Papers by Zhuoran Li
PhysicsArena: The First Multimodal Physics Reasoning Benchmark Exploring Variable, Process, and Solution Dimensions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Song Dai, Yibo Yan, Jiamin Su, Zihao Dongfang, Yubo Gao, Yonghua Hei, Jungang Li, Junyan Zhang, Sicheng Tao, Zhuoran Gao, Xuming Hu
| Challenge: | Current physics benchmarks focus on text-only inputs or only on problem-solving . current physics reasoning benchmarks neglect critical intermediate steps of variable identification and process formulation. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark evaluates multimodal large language models in physics reasoning . the benchmark measures variables, process formulations, and solution derivation . |
| Outcome: | PhysicsArena is the first multimodal physics reasoning benchmark . it evaluates MLLMs across three critical dimensions: variable identification, process formulation, and solution derivation. |
Tug-of-War between Knowledge: Exploring and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts in Retrieval-Augmented Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge conflicts in RALMs can ensnare them in a tug-of-war between knowledge and evidence, limiting their practical applicability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method called Conflict-Disentangle Contrastive Decoding (CD2) to better calibrate the model’s confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can resolve knowledge conflicts in large language models with the help of conflict-disentangle contrast decoding (CD2) . |
Cutting Off the Head Ends the Conflict: A Mechanism for Interpreting and Mitigating Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Pengfei Cao, Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand internal memory boundaries of language models by providing external context can often conflict, leading to knowledge conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prunes conflicting attention heads without updating model parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can flexibly control eight LMs to use internal memory or external context without updating model parameters. |
Focus on Your Question! Interpreting and Mitigating Toxic CoT Problems in Commonsense Reasoning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-thought-like method to elicit models' potential abilities to generate rationales and answers that are based on attribution tracing and causal tracers to probe the internal working mechanism of the LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method eliminates Toxic CoT problems and improves the model’s overall commonsense reasoning performance by 5.5%. |
FinRAGBench-V: A Benchmark for Multimodal RAG with Visual Citation in the Financial Domain (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing RAG research focuses on textual data, overlooking rich visual content in financial documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual RAG benchmark tailored for finance that integrates multimodal data and provides visual citation to ensure traceability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed visual RAG benchmark integrates multimodal data and provides visual citation to ensure traceability. |
LINKED: Eliciting, Filtering and Integrating Knowledge in Large Language Model for Commonsense Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jiachun Li, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Xiaojian Jiang, Jiexin Xu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to elicit, filter and integrate knowledge in large language models (LINKED) they propose 'reward model' to filter out noisy knowledge and 'take marginal consistent reasoning module' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA baselines on two commonsense reasoning tasks. |
Probing Audio-Visual Reasoning in Multimodal Language Models through the Lens of Audio (2026.acl-long)
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Kaixiong Gong, Kaituo Feng, Bohao Li, Yibing Wang, Mofan Cheng, Shijia Yang, Jiaming Han, Benyou Wang, Yutong Bai, Zhuoran Yang, Xiangyu Yue
| Challenge: | Recent multimodal large language models lack robust audio-visual integration ability and performance on DeafTest is highly correlated with AV-Odyssey accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that integrates audio-visual reasoning with audio-video cues to infer solutions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on DeafTest, but lacks audio perception in simple audio tasks. |
An Unsupervised Multiple-Task and Multiple-Teacher Model for Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for named entity recognition only consider the potential transferability between two identical tasks across both domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a similarity metric model to improve cross-lingual named entity recognition task on target domain. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies on 7 different languages confirm the effectiveness of the proposed model. |
Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Li, Rui Xu, Jian Yang, Junnan Liu, Zhijun Chen, Qianren Mao, Hongcheng Guo, Jiaheng Liu, Likang Xiao, Ming LI, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that modulates the contribution of each source model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model merging framework outperforms strong baselines on multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages. |
RAG-RewardBench: Benchmarking Reward Models in Retrieval Augmented Generation for Preference Alignment (2025.findings-acl)
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Zhuoran Jin, Hongbang Yuan, Tianyi Men, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Xiaojian Jiang, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval augmented language models often overlook effective alignment with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate RMs in retrieval augmented language models . they incorporate 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines 18 RAG subsets, six retrievers, and 24 RALMs to increase diversity of data sources. |
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 . |
Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored using large language models to generate synthetic datasets . however, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data is inconsistent across different classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to generate synthetic datasets to better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of LLM-generated synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | The results show that subjectivity is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data. |
Establishing Trustworthy LLM Evaluation via Shortcut Neuron Analysis (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on building dynamic benchmarks to address data contamination issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for identifying shortcut neurons through comparative and causal analysis to suppress shortcut neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method overestimates contaminated models and is highly generalizable across benchmarks and hyperparameter settings. |
Outcome-Grounded Advantage Reshaping for Fine-Grained Credit Assignment in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Ziheng Li, Liu Kang, Feng Xiao, Luxi Xing, Qingyi Si, Zhuoran Li, Weikang Gong, Deqing Yang, Yanghua Xiao, Hongcheng Guo
| Challenge: | Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) uses a coarse-grained credit assignment mechanism that propagates group-level rewards uniformly to to every token in a sequence, neglecting the varying contribution of individual reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They introduce Outcome-grounded Advantage Reshaping (OAR) which redistributes advantages based on how much each token influences the model’s final answer. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that OAR-G outperforms GRPO on a high-fidelity attribution signal and suppresses low-impact tokens while preserving the advantage mass. |
AgentsCourt: Building Judicial Decision-Making Agents with Court Debate Simulation and Legal Knowledge Augmentation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhitao He, Pengfei Cao, Chenhao Wang, Zhuoran Jin, Yubo Chen, Jiexin Xu, Huaijun Li, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have significantly impacted the legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for judicial decision-making that simulates the court trial process . they propose 420 Chinese judgment documents to support their framework and build a large-scale legal knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in various aspects, especially in generating legal articles. |