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Hongru Wang

47 accepted papers

2026

Compound-QA: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Compound Questions

ICASSP 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks, prompting researchers to develop diverse evaluation benchmarks. However, most benchmarks typically measure the ability of LLMs to respond to individual questions, neglecting the complex interactions in real-world a…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

On Path to Multimodal Historical Reasoning: HistBench and HistAgent

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to remarkable progress across various domains, yet their capabilities in the humanities, particularly history, remain underexplored. Historical reasoning poses unique challenges for LLMs, involving multimodal source interpretation, temporal in…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Perception-Aware Policy Optimization for Multimodal Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has proven to be a highly effective strategy for empowering Large Language Models (LLMs) with long chain-of-thought reasoning abilities. However, its design and optimizations remain tailored to purely textual domains, resulting in suboptimal perf…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Position: Agent Should Invoke External Tools ONLY When Epistemically Necessary

ICML 2026poster

As large language models evolve into tool-augmented agents, a central question remains unresolved: when is external tool use actually justified? Existing agent frameworks typically treat tools as ordinary actions and optimize for task success or reward, offering little principled distinction between…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Search-R2: Enhancing Search-Integrated Reasoning via Actor-Refiner Collaboration

ICML 2026poster

Search-integrated reasoning enables language agents to transcend static parametric knowledge by actively querying external sources. However, training these agents via reinforcement learning is hindered by the *multi-scale credit assignment* problem: existing methods typically rely on sparse, traject…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Can LLMs Evaluate Complex Attribution in QA? Automatic Benchmarking using Knowledge Graphs

ACL 2025long

Attributed Question Answering (AQA) has attracted wide attention, but there are still several limitations in evaluating the attributions, including lacking fine-grained attribution categories, relying on manual annotations, and failing to compare attributions with only subtle differences. To bridge…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DecisionFlow: Advancing Large Language Model as Principled Decision Maker

EMNLP 2025

In high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance, effective decision-making demands not just accurate outcomes but transparent and explainable reasoning. However, current language models often lack the structured deliberation needed for such tasks, instead generating decisions and justification

2025

ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs

ACL 2025long

With the proliferation of task-specific large language models, delta compression has emerged as a method to mitigate the resource challenges of deploying numerous such models by effectively compressing the delta model parameters. Previous delta-sparsification methods either remove parameters randoml…

2025

MlingConf: A Comprehensive Study of Multilingual Confidence Estimation on Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

The tendency of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations raises concerns regarding their reliability. Therefore, confidence estimations indicating the extent of trustworthiness of the generations become essential. However, current LLM confidence estimations in languages other than Eng…

2025

ModelingAgent: Bridging LLMs and Mathematical Modeling for Real-World Challenges

EMNLP 2025

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has enabled substantial advances in solving mathematical problems. However, existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world complexity, which demand open-ended, interdisciplinary reasoning and integration of computational tools. To address this ga

2025

NILE: Internal Consistency Alignment in Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Recent advances show that the world knowledge in the Instruction Fine-Tuning (IFT) dataset, which is incompatible with LLMs’ internal knowledge, can greatly hurt the IFT performance. However, the effective integration and balancing of the internal knowledge of LLMs, acquired during pre-training, wit

2025

Rethinking Stateful Tool Use in Multi-Turn Dialogues: Benchmarks and Challenges

ACL 2025finding

Existing benchmarks that assess Language Models (LMs) as Language Agents (LAs) for tool use primarily focus on stateless, single-turn interactions or partial evaluations, such as tool selection in a single turn, overlooking the inherent stateful nature of interactions in multi-turn applications. To…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SMART: Self-Aware Agent for Tool Overuse Mitigation

ACL 2025finding

Current Large Language Model (LLM) agents demonstrate strong reasoning and tool use capabilities, but often lack self-awareness, failing to balance these approaches effectively. This imbalance leads to **Tool Overuse**, where models unnecessarily rely on external tools for tasks solvable with parame…

2025

SafeToolBench: Pioneering a Prospective Benchmark to Evaluating Tool Utilization Safety in LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited great performance in autonomously calling various tools in external environments, leading to better problems solving and task automation capabilities. However, these external tools also amplify potential risks such as financial loss or privacy leaking with

2025

Self-DC: When to Reason and When to Act? Self Divide-and-Conquer for Compositional Unknown Questions

NAACL 2025long

Previous research has typically concentrated on leveraging the internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions (i.e., internal reasoning such as generate-then-read). In contrast, for questions that fall outside their known scope, these models rely on external knowledge r…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2025

Self-Reasoning Language Models: Unfold Hidden Reasoning Chains with Few Reasoning Catalyst

ACL 2025finding

Inference-time scaling has attracted much attention which significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks by increasing the length of Chain-of-Thought. These longer intermediate reasoning rationales embody various meta-reasoning skills in human cognit…

2025

SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters

NAACL 2025long

The widespread applications of large language models (LLMs) have brought about concerns regarding their potential misuse. Although aligned with human preference data before release, LLMs remain vulnerable to various malicious attacks. In this paper, we adopt a red-teaming strategy to enhance LLM saf…

2025

Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering

NAACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) can store a significant amount of factual knowledge in their parameters. However, their parametric knowledge may conflict with the information provided in the context—this phenomenon, known as context-memory knowledge conflicts, can lead to undesirable model behaviour, s…

2025

ToolRL: Reward is All Tool Learning Needs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) often undergo supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to acquire tool use capabilities. However, SFT struggles to generalize to unfamiliar or complex tool use scenarios. Recent advancements in reinforcement learning (RL), particularly with R1-like models, have demonstrated…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

ToolSpectrum: Towards Personalized Tool Utilization for Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

While integrating external tools into large language models (LLMs) enhances their ability to access real-time information and domain-specific services, existing approaches focus narrowly on functional tool selection following user instructions while overlooking the critical role of context-aware per…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

TransBench: Breaking Barriers for Transferable Graphical User Interface Agents in Dynamic Digital Environments

ACL 2025finding

Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents, which autonomously operate on digital interfaces through natural language instructions, hold transformative potential for accessibility, automation, and user experience. A critical aspect of their functionality is grounding — the ability to map linguistic inten…

2025

UAlign: Leveraging Uncertainty Estimations for Factuality Alignment on Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Despite demonstrating impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) still often struggle to accurately express the factual knowledge they possess, especially in cases where the LLMs’ knowledge boundaries are ambiguous. To improve LLMs’ factual expressions, we propose the UAlign framework, wh…

2024

AppBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex User Instruction

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) can interact with the real world by connecting with versatile external APIs, resulting in better problem-solving and task automation capabilities. Previous research primarily either focuses on APIs with limited arguments from a single source or overlooks the complex depe…

2024

AutoPSV: Automated Process-Supervised Verifier

NeurIPS 2024poster

In this work, we propose a novel method named \textbf{Auto}mated \textbf{P}rocess-\textbf{S}upervised \textbf{V}erifier (\textbf{\textsc{AutoPSV}}) to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by automatically annotating the reasoning steps. \textsc{AutoPSV} begins by traini…

2024

DPDLLM: A Black-box Framework for Detecting Pre-training Data from Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

The success of large language models (LLM) benefits from large-scale model parameters and large amounts of pre-training data. However, the textual data for training LLM can not be confirmed to be legal because they are crawled from different web sites. For example, there are copyrighted articles, pe…

2024

Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique Prompting

NAACL 2024long

Numerous works are proposed to align large language models (LLMs) with human intents to better fulfill instructions, ensuring they are trustful and helpful.Nevertheless, some human instructions are often malicious or misleading and following them will lead to untruthful and unsafe responses.Previous…

2024

JoTR: A Joint Transformer and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dialogue Policy Learning

COLING 2024main

Dialogue policy learning (DPL) aims to determine an abstract representation (also known as action) to guide what the response should be. Typically, DPL is cast as a sequential decision problem across a series of predefined action candidates. However, such static and narrow actions can limit response…

2024

Knowledge Conflicts for LLMs: A Survey

EMNLP 2024main

This survey provides an in-depth analysis of knowledge conflicts for large language models (LLMs), highlighting the complex challenges they encounter when blending contextual and parametric knowledge. Our focus is on three categories of knowledge conflicts: context-memory, inter-context, and intra-m…

2024

Less is More: Making Smaller Language Models Competent Subgraph Retrievers for Multi-hop KGQA

EMNLP 2024finding

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to inject external non-parametric knowledge into large language models (LLMs). Recent works suggest that Knowledge Graphs (KGs) contain valuable external knowledge for LLMs. Retrieving information from KGs differs from extracting it from document s…

2024

M3sum: A Novel Unsupervised Language-Guided Video Summarization

ICASSP 2024accepted

Language-guided video summarization empowers users to use natural language queries to effortlessly summarize lengthy videos into concise and relevant summaries that cater specifically to their information needs, which is more friendly to access and digest. However, most of the previous works rely on…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction

COLING 2024main

Multimodal information extraction (MIE) is a challenging task which aims to extract the structural information in free text coupled with the image for constructing the multimodal knowledge graph. The entity-based MIE tasks are based on the entity information to complete the specific tasks. However,…

2024

Medical Dialogue System: A Survey of Categories, Methods, Evaluation and Challenges

ACL 2024findings

This paper surveys and organizes research works of medical dialog systems, which is an important yet challenging task. Although these systems have been surveyed in the medical community from an application perspective, a systematic review from a rigorous technical perspective has to date remained no…

2024

Role Prompting Guided Domain Adaptation with General Capability Preserve for Large Language Models

NAACL 2024findings

The growing interest in Large Language Models (LLMs) for specialized applications has revealed a significant challenge: when tailored to specific domains, LLMs tend to experience catastrophic forgetting, compromising their general capabilities and leading to a suboptimal user experience. Additionall…

2024

SELF-GUARD: Empower the LLM to Safeguard Itself

NAACL 2024long

With the increasing risk posed by jailbreak attacks, recent studies have investigated various methods to improve the safety of large language models (LLMs), mainly falling into two strategies: safety training and safeguards. Safety training involves fine-tuning the LLM with adversarial samples, whic…

2024

SeRTS: Self-Rewarding Tree Search for Biomedical Retrieval-Augmented Generation

EMNLP 2024finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in the biomedical domain with the advancement of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, existing retrieval-augmented approaches face challenges in addressing diverse queries and documents, particularly for medical knowledge queries, res…

2024

UniRetriever: Multi-task Candidates Selection for Various Context-Adaptive Conversational Retrieval

COLING 2024main

Conversational retrieval refers to an information retrieval system that operates in an iterative and interactive manner, requiring the retrieval of various external resources, such as persona, knowledge, and even response, to effectively engage with the user and successfully complete the dialogue. H…

2024

VLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation for Generalizability of Text-to-Image Models

EMNLP 2024main

Progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) models has significantly advanced the generation of images from textual descriptions. Existing metrics, such as CLIP, effectively measure the semantic alignment between single prompts and their corresponding images. However, they fall short in evaluating a model’s abi…

2023

Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue Questions with LLMs

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, greatly empower dialogue systems with strong language understanding and generation capabilities. However, most of the previous works prompt the LLMs to directly generate a response based on the dialogue context, overlooking the underlying linguistic cue…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Improving Factual Consistency for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Enhancement and Alignment

EMNLP 2023long findings

Pretrained language models (PLMs) based knowledge-grounded dialogue systems are prone to generate responses that are factually inconsistent with the provided knowledge source. In such inconsistent responses, the dialogue models fail to accurately express the external factual knowledge they rely upon…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized Knowledge-grounded Dialogues

EMNLP 2023long findings

Open-domain dialogue system usually requires different sources of knowledge to generate more informative and evidential responses. However, existing knowledge-grounded dialogue systems either focus on a single knowledge source or overlook the dependency between multiple sources of knowledge, which m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Prompting and Evaluating Large Language Models for Proactive Dialogues: Clarification, Target-guided, and Non-collaboration

EMNLP 2023long findings

Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, they still possess limitations, such as failing to ask clarifying questions to ambiguous queries or refuse users' unreasonable reques…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

ReadPrompt: A Readable Prompting Method for Reliable Knowledge Probing

EMNLP 2023long findings

Knowledge probing is a task to assess the knowledge encoded within pre-trained language models (PLMs) by having the PLM complete prompts such as "Italy is located in \_\_,". The model's prediction precision serves as a lower bound for the amount of knowledge it contains. Subsequent works explore tra…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Retrieval-free Knowledge Injection through Multi-Document Traversal for Dialogue Models

ACL 2023long

Dialogue models are often enriched with extensive external knowledge to provide informative responses through a retrieval-augmented pipeline. Nevertheless, retrieval-augmented approaches rely on finely annotated retrieval training data and knowledge-grounded response generation data, making it costl…

2023

Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Order-Insensitive Representation Regularization

ACL 2023findings

Generating persona consistent dialogue response is important for developing an intelligent conversational agent. Recent works typically fine-tune large-scale pre-trained models on this task by concatenating persona texts and dialogue history as a single input sequence to generate the target response…

2022

DIGAT: Modeling News Recommendation with Dual-Graph Interaction

EMNLP 2022finding

News recommendation (NR) is essential for online news services. Existing NR methods typically adopt a news-user representation learning framework, facing two potential limitations. First, in news encoder, single candidate news encoding suffers from an insufficient semantic information problem. Secon…

2022

Integrating Pretrained Language Model for Dialogue Policy Evaluation

ICASSP 2022accepted

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been witnessed its potential for training a dialogue policy agent towards maximizing the accumulated rewards given from users. However, the reward can be very sparse for it is usually only provided at the end of a dialog session, which causes unaffordable interaction…

Cited by 0SourceScholar