xuri Ge, Zhumin Chen, Xinyu Ma, Daiting Shi, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xin Xin
| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE. |
PersonaBench: Evaluating AI Models on Understanding Personal Information through Accessing (Synthetic) Private User Data (2025.findings-acl)
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Juntao Tan, Liangwei Yang, Zuxin Liu, Zhiwei Liu, Rithesh R N, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Jianguo Zhang, Weiran Yao, Ming Zhu, Shirley Kokane, Silvio Savarese, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Shelby Heinecke
| Challenge: | Existing research lacks direct access to such data, making benchmarking difficult due to privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic data pipeline that generates realistic user profiles and private documents and a benchmark to evaluate models' ability to understand personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates realistic user profiles and private documents, enabling PersonaBench, a benchmark for evaluating models’ ability to understand personal information. |
Data Mixing Agent: Learning to Re-weight Domains for Continual Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reweighting data mixtures rely on manual designation with certain heuristics based on intuition or empirical results. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based framework that learns to re-weight domains by reinforcement learning on large quantities of data mixing trajectories with corresponding feedback from an evaluation environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in achieving balanced performance across source and target fields and domain spaces without retraining. |
DecBERT: Enhancing the Language Understanding of BERT with Causal Attention Masks (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Transformer Encoder model can't automatically capture word order, so explicit position embeddings are required to be fed into the target model. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based language model DecBERT that uses a causal attention mask to capture word order. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE language understanding benchmark and accelerates the pre-training process. |
WSDMS: Debunk Fake News via Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences with Contextualized Social Wisdom (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for debunking fake news rely on blending of authentic and fabricated content by creators. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that detects misinformation at sentence-level using social media conversations . they use a bag-level annotation system to train the model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on three real-world benchmarks and outperformed existing state of the art models in debunking fake news at sentence and article levels. |
Measuring Bargaining Abilities of LLMs: A Benchmark and A Buyer-Enhancement Method (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Using a novel approach, we can evaluate an agent’s bargaining abilities as an asymmetric incomplete information game. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the buyer’s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned. |
HiTRANS: A Hierarchical Transformer Network for Nested Named Entity Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for named entity recognition focus on flat NER, i.e., without nested entities, by sequence labeling methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a Hierarchical Transformer network which decomposes the input sentence into multi-grained spans and enhances the representation learning in a hierarchical manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better performance than the state-of-the-art approaches on GENIA, ACE-2004, ace-2005 and NNE datasets. |
A Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation Neural Network for Explainable Fake News Detection (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection focus on fact-checked reports, resulting in limited coverage and debunking delays. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-fine Cascaded Evidence-Distillation neural network for explainable fake news detection based on raw reports . they use hierarchical encoders and cascaded selectors to select most explainable sentences for verdicts on top of selected top-K reports based upon raw reports. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline detection methods and generates high-quality explanations from diverse evaluation perspectives. |
DUET: Joint Exploration of User–Item Profiles in Recommendation System (2026.findings-acl)
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Yue Chen, Yifei Sun, Lu Wang, Fangkai Yang, Pu Zhao, Minjie Hong, Yifei Dong, Minghua He, Nan Hu, Jianjin Zhang, Zhiwei Dai, Yuefeng Zhan, Weihao Han, Hao Sun, Qingwei Lin, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs are opaque and difficult to interpret, resulting in limited interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose an interaction-aware profile generator that jointly produces user and item profiles conditioned on both user history and item evidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on three real-world datasets. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
Rumor Detection on Twitter with Claim-Guided Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor detection are limited to the strict relation of user responses or oversimplify the conversation structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that reinforces interaction of user opinions while reducing negative impact imposed by irrelevant posts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on three Twitter datasets and can detect rumors at early stages. |
Bridging the Domain Gaps in Context Representations for k-Nearest Neighbor Neural Machine Translation (2023.acl-long)
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Zhiwei Cao, Baosong Yang, Huan Lin, Suhang Wu, Xiangpeng Wei, Dayiheng Liu, Jun Xie, Min Zhang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve k-Nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) are based on the ability to non-parametrically adapt to new domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to boost the datastore retrieval of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method boosts the retrieval and translation quality of k-Nearest neighbor machine translation by reconstructing the original datastore. |
Efficient k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation with Dynamic Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for non-parametric domain adaptation lack kNN retrieval at each timestep, leading to substantial time overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a kNN-MT-based model that uses a domain-specific translation knowledge store to interpolate the prediction distribution of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly extends kNN-MT with dynamic retrieval on widely-used datasets. |
Selective Preference Optimization via Token-Level Reward Function Estimation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for maximizing preference optimization on all available tokens are noisy and inefficient. |
| Approach: | They propose a selective alignment strategy that centers on efficient key token selection without strong, fine-grained supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms baseline methods on three benchmarks with up to 60% reduction in training hours. |
Devil’s Advocate: Anticipatory Reflection for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Introspection-driven approach equips LLM agents with introspection, enhancing consistency and adaptability in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot approach that equips LLM agents with introspection, enhancing consistency and adaptability in solving complex tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance and efficiency by reducing the number of trials and plan revisions by 45%. |
RAEmoLLM: Retrieval Augmented LLMs for Cross-Domain Misinformation Detection Using In-Context Learning Based on Emotional Information (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current methods for cross-domain misinformation detection focus on in-domain tasks and do not incorporate significant sentiment and emotion features. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval augmented (RAG) LLM framework that incorporates affective information into retrieval databases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on three misinformation benchmarks. |
Widget Captioning: Generating Natural Language Description for Mobile User Interface Elements (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for examining and fixing missing captions are lacking in mobile UIs. |
| Approach: | They propose a task for automatically generating language descriptions for UI elements from multimodal input including both the image and structural representations of user interfaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can generate captions from image and structural representations of UI elements. |
A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent works require a model to learn from trace examples of a task via supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that iteratively learns from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous models on easy tasks with more efficient reasoning and self-reflection. |
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)
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Ziwei Wang, Junjie Zheng, Leyang Yang, Sheng Zhou, Xiaoxuan Tang, Fang Zhouhua, Zhiwei Liu, Dajun Chen, Yong Li, Jiajun Bu
| Challenge: | Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration . |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration. |
Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate (2024.emnlp-main)
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Tian Liang, Zhiwei He, Wenxiang Jiao, Xing Wang, Yan Wang, Rui Wang, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi, Zhaopeng Tu
| Challenge: | Modern large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but struggle on complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that encourages divergent thinking in LLMs . they propose to break debate and use a judge to obtain a final solution . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework encourages divergent thinking in large language models . it is able to generate novel thoughts even if initial stance is incorrect . |
AEA: Adaptive Expert Allocation Improves Sentence Embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts LLM (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve embeddings from Mixture-of-Experts models allocate a fixed number of experts uniformly across all layers and tokens, ignoring inter-layer and inter-token heterogeneity. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Expert Allocation framework that performs layer-wise and token-wise expert allocation to enhance embedding quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves embedding quality across multiple MoE models. |
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiwei Zha, Xiangru Zhu, Yuanyi Xu, Chenghua Huang, Jingping Liu, Zhixu Li, Xuwu Wang, Yanghua Xiao, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to perceive the visual world with a deep concept structure cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-level benchmark to assess MLLMs’ hierarchical concept understanding and reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in concept structure reasoning evaluation. |
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing rumor detection methods are poor at detecting false rumors about breaking news or trending topics due to the lack of training data and prior knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an adversarial contrastive learning framework to detect false rumors by adapting features learned from well-resourced rumor data to that of the low-resource. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two low-resource datasets and shows superior performance . it overcomes restriction of domain and/or language usage and improves robustness . |