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Jiaqing Liang

49 accepted papers

2026

A Stitch in Time Saves Nine: Proactive Self-Refinement for Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Recent advances in self-refinement have demonstrated significant potential for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs) through iterative refinement. However, most existing self-refinement methods rely on a reactive process with a fixed number of iterations, making it difficult to deter…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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

Difficulty Is Not Enough: Curriculum Learning for LLMs Fine-tuning Must Consider Utility

AAAI 2026technical

Fine-tuning plays an essential role in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on specific tasks. A central challenge lies in designing data-efficient strategy to achieve better fine-tuning performance. Curriculum learning, which organizes data from easy to hard, has become a widel

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

From Outcomes to Actions: Leveraging Hindsight for Long-Horizon Language Agent Training

ICML 2026poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a widely adopted technique for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. Despite this progress, existing RL methods still face challenges in training agents with longer-horizon interactions. One major bottleneck is distinguishing the contribution…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Measuring the Unmeasurable: Unveiling Latent Cognitive Capabilities of LLM

AAAI 2026technical

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, and law, accurately evaluating their nuanced reasoning process becomes essential to ensure their safety, reliability, and trustworthiness. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate LLMs a

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

Selective Expert Guidance for Effective and Diverse Exploration in Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a widely adopted technique for enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of RLVR strongly depends on the capability of base models. This issue arises because it requires the model to ha…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Your Models Have Thought Enough: Training Large Reasoning Models to Stop Overthinking

ICLR 2026poster

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance on challenging tasks, yet their deep reasoning often incurs substantial computational costs. To achieve efficient reasoning, existing reinforcement learning methods still struggle to construct short reasoning path during the rollout…

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

CDS: Data Synthesis Method Guided by Cognitive Diagnosis Theory

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advancements, but the increasing complexity of tasks and higher performance demands highlight the need for continuous improvement. Some approaches utilize synthetic data generated by advanced LLMs based on evaluation results to train models. How…

2025

Character is Destiny: Can Persona-assigned Language Models Make Personal Choices?

EMNLP 2025

Can Large Language Models (LLMs) simulate humans in making important decisions? Recent research has unveiled the potential of using LLMs to develop role-playing language agents (RPLAs), mimicking mainly the knowledge and tones of various characters. However, imitative decision-making necessitates a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Data-Efficient Selection via Grammatical Complexity in Continual Pre-training of Domain-Specific LLMs

EMNLP 2025

Data efficiency is crucial in domain-specific continual pre-training (CPT) of large language models (LLMs), especially under resource constraints. Aiming for “small data, big impact,” this work addresses the limitations of existing domain-specific data selection strategies, which often rely on scarc

2025

Dialect-SQL: An Adaptive Framework for Bridging the Dialect Gap in Text-to-SQL

EMNLP 2025

Text-to-SQL is the task of translating natural language questions into SQL queries based on relational databases. Different databases implement their own SQL dialects, leading to variations in syntax. As a result, SQL queries designed for one database may not execute properly in another, creating a

2025

From Remembering to Metacognition: Do Existing Benchmarks Accurately Evaluate LLMs?

EMNLP 2025

Despite the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), existing benchmark datasets often focus on low-level cognitive tasks, such as factual recall and basic comprehension, while providing limited coverage of higher-level reasoning skills, including analysis, evaluation, and creation. In thi

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Gen-SQL: Efficient Text-to-SQL By Bridging Natural Language Question And Database Schema With Pseudo-Schema

COLING 2025main

With the prevalence of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have shifted paradigms and leveraged LLMs to tackle the challenging task of Text-to-SQL. Because of the complexity of real world databases, previous works adopt the retrieve-then-generate framework to retrieve relevant database sche…

2025

Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation

NAACL 2025findings

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been widely adopted to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive tasks. To enhance credibility and verifiability in RAG systems, Attributed Text Generation (ATG) is proposed, which provides citations to retrieval knowledge in LLM-generated r…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
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

MultiLingPoT: Boosting Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs through Multilingual Program Integration

EMNLP 2025

Program-of-Thought, which aims to use program instead of natural language in reasoning, is an important way for LLMs to solve mathematical problems. Since different programming languages excel in different areas, it is natural to use the most suitable language for solving specific problems. However,

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Order Doesn’t Matter, But Reasoning Does: Training LLMs with Order-Centric Augmentation

EMNLP 2025

Logical reasoning is essential for large language models (LLMs) to ensure accurate and coherent inference. However, LLMs struggle with reasoning order variations and fail to generalize across logically equivalent transformations. LLMs often rely on fixed sequential patterns rather than true logical

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Order Matters: Investigate the Position Bias in Multi-constraint Instruction Following

ACL 2025finding

Real-world instructions with multiple constraints pose a significant challenge to existing large language models (LLMs). An observation is that the LLMs exhibit dramatic performance fluctuation when disturbing the order of the incorporated constraints. Yet, none of the existing works has systematica…

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

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

Step-by-Step Mastery: Enhancing Soft Constraint Following Ability of Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

It is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions that involve multiple constraints. In real-world scenarios, user instructions often contain soft constraints, which are semantically related and cannot be rule-based verified, posing challenges for LLMs. To enhance the soft constr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Think Thrice Before You Act: Progressive Thought Refinement in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on supervision signals to evaluate previous responses, making it…

2024

A Novel Cascade Instruction Tuning Method for Biomedical NER

ICASSP 2024accepted

Large language models(LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various tasks. However, LLMs suffer from severe limitations in domain generalisation, primarily due to inherent limitations. Closed-source LLMs face constraints in fine-tuning, while open-source LLMs contend with the scarcity of dom…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
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

AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Web scraping is a powerful technique that extracts data from websites, enabling automated data collection, enhancing data analysis capabilities, and minimizing manual data entry efforts. Existing methods, wrappers-based methods suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new w…

2024

CR-LLM: A Dataset and Optimization for Concept Reasoning of Large Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Concept reasoning is an important capability for models to understand the world. However, the existing datasets, such as concept extraction and concept generation, suffer from modeledge leakage and context leakage. To address these limitations, we construct a dataset of concept reasoning for large l…

2024

Can Large Language Models Understand Real-World Complex Instructions?

AAAI 2024technical

Large language models (LLMs) can understand human instructions, showing their potential for pragmatic applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. However, they still struggle with complex instructions, which can be either complex task descriptions that require multiple tasks and constraints, or compl…

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

Do Large Language Models have Problem-Solving Capability under Incomplete Information Scenarios?

ACL 2024findings

The evaluation of the problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important, encompassing capabilities such as questioning, knowledge search, error detection, and path planning. Current research mainly focus on LLMs’ problem-solvi…

2024

From Complex to Simple: Enhancing Multi-Constraint Complex Instruction Following Ability of Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024finding

It is imperative for Large language models (LLMs) to follow instructions with elaborate requirements (i.e. Complex Instructions Following). Yet, it remains under-explored how to enhance the ability of LLMs to follow complex instructions with multiple constraints. To bridge the gap, we initially stud…

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

Is There a One-Model-Fits-All Approach to Information Extraction? Revisiting Task Definition Biases

EMNLP 2024finding

Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. However, definition bias in information extraction appears not only across datasets from different domains but also within datasets sharing the same domain. We identify two types of definition bias in IE: bias among information extrac…

2024

Light Up the Shadows: Enhance Long-Tailed Entity Grounding with Concept-Guided Vision-Language Models

ACL 2024findings

Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) have proven valuable for various downstream tasks. However, scaling them up is challenging because building large-scale MMKGs often introduces mismatched images (i.e., noise). Most entities in KGs belong to the long tail, meaning there are few images of them avai…

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

SEGMENT+: Long Text Processing with Short-Context Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

There is a growing interest in expanding the input capacity of language models (LMs) across various domains. However, simply increasing the context window does not guarantee robust performance across diverse long-input processing tasks, such as understanding extensive documents and extracting detail…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
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…

2023

Adaptive Ordered Information Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning

ACL 2023findings

Information extraction (IE) has been studied extensively. The existing methods always follow a fixed extraction order for complex IE tasks with multiple elements to be extracted in one instance such as event extraction. However, we conduct experiments on several complex IE datasets and observe that…

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

End-to-End Entity Linking with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

AAAI 2023technical

Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking the text segments to the referring entities in the knowledge graph, typically decomposed into mention detection, and entity disambiguation. Compared to traditional methods treating the two tasks separately, recent end-to-end entity linking methods exploit t…

2023

GANTEE: Generative Adversarial Network for Taxonomy Enterance Evaluation

AAAI 2023technical

Taxonomy is formulated as directed acyclic graphs or trees of concepts that support many downstream tasks. Many new coming concepts need to be added to an existing taxonomy. The traditional taxonomy expansion task aims only at finding the best position for new coming concepts in the existing taxonom…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

HAUSER: Towards Holistic and Automatic Evaluation of Simile Generation

ACL 2023long

Similes play an imperative role in creative writing such as story and dialogue generation. Proper evaluation metrics are like a beacon guiding the research of simile generation (SG). However, it remains under-explored as to what criteria should be considered, how to quantify each criterion into metr…

2023

MAPS-KB: A Million-Scale Probabilistic Simile Knowledge Base

AAAI 2023technical

The ability to understand and generate similes is an imperative step to realize human-level AI. However, there is still a considerable gap between machine intelligence and human cognition in similes, since deep models based on statistical distribution tend to favour high-frequency similes. Hence, a…

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…

2021

Learning Term Embeddings for Lexical Taxonomies

AAAI 2021technical

Lexical taxonomies, a special kind of knowledge graph, are essential for natural language understanding. This paper studies the problem of lexical taxonomy embedding. Most existing graph embedding methods are difficult to apply to lexical taxonomies since 1) they ignore implicit but important inform…

2021

Revisiting the Negative Data of Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction

ACL 2021long

Distantly supervision automatically generates plenty of training samples for relation extraction. However, it also incurs two major problems: noisy labels and imbalanced training data. Previous works focus more on reducing wrongly labeled relations (false positives) while few explore the missing rel…