Papers by Zifan Li
Towards Hierarchical Multi-Step Reward Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Teng Wang, Jiang Zhangyi, Zhenqi He, Hailei Gong, Shenyang Tong, Wenhan Yang, Zeyu Li, Yanan Zheng, Zifan He, Zewen Ye, Shengjie Ma, Jianping Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing Process Reward Models (PRMs) are vulnerable to reward hacking and require expensive, large-scale annotation of reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model approach which evaluates both individual and consecutive reasoning steps from fine-grained and coarse-grounded level. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model performs better than existing PRMs and is more robust than existing models. |
SyntaxSQLNet: Syntax Tree Networks for Complex and Cross-Domain Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in text-to-SQL do not require generating complex SQL queries with multiple clauses or sub-queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a syntax tree network to address the complex text-to-SQL generation task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art model by 9.5% on a large text-to-SQL corpus. |
Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task (D18-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Kai Yang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Dongxu Wang, Zifan Li, James Ma, Irene Li, Qingning Yao, Shanelle Roman, Zilin Zhang, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for semantic parsing are too small in terms of number of programs for training modern data-intensive models. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale complex and cross-domain semantic parsing task for a database . they use a dataset with 10,181 questions and 5,693 unique complex SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is different from previous tasks because it uses the same database and program . the best model achieves only 9.7% exact matching accuracy on a database split setting. |
MIND: Towards Immersive Psychological Healing with Multi-Agent Inner Dialogue (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yujia Chen, Changsong Li, Yiming Wang, Tianjie Ju, Qingqing Xiao, Nan Zhang, Zifan Kong, Peng Wang, Binyu Yan
| Challenge: | Mental health issues are worsening in today’s competitive society, such as depression and anxiety. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent inner dialogue paradigm that provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm provides more immersive psychological healing environments. |
GuessArena: Guess Who I Am? A Self-Adaptive Framework for Evaluating LLMs in Domain-Specific Knowledge and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models rely on static benchmarks and standardized evaluation protocols. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive evaluation framework that integrates dynamic domain knowledge modeling with progressive reasoning assessment to improve evaluation fidelity. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework distinguishes LLMs in terms of domain knowledge coverage and reasoning chain completeness. |
CoSQL: A Conversational Text-to-SQL Challenge Towards Cross-Domain Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (D19-1)
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Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Heyang Er, Suyi Li, Eric Xue, Bo Pang, Xi Victoria Lin, Yi Chern Tan, Tianze Shi, Zihan Li, Youxuan Jiang, Michihiro Yasunaga, Sungrok Shim, Tao Chen, Alexander Fabbri, Zifan Li, Luyao Chen, Yuwen Zhang, Shreya Dixit, Vincent Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Richard Socher, Walter Lasecki, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. |
TypeSQL: Knowledge-Based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation (N18-2)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that can understand natural language questions and generate corresponding SQL queries are not able to do this. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which formats the problem as a slot filling task in a more reasonable way and utilizes type information to better understand rare entities and numbers in the questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the prior art on the WikiSQL dataset and can reach 82.6% accuracy, a 17.5% improvement compared to the previous content-sensitive model. |