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Deqing Yang

37 accepted papers

2026

ComLQ: Benchmarking Complex Logical Queries in Information Retrieval

AAAI 2026technical

Information retrieval (IR) systems play a critical role in navigating information overload across various applications. Existing IR benchmarks primarily focus on simple queries that are semantically analogous to single- and multi-hop relations, overlooking complex logical queries involving first-ord

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

ProRL: Effective Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Recommendation via Rectified Policy Gradient Estimation

ICML 2026poster

Proactive Recommender Systems (PRSs) aim to guide user preference shift toward target items by generating paths of intermediate recommendations. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for optimizing such sequential decision tasks. Based on path rewards, RL can naturally jointly …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Think Fast and Slow: Step-Level Cognitive Depth Adaptation for LLM Agents

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-turn decision-making tasks. However, current agents typically rely on fixed cognitive patterns: non-thinking models generate immediate responses, while thinking models engage in deep reasoning uniformly. This rigid…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ARIA: Training Language Agents with Intention-driven Reward Aggregation

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) have enabled agents to perform complex reasoning and decision-making through free-form language interactions. However, in open-ended language action environments (e.g., negotiation or question-asking games), the action space can be formulated as a joint distribution over…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Accelerated Evolving Set Processes for Local PageRank Computation

NeurIPS 2025poster

This work proposes a novel framework based on nested evolving set processes to accelerate Personalized PageRank (PPR) computation. At each stage of the process, we employ a localized inexact proximal point iteration to solve a simplified linear system. We show that the time complexity of such locali…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BOOKWORLD: From Novels to Interactive Agent Societies for Story Creation

ACL 2025long

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled social simulation through multi-agent systems. Prior efforts focus on agent societies created from scratch, assigning agents with newly defined personas. However, simulating established fictional worlds and characters remain largely undere…

2025

Curse of Knowledge: Your Guidance and Provided Knowledge are biasing LLM Judges in Complex Evaluation

EMNLP 2025

As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they face increasingly diverse and complex tasks, making reliable evaluation challenging. The paradigm of LLMs as judges has emerged as a scalable solution, yet prior work primarily focuses on simple settings. Their reliability in complex tasks—wher

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

EASYTOOL: Enhancing LLM-based Agents with Concise Tool Instruction

NAACL 2025long

There has been a rising interest in utilizing tools in applications of autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) to address intricate real-world tasks. To develop LLMbased agents, it usually requires LLMs to understand many tool functions from different tool documentations. However, th…

2025

EvoAgent: Towards Automatic Multi-Agent Generation via Evolutionary Algorithms

NAACL 2025long

The rise of powerful large language models (LLMs) has spurred a new trend in building LLM-based autonomous agents for solving complex tasks, especially multi-agent systems. Despite the remarkable progress, we notice that existing works are heavily dependent on human-designed frameworks, which greatl…

2025

Implicit Reasoning in Transformers is Reasoning through Shortcuts

ACL 2025finding

Test-time compute is emerging as a new paradigm for enhancing language models’ complex multi-step reasoning capabilities, as demonstrated by the success of OpenAI’s o1 and o3, as well as DeepSeek’s R1. Compared to explicit reasoning in test-time compute, implicit reasoning is more inference-efficien…

2025

LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions

ACL 2025long

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities, they still struggle with generating factually incorrect content (i.e., hallucinations). A promising approach to mitigate this issue is enabling models to express uncertainty when unsure. Previous research on uncertainty modeling…

2025

Logical Consistency is Vital: Neural-Symbolic Information Retrieval for Negative-Constraint Queries

ACL 2025finding

Information retrieval plays a crucial role in resource localization. Current dense retrievers retrieve the relevant documents within a corpus via embedding similarities, which compute similarities between dense vectors mainly depending on word co-occurrence between queries and documents, but overloo…

2025

Mitigating Out-of-Entity Errors in Named Entity Recognition: A Sentence-Level Strategy

COLING 2025main

Many previous models of named entity recognition (NER) suffer from the problem of Out-of-Entity (OOE), i.e., the tokens in the entity mentions of the test samples have not appeared in the training samples, which hinders the achievement of satisfactory performance. To improve OOE-NER performance, in…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Past Meets Present: Creating Historical Analogy with Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Historical analogies, which compare known past events with contemporary but unfamiliar events, are important abilities that help people make decisions and understand the world. However, research in applied history suggests that people have difficulty finding appropriate analogies. And previous studi…

2025

PunMemeCN: A Benchmark to Explore Vision-Language Models’ Understanding of Chinese Pun Memes

EMNLP 2025

Pun memes, which combine wordplay with visual elements, represent a popular form of humor in Chinese online communications. Despite their prevalence, current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) lack systematic evaluation in understanding and applying these culturally-specific multimodal expressions. In th

2025

SELFGOAL: Your Language Agents Already Know How to Achieve High-level Goals

NAACL 2025long

Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly valuable as decision-making tools in domains such as gaming and programming. However, these agents often face challenges in achieving high-level goals without detailed instructions and in adapting to environments where feedback…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2025

Skeletons Matter: Dynamic Data Augmentation for Text-to-Query

EMNLP 2025

The task of translating natural language questions into query languages has long been a central focus in semantic parsing. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly accelerated progress in this field. However, existing studies typically focus on a single query language,

2025

The Lighthouse of Language: Enhancing LLM Agents via Critique-Guided Improvement

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual g…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

UNCLE: Benchmarking Uncertainty Expressions in Long-Form Generation

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, particularly in long-form generations. A promising direction to mitigate hallucination is to teach LLMs to express uncertainty explicitly when they lack sufficient knowledge. However, existing work lacks direct and fair evaluation of LLMs’ abi

2024

ANALOGYKB: Unlocking Analogical Reasoning of Language Models with A Million-scale Knowledge Base

ACL 2024long

Analogical reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability of humans. However, current language models (LMs) still struggle to achieve human-like performance in analogical reasoning tasks due to a lack of resources for model training. In this work, we address this gap by proposing ANALOGYKB, a million-…

2024

Boosting Scientific Concepts Understanding: Can Analogy from Teacher Models Empower Student Models?

EMNLP 2024main

Analogical reasoning plays a critical role in human cognition, enabling us to understand new concepts by associating them with familiar ones. Previous research in the AI community has mainly focused on identifying and generating analogies and then examining their quality under human evaluation, whic…

2024

Capturing Minds, Not Just Words: Enhancing Role-Playing Language Models with Personality-Indicative Data

EMNLP 2024finding

Role-playing agents (RPA) have been a popular application area for large language models (LLMs), attracting significant interest from both industry and academia. While existing RPAs well portray the characters’ knowledge and tones, they face challenges in capturing their minds, especially for small…

2024

Evaluating Character Understanding of Large Language Models via Character Profiling from Fictional Works

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and spurred numerous AI applications, in which role-playing agents (RPAs) are particularly popular, especially for fictional characters. The prerequisite for these RPAs lies in the capability of LLMs to understand characters from…

2024

Improving Recall of Large Language Models: A Model Collaboration Approach for Relational Triple Extraction

COLING 2024main

Relation triple extraction, which outputs a set of triples from long sentences, plays a vital role in knowledge acquisition. Large language models can accurately extract triples from simple sentences through few-shot learning or fine-tuning when given appropriate instructions. However, they often mi…

2024

Iterative Methods via Locally Evolving Set Process

NeurIPS 2024poster

Given the damping factor $\alpha$ and precision tolerance $\epsilon$, \citet{andersen2006local} introduced Approximate Personalized PageRank (APPR), the \textit{de facto local method} for approximating the PPR vector, with runtime bounded by $\Theta(1/(\alpha\epsilon))$ independent of the graph size…

2024

Negation Triplet Extraction with Syntactic Dependency and Semantic Consistency

COLING 2024main

Previous works of negation understanding mainly focus on negation cue detection and scope resolution, without identifying negation subject which is also significant to the downstream tasks. In this paper, we propose a new negation triplet extraction (NTE) task which aims to extract negation subject…

2024

Reason from Fallacy: Enhancing Large Language Models’ Logical Reasoning through Logical Fallacy Understanding

NAACL 2024findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated good performance in many reasoning tasks, but they still struggle with some complicated reasoning tasks including logical reasoning. One non-negligible reason for LLMs’ suboptimal performance on logical reasoning is their overlooking of understanding lo…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

ToNER: Type-oriented Named Entity Recognition with Generative Language Model

COLING 2024main

In recent years, the fine-tuned generative models have been proven more powerful than the previous tagging-based or span-based models on named entity recognition (NER) task. It has also been found that the information related to entities, such as entity types, can prompt a model to achieve NER bette…

2024

“A good pun is its own reword”: Can Large Language Models Understand Puns?

EMNLP 2024main

Puns play a vital role in academic research due to their distinct structure and clear definition, which aid in the comprehensive analysis of linguistic humor. However, the understanding of puns in large language models (LLMs) has not been thoroughly examined, limiting their use in creative writing a…

2023

Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction

EMNLP 2023long findings

The vital role of analogical reasoning in human cognition allows us to grasp novel concepts by linking them with familiar ones through shared relational structures. Despite the attention previous research has given to word analogies, this work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) often overloo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Causality-aware Concept Extraction based on Knowledge-guided Prompting

ACL 2023long

Concepts benefit natural language understanding but are far from complete in existing knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been widely used in text-based concept extraction (CE). However, PLMs tend to mine the co-occurrence associations from massive corpus as pre…

2023

Distilling Script Knowledge from Large Language Models for Constrained Language Planning

ACL 2023long

In everyday life, humans often plan their actions by following step-by-step instructions in the form of goal-oriented scripts. Previous work has exploited language models (LMs) to plan for abstract goals of stereotypical activities (e.g., “make a cake”), but leaves more specific goals with multi-fac…

2022

Generative Entity Typing with Curriculum Learning

EMNLP 2022main

Entity typing aims to assign types to the entity mentions in given texts. The traditional classification-based entity typing paradigm has two unignorable drawbacks: 1) it fails to assign an entity to the types beyond the predefined type set, and 2) it can hardly handle few-shot and zero-shot situati…

2022

Improving Continual Relation Extraction through Prototypical Contrastive Learning

COLING 2022main

Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations towards the continuous and iterative arrival of new data, of which the major challenge is the catastrophic forgetting of old tasks. In order to alleviate this critical problem for enhanced CRE performance, we propose a novel Continual Rel…

2022

Relation-Specific Attentions over Entity Mentions for Enhanced Document-Level Relation Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Compared with traditional sentence-level relation extraction, document-level relation extraction is a more challenging task where an entity in a document may be mentioned multiple times and associated with multiple relations. However, most methods of document-level relation extraction do not disting…

2021

Refining Sample Embeddings with Relation Prototypes to Enhance Continual Relation Extraction

ACL 2021long

Continual learning has gained increasing attention in recent years, thanks to its biological interpretation and efficiency in many real-world applications. As a typical task of continual learning, continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations between entities from texts, where the sa…