Papers by Zonghai Yao
README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zonghai Yao, Nandyala Siddharth Kantu, Guanghao Wei, Hieu Tran, Zhangqi Duan, Sunjae Kwon, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | a new task is to generate lay definitions of medical terms in EHRs that are difficult to understand for patients. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of automatically generating lay definitions to simplify medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can match or surpass state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT with high-quality data. |
Exploiting Tree Structure for Credit Assignment in Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning has shown strong promise for strengthening reasoning ability of large language models, but sparse, delayed rewards make token-level credit assignment a central challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a critic-free algorithm that rewards tokens that change the solution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on in-distribution benchmarks and out-of-disttribution settings. |
MedQA-CS: Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)-Style Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Clinical Skills (2026.eacl-long)
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Zonghai Yao, Zihao Zhang, Chaolong Tang, Xingyu Bian, Youxia Zhao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Huixue Zhou, Won Seok Jang, Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Current clinical LLM benchmarks fail to evaluate advanced clinical skills in AI and large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate large language models (LLMs) using two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates LLMs through two instruction-following tasks designed to reflect real clinical scenarios. |
Large Language Models are In-context Teachers for Knowledge Reasoning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In-context teaching is a method of providing in-concept example rationales to a student to reason over unseen cases. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an LLM's self-elicited explanations as in-context demonstrations to prompt a student to reason over unseen cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human-crafted demonstrations on medical question answering and human-created models outperfect human-made demonstrations. |
Revisiting the Architectures like Pointer Networks to Efficiently Improve the Next Word Distribution, Summarization Factuality, and Beyond (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for word probability distributions are limited and the output softmax layer is inherently limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the output softmax layer to compute the word probability distribution instead of using pointer networks to break the bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves factCC score by 2 points in CNN/DM and XSUM dataset, and MAUVE scores by 30% in bookSum paragraph-level dataset. |
Knowing When to Abstain: Medical LLMs Under Clinical Uncertainty (2026.eacl-long)
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Sravanthi Machcha, Sushrita Yerra, Sahil Gupta, Aishwarya Sahoo, Sharmin Sultana, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Current evaluation of large language models prioritizes accuracy, but abstention is vital for trustworthy deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark and evaluation protocol for abstention in medical multiple-choice question answering . they integrate conformal prediction, adversarial question perturbations, and explicit abstraction options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol improves reliability of medical multiple-choice question answering models by providing explicit abstention options. |
Efficient and Effective Internal Memory Retrieval for LLM-Based Healthcare Prediction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ground large language models in external knowledge are limited by hallucinations and a lack of granular medical context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that replaces external retrieval with internal, key-based knowledge access by encoding clinical information directly into the model’s parameter space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across four benchmark healthcare outcome prediction datasets. |
From Scores to Steps: Diagnosing and Improving LLM Performance in Evidence-Based Medical Calculations (2025.emnlp-main)
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Benlu Wang, Iris Xia, Yifan Zhang, Junda Wang, null Feiyun Ouyang, Shuo Han, Arman Cohan, Hong Yu, Zonghai Yao
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks assess only the final answer with a wide numerical tolerance, overlooking systematic reasoning failures and potentially causing serious clinical misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a new step-by-step evaluation pipeline that assesses formula selection, entity extraction, and arithmetic computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of large language models on medical benchmarks from 16.35% to 53.19%. |
Improving Summarization with Human Edits (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown the promise of learning with human feedback paradigms to produce human-determined high-quality text. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel technique to use both human-edited and model-generated data together in the training loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique outperforms the conventional RLHF method (designed for human preferences) when applied to human-edit data. |
MedJEx: A Medical Jargon Extraction Model with Wiki’s Hyperlink Span and Contextualized Masked Language Model Score (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing natural language processing (NLP) methods for identifying medical jargon terms are difficult for patients to understand. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language processing application for identifying medical jargon terms from electronic health record notes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on an auxiliary Wikipedia hyperlink span dataset and on the annotated MedJ dataset. |
DischargeSim: A Simulation Benchmark for Educational Doctor–Patient Communication at Discharge (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Discharge communication is a critical yet underexplored component of patient care, where the goal shifts from diagnosis to education. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates large language models’ ability to act as personalized discharge educators. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with 18 LLMs show that model size does not always yield better education outcomes, highlighting trade-offs in strategy use and content prioritization. |
NoteChat: A Dataset of Synthetic Patient-Physician Conversations Conditioned on Clinical Notes (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | NoteChat is a cooperative multi-agent framework for generating patient-physician dialogues . evaluator finds it outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . clinical documentation is largely done by physicians at both steps . |
| Approach: | They propose a cooperative multi-agent framework leveraging Large Language Models to generate patient-physician dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models for generating clinical notes . it can engage patients directly and help clinical documentation, a leading cause of physician burnout . |
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Zonghai Yao, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong yu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says . |
| Approach: | They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures . |
MCQG-SRefine: Multiple Choice Question Generation and Evaluation with Iterative Self-Critique, Correction, and Comparison Feedback (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generating multiple-choice questions (MCQG) for professional exams is challenging due to outdated knowledge, hallucination issues, and prompt sensitivity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for converting medical cases into high-quality USMLE-style questions using a self-refine-based framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves human expert satisfaction regarding quality and difficulty of medical questions. |
Improving Formality Style Transfer with Context-Aware Rule Injection (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing language models pre-trained on large-scale corpora often do not work well for user-generated data where the language styles differ significantly from the mainstream text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for formality style transfer by injecting multiple rules into an end-to-end BERT-based encoder and decoder model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing rule-based FST approaches on tweet sentiment analysis tasks. |
SYNFAC-EDIT: Synthetic Imitation Edit Feedback for Factual Alignment in Clinical Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with factual inaccuracies, a critical issue in clinical NLP applications where errors could lead to serious consequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that leverages >100B parameter GPT variants to act as synthetic experts to generate edit feedback without additional human annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline aims to improve the quality of clinical note summarizations by generating edit feedback without human annotations. |
Zero-shot Entity Linking with Efficient Long Range Sequence Modeling (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to expand the long-range sequence modeling require expensive pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to expand the long-range sequence modeling without retraining the BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the STOA on the zero-shot entity linking dataset by 76.06% and for long data by 74.57%. |
RARE: Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning Enhancement for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Hieu Tran, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Junda Wang, Yifan Zhang, Shuo Han, null Feiyun Ouyang, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | Existing work aims to improve reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for knowledge-intensive tasks such as medical and commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a versatile extension to the mutual reasoning framework (rStar) that enhances reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension to the mutual reasoning framework improves reasoning accuracy and factual integrity across large language models for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks. |
MedCOD: Enhancing English-to-Spanish Medical Translation of Large Language Models Using Enriched Chain-of-Dictionary Framework (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MedCOD integrates domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models . evaluators evaluated four open-source LLMs with structured prompts . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates domain-specific structured knowledge into large language models . they constructed a parallel corpus of 2,999 English-Spanish MedlinePlus articles . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation quality across four open-source LLMs. |
LocalTweets to LocalHealth: A Mental Health Surveillance Framework Based on Twitter Data (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior research on Twitter has provided positive evidence of its utility in developing supplementary health surveillance systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to surveil public health, focusing on mental health outcomes by using tweets from 765 neighborhoods in the USA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the highest F1-score and accuracy over the previous framework, and extrapolates CDC’s estimates to proxy unreported neighborhoods. |
Chatbot To Help Patients Understand Their Health (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Won Seok Jang, Hieu Tran, Manav Shaileshkumar Mistry, Sai Kiran Gandluri, Yifan Zhang, Sharmin Sultana, Sunjae Kwon, Yuan Zhang, Zonghai Yao, Hong Yu
| Challenge: | NoteAid-Chatbot is a conversational AI designed to help patients better understand their health . |
| Approach: | They propose a new learning paradigm that leverages a multi-agent large language model and reinforcement learning framework without relying on costly human-generated training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses non-expert human training methods. |
LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems for Clinical Workflows: A Survey of AI Hospitals (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are moving from isolated text generation toward agentic work inside clinical workflows. |
| Approach: | They propose a workflow-level taxonomy for LLM-based multi-agent systems for clinical and healthcare workflows . they propose integration readiness levels, task-level instrumentation requirements and recurring workflow failure modes as a practical framework for comparing, evaluating and deploying clinical LLM agents and AI hospitals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems should be compared at the workflow level, rather than only by model components or end-task accuracy. |