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Boxi Cao

16 accepted papers

2026

Decoupling Reasoning and Confidence: Resurrecting Calibration in Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) significantly enhances large language models (LLMs) reasoning but severely suffers from calibration degeneration, where models become excessively over-confident in incorrect answers. Previous studies devote to directly incorporating calibration o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Does Question Really Matter? The Attribution of Answer Bias in LLM Evaluation

AAAI 2026technical

Multiple-choices question answering (MCQA) has emerged as one of the most popular task formats for large language models (LLMs) evaluation. Unfortunately, there exist substantial evidence that the evaluation of current MCQA benchmarks suffers from significant answer bias, which severely undermines t

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

MetaphorVU: Towards Metaphorical Video Understanding

ICML 2026spotlight

Metaphorical videos are prevalent across various real-world scenarios to convey complex ideas, and understanding them typically requires high-order cognitive capabilities. The lack of systematic studies on metaphorical video understanding not only constrains the real-world applicability of MLLMs but…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Critic-CoT: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic

ACL 2025finding

Self-critic has become a crucial mechanism for enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. However, current approaches mainly involve basic prompts for intuitive instance-level feedback, which resembles System-1 processes and limits the reasoning capabilities. Moreover, there is a lack of in-depth…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Memorizing is Not Enough: Deep Knowledge Injection Through Reasoning

ACL 2025long

Although large language models (LLMs) excel in knowledge recall and reasoning, their static nature leads to outdated information as the real world evolves or when adapting to domain-specific knowledge, highlighting the need for effective knowledge injection. However, current research on knowledge in…

2025

The Linguistic Connectivities Within Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable multilingual abilities in various applications. Unfortunately, recent studies have discovered that there exist notable disparities in their performance across different languages. Understanding the underlying mechanisms behind such disparitie…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning or Self-aligning? Rethinking Instruction Fine-tuning

ACL 2024long

Instruction Fine-tuning (IFT) is a crucial phase in building large language models (LLMs). Previous works mainly focus on the IFT’s role in the transfer of behavioral norms and the learning of additional world knowledge. However, the understanding of the underlying mechanisms of IFT remains signific…

2024

Not All Contexts Are Equal: Teaching LLMs Credibility-aware Generation

EMNLP 2024main

The rapid development of large language models has led to the widespread adoption of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates external knowledge to alleviate knowledge bottlenecks and mitigate hallucinations. However, the existing RAG paradigm inevitably suffers from the impact of flaw…

2024

Retentive or Forgetful? Diving into the Knowledge Memorizing Mechanism of Language Models

COLING 2024main

Memory is one of the most essential cognitive functions serving as a repository of world knowledge and episodes of activities. In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models have shown remarkable memorizing ability. On the contrary, vanilla neural networks without pre-training have been lo…

Cited by 16SourcePDFScholar
2024

Spiral of Silence: How is Large Language Model Killing Information Retrieval?—A Case Study on Open Domain Question Answering

ACL 2024long

The practice of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval systems, has become increasingly prevalent. However, the repercussions of LLM-derived content infiltrating the web and influencing the retrieval-generation feedback loop are largely unc…

2024

StructEval: Deepen and Broaden Large Language Model Assessment via Structured Evaluation

ACL 2024findings

Evaluation is the baton for the development of large language models. Current evaluations typically employ a single-item assessment paradigm for each atomic test objective, which struggle to discern whether a model genuinely possesses the required capabilities or merely memorizes/guesses the answers…

2023

Does the Correctness of Factual Knowledge Matter for Factual Knowledge-Enhanced Pre-trained Language Models?

EMNLP 2023long main

In recent years, the injection of factual knowledge has been observed to have a significant positive correlation to the downstream task performance of pre-trained language models. However, existing work neither demonstrates that pre-trained models successfully learn the injected factual knowledge no…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning In-context Learning for Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2023long

Named entity recognition in real-world applications suffers from the diversity of entity types, the emergence of new entity types, and the lack of high-quality annotations. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an in-context learning-based NER approach, which can effectively inject in-c…

2022

Can Prompt Probe Pretrained Language Models? Understanding the Invisible Risks from a Causal View

ACL 2022long

Prompt-based probing has been widely used in evaluating the abilities of pretrained language models (PLMs). Unfortunately, recent studies have discovered such an evaluation may be inaccurate, inconsistent and unreliable. Furthermore, the lack of understanding its inner workings, combined with its wi…

2022

Pre-training to Match for Unified Low-shot Relation Extraction

ACL 2022long

Low-shot relation extraction (RE) aims to recognize novel relations with very few or even no samples, which is critical in real scenario application. Few-shot and zero-shot RE are two representative low-shot RE tasks, which seem to be with similar target but require totally different underlying abil…

2021

Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases

ACL 2021long

Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the unde…