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Bang Liu

50 accepted papers

2026

AOrchestra: Automating Sub-Agent Creation for Agentic Orchestration

ICML 2026poster

Language agents have shown strong promise for task automation. Realizing this promise for increasingly complex, long-horizon tasks has driven the rise of a subagent-as-tools paradigm for multi-turn task solving. However, existing designs still lack a dynamic abstraction view of sub-agents, thereby h…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

AutoWebWorld: Synthesizing Infinite Verifiable Web Environments via Finite State Machines

ICML 2026poster

The performance of autonomous Web GUI agents heavily relies on the quality and quantity of their training data. However, a fundamental bottleneck persists: collecting interaction trajectories from real-world websites is expensive and difficult to verify. The underlying state transitions are hidden, …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Disturbance-Robust Dynamical System Learning With Neural ODEs and Flow-Matching Augmentation

RA-L 2026

Autonomous dynamical systems (DS) are essential for imitation learning but often face challenges in simultaneously achieving high accuracy, stability guarantees, and resistance to disturbances. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a globally stable DS with trajectory attraction and dis

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

GraphOmni: A Comprehensive and Extensible Benchmark Framework for Large Language Models on Graph-theoretic Tasks

ICLR 2026poster

This paper introduces GraphOmni, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs on graph-theoretic tasks articulated in natural language. GraphOmni spans diverse graph types, serialization formats, and prompting schemes, substantially extending upon prior efforts i…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

InfoPO: Information-Driven Policy Optimization for User-Centric Agents

ICML 2026poster

Real-world user requests to LLM agents are often underspecified. Agents must interact to acquire missing information and make correct downstream decisions. However, current multi-turn GRPO-based methods often rely on trajectory-level reward computation, which leads to credit assignment problems and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

VisJudge-Bench: Aesthetics and Quality Assessment of Visualizations

ICLR 2026poster

Visualization, a domain-specific yet widely used form of imagery, is an effective way to turn complex datasets into intuitive insights, and its value depends on whether data are faithfully represented, clearly communicated, and aesthetically designed. However, evaluating visualization quality is cha…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

What to Ask Next? Probing the Imaginative Reasoning of LLMs with TurtleSoup Puzzles

AAAI 2026technical

We investigate the capacity of Large Language Models (LLMs) for imaginative reasoning—the proactive construction, testing, and revision of hypotheses in information-sparse environments. Existing benchmarks, often static or focused on social deduction, fail to capture the dynamic, exploratory nature

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AFlow: Automating Agentic Workflow Generation

ICLR 2025oral

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in solving complex tasks across diverse domains, typically by employing agentic workflows that follow detailed instructions and operational sequences. However, constructing these workflows requires significant human effort, limiting…

2025

Accelerating Inference of Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Sparse Context Selection

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with retrieval exhibit robust performance and extensive versatility by incorporating external contexts. However, the input length grows linearly in the number of retrieved documents, causing a dramatic increase in latency. In this paper, we propose a novel para…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2025

AlignVLM: Bridging Vision and Language Latent Spaces for Multimodal Document Understanding

NeurIPS 2025poster

Aligning visual features with language embeddings is a key challenge in vision-language models (VLMs). The performance of such models hinges on having a good connector that maps visual features generated by a vision encoder to a shared embedding space with the LLM while preserving semantic similarit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Data Interpreter: An LLM Agent for Data Science

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents have excelled in various domains but face significant challenges when applied to data science workflows due to their complex, multi-stage nature. Current LLM-based agents struggle with non-linear relationships, recursive dependencies, implicit data- and logic-…

2025

FACT: Examining the Effectiveness of Iterative Context Rewriting for Multi-fact Retrieval

NAACL 2025findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, yet they struggle with tasks requiring the simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts, especially during generation. This paper identifies a novel “lost-in-the-middle” phenomenon, where LLMs progressively lo…

2025

INDOORWORLD : Integrating Physical Task Solving and Social Simulation in A Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Environment

EMNLP 2025

Virtual environments are essential to AI agent research. Existing environments for LLM agent research typically focus on either physical task solving or social simulation, with the former oversimplifying agent individuality and social dynamics, and the latter lacking physical grounding of social beh

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Improving Context Fidelity via Native Retrieval-Augmented Reasoning

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) often struggle with context fidelity, producing inconsistent answers when responding to questions based on provided information. Existing approaches either rely on expensive supervised fine-tuning to generate evidence post-answer or train models to perform web searches w

2025

R3Mem: Bridging Memory Retention and Retrieval via Reversible Compression

ACL 2025finding

Memory plays a key role in enhancing LLMs’ performance when deployed to real-world applications. Existing solutions face trade-offs: explicit memory designs based on external storage require complex management and incur storage overhead, while implicit memory designs that store information via param…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

System-1.5 Reasoning: Traversal in Language and Latent Spaces with Dynamic Shortcuts

NeurIPS 2025poster

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to move beyond fast System-1 responses and engage in deliberative System-2 reasoning. However, this comes at the cost of significant inefficiency due to verbose intermediate output. Recent latent-space reasoning methods improve ef…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

VCR: A Task for Pixel-Level Complex Reasoning in Vision Language Models via Restoring Occluded Text

ICLR 2025poster

We introduce Visual Caption Restoration (VCR), a novel vision-language task that challenges models to accurately restore partially obscured texts using pixel-level hints within images through complex reasoning. This task stems from the observation that text embedded in images intrinsically differs f…

2024

CausalNET: Unveiling Causal Structures on Event Sequences by Topology-Informed Causal Attention

IJCAI 2024poster

Causal discovery on event sequences holds a pivotal significance across domains such as healthcare, finance, and industrial systems. The crux of this endeavor lies in unraveling causal structures among event types, typically portrayed as directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Nonetheless, prevailing method…

2024

Deciphering Digital Detectives: Understanding LLM Behaviors and Capabilities in Multi-Agent Mystery Games

ACL 2024findings

In this study, we explore the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Jubensha, a Chinese detective role-playing game and a novel area in Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven gaming. We introduce the first dataset specifically for Jubensha, including character scripts and game rules, to foster…

2024

EiG-Search: Generating Edge-Induced Subgraphs for GNN Explanation in Linear Time

ICML 2024poster

Understanding and explaining the predictions of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), is crucial for enhancing their safety and trustworthiness. Subgraph-level explanations are gaining attention for their intuitive appeal. However, most existing subgraph-level explainers face efficiency challenges in explai…

2024

Enhancing Agent Learning through World Dynamics Modeling

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs), trained on vast amounts of internet data, have developed a broad understanding of the world, enhancing the decision-making capabilities of embodied agents. This success is largely due to the comprehensive and in-depth domain knowledge within their training datasets. How…

2024

Enhancing Healthcare LLM Trust with Atypical Presentations Recalibration

EMNLP 2024finding

Black-box large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in various environments, making it essential for these models to effectively convey their confidence and uncertainty, especially in high-stakes settings. However, these models often exhibit overconfidence, leading to potential risks an…

2024

FAC2E: Better Understanding Large Language Model Capabilities by Dissociating Language and Cognition

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. However, such a paradigm fails to comprehensively differentiate the fine-grained language and cognitive skills, rendering the lack of sufficient interpretation to LLMs’ cap…

2024

GOAt: Explaining Graph Neural Networks via Graph Output Attribution

ICLR 2024poster

Understanding the decision-making process of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) is crucial to their interpretability. Most existing methods for explaining GNNs typically rely on training auxiliary models, resulting in the explanations remain black-boxed. This paper introduces Graph Output Attribution (GOA…

2024

HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science

EMNLP 2024finding

The emergence of specialized large language models (LLMs) has shown promise in addressing complex tasks in materials science. Many LLMs, however, often struggle with the distinct complexities of materials science tasks, such as computational challenges, and rely heavily on outdated implicit knowledg…

2024

OPEx: A Component-Wise Analysis of LLM-Centric Agents in Embodied Instruction Following

ACL 2024long

Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) is a crucial task in embodied learning, requiring agents to interact with their environment through egocentric observations to fulfill natural language instructions. Recent advancements have seen a surge in employing large language models (LLMs) within a framewor…

2024

Resonance RoPE: Improving Context Length Generalization of Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

This paper addresses the challenge of train-short-test-long (TSTL) scenarios in Large Language Models (LLMs) equipped with Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE), where models pre-trained on shorter sequences face difficulty with out-of-distribution (OOD) token positions in longer sequences. We introduce…

2024

Talk Funny! A Large-Scale Humor Response Dataset with Chain-of-Humor Interpretation

AAAI 2024technical

Humor is a crucial part of human communication. Understanding humor and generating humorous responses in dialogue can provide natural and empathic human-computer interactions. However, most existing pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform unsatisfactorily in humor generation. On one hand, the se…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2023

DenseShift: Towards Accurate and Efficient Low-Bit Power-of-Two Quantization

ICCV 2023poster

Efficiently deploying deep neural networks on low-resource edge devices is challenging due to their ever-increasing resource requirements. To address this issue, researchers have proposed multiplication-free neural networks, such as Power-of-Two quantization, or also known as Shift networks, which a…

Cited by 3PDFcodeScholar
2023

Efficient Classification of Long Documents via State-Space Models

EMNLP 2023short main

Transformer-based models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on numerous NLP applications. However, long documents which are prevalent in real-world scenarios cannot be efficiently processed by transformers with the vanilla self-attention module due to their quadratic computation complexity a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Fine-tuning Happens in Tiny Subspaces: Exploring Intrinsic Task-specific Subspaces of Pre-trained Language Models

ACL 2023long

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to be overly parameterized and have significant redundancy, indicating a small degree of freedom of the PLMs. Motivated by the observation, in this paper, we study the problem of re-parameterizing and fine-tuning PLMs from a new perspective: Discovery of…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2023

HoneyBee: Progressive Instruction Finetuning of Large Language Models for Materials Science

EMNLP 2023long findings

We propose an instruction-based process for trustworthy data curation in materials science (MatSci-Instruct), which we then apply to finetune a LLaMa-based language model targeted for materials science (HoneyBee). MatSci-Instruct helps alleviate the scarcity of relevant, high-quality materials scien…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Identify Event Causality with Knowledge and Analogy

AAAI 2023technical

Event causality identification (ECI) aims to identify the causal relationship between events, which plays a crucial role in deep text understanding. Due to the diversity of real-world causality events and difficulty in obtaining sufficient training data, existing ECI approaches have poor generalizab…

2023

MAPO: Boosting Large Language Model Performance with Model-Adaptive Prompt Optimization

EMNLP 2023long findings

Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. However, a good prompt…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

MatSci-NLP: Evaluating Scientific Language Models on Materials Science Language Tasks Using Text-to-Schema Modeling

ACL 2023long

We present MatSci-NLP, a natural language benchmark for evaluating the performance of natural language processing (NLP) models on materials science text. We construct the benchmark from publicly available materials science text data to encompass seven different NLP tasks, including conventional NLP…

2023

Search-Oriented Conversational Query Editing

ACL 2023findings

Conversational query rewriting (CQR) realizes conversational search by reformulating the search dialogue into a standalone rewrite. However, existing CQR models either are not learned toward improving the downstream search performance or inefficiently generate the rewrite token-by-token from scratch…

2023

SkillQG: Learning to Generate Question for Reading Comprehension Assessment

ACL 2023findings

We present SkillQG: a question generation framework with controllable comprehension types for assessing and improving machine reading comprehension models. Existing question generation systems widely differentiate questions by literal information such as question words and answer types to generate s…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

Feeding What You Need by Understanding What You Learned

ACL 2022long

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) reveals the ability to understand a given text passage and answer questions based on it. Existing research works in MRC rely heavily on large-size models and corpus to improve the performance evaluated by metrics such as Exact Match (EM) and F1. However, such a pa…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Multi-turn Emotional Support Dialogue Generation with Lookahead Strategy Planning

EMNLP 2022main

Providing Emotional Support (ES) to soothe people in emotional distress is an essential capability in social interactions. Most existing researches on building ES conversation systems only considered single-turn interactions with users, which was over-simplified. In comparison, multi-turn ES convers…

2022

MuKEA: Multimodal Knowledge Extraction and Accumulation for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering

CVPR 2022poster

Knowledge-based visual question answering requires the ability of associating external knowledge for open-ended cross-modal scene understanding. One limitation of existing solutions is that they capture relevant knowledge from text-only knowledge bases, which merely contain facts expressed by first-…

Cited by 136PDFcodeScholar
2022

QRelScore: Better Evaluating Generated Questions with Deeper Understanding of Context-aware Relevance

EMNLP 2022main

Existing metrics for assessing question generation not only require costly human reference but also fail to take into account the input context of generation, rendering the lack of deep understanding of the relevance between the generated questions and input contexts. As a result, they may wrongly p…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

R5: Rule Discovery with Reinforced and Recurrent Relational Reasoning

ICLR 2022spotlight

Systematicity, i.e., the ability to recombine known parts and rules to form new sequences while reasoning over relational data, is critical to machine intelligence. A model with strong systematicity is able to train on small-scale tasks and generalize to large-scale tasks. In this paper, we propose…

2021

Guiding the Growth: Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation through Step-by-Step Rewriting

ACL 2021long

This paper explores the task of Difficulty-Controllable Question Generation (DCQG), which aims at generating questions with required difficulty levels. Previous research on this task mainly defines the difficulty of a question as whether it can be correctly answered by a Question Answering (QA) syst…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2021

Imperfect also Deserves Reward: Multi-Level and Sequential Reward Modeling for Better Dialog Management

NAACL 2021long

For task-oriented dialog systems, training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based Dialog Management module suffers from low sample efficiency and slow convergence speed due to the sparse rewards in RL. To solve this problem, many strategies have been proposed to give proper rewards when training RL, bu…

2021

Integrating Semantics and Neighborhood Information with Graph-Driven Generative Models for Document Retrieval

ACL 2021long

With the need of fast retrieval speed and small memory footprint, document hashing has been playing a crucial role in large-scale information retrieval. To generate high-quality hashing code, both semantics and neighborhood information are crucial. However, most existing methods leverage only one of…

2021

Refining BERT Embeddings for Document Hashing via Mutual Information Maximization

EMNLP 2021finding

Existing unsupervised document hashing methods are mostly established on generative models. Due to the difficulties of capturing long dependency structures, these methods rarely model the raw documents directly, but instead to model the features extracted from them (e.g. bag-of-words (BOG), TFIDF).…

2021

S$^3$: Sign-Sparse-Shift Reparametrization for Effective Training of Low-bit Shift Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Shift neural networks reduce computation complexity by removing expensive multiplication operations and quantizing continuous weights into low-bit discrete values, which are fast and energy-efficient compared to conventional neural networks. However, existing shift networks are sensitive to the weig…