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Yafu Li

30 accepted papers

2026

Characterizing, Evaluating, and Optimizing Complex Reasoning

ICML 2026oral

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) increasingly rely on reasoning traces with complex internal structures. However, existing work lacks a unified answer to three fundamental questions: (1) what defines high-quality reasoning, (2) how to reliably evaluate long, implicitly structured reasoning traces, and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Conditional Advantage Estimation for Reinforcement Learning in Large Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable progress in enhancing LLMs’ reasoning capabilities on tasks with clear correctness criteria, such as mathematical reasoning tasks. Several training metrics, such as entropy or response leng…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DiffThinker: Towards Generative Multimodal Reasoning with Diffusion Models

ICML 2026poster

While recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have attained significant strides in multimodal reasoning, their reasoning processes remain predominantly text-centric and fail to visualize and track intermediate visual states during the reasoning process, leading to suboptimal performance in c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Diversity-Incentivized Exploration for Versatile Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a crucial paradigm for incentivizing reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). Due to vast state-action spaces and reward sparsity in reasoning tasks, existing methods often struggle with deficient exploration and poo…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

ExGRPO: Learning to Reason from Prior Successes

ICLR 2026poster

Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) is an emerging paradigm for improving the reasoning ability of large language models. However, standard on-policy training discards rollout experiences after a single update, leading to computational inefficiency and instability. While prior work…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

FrameThinker: Learning to Think with Long Videos via Multi-Turn Frame Spotlighting

ICLR 2026poster

While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have achieved substantial progress in video understanding, their application to long video reasoning is hindered by uniform frame sampling and static textual reasoning, which are inefficient and struggle to handle visually intensive video tasks. To overcom…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

From Conflict to Consensus: Boosting Medical Reasoning via Multi-Round Agentic RAG

ICML 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit high reasoning capacity in medical question-answering, but their tendency to produce hallucinations and outdated knowledge poses critical risks in healthcare fields. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates these issues, existing methods rely on noisy…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Reasoning over Boundaries: Enhancing Specification Alignment via Test-time Deliberation

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in diverse real-world applications, each governed by bespoke behavioral and safety specifications (spec) custom-tailored by users or organizations. These specifications, categorized into safety-spec and behavioral-spec, vary across scenarios and …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Revisual-R1: Advancing Multimodal Reasoning From Optimized Cold Start to Staged Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Inspired by the remarkable reasoning capabilities of Deepseek-R1 in complex textual tasks, many works attempt to incentivize similar capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by directly applying reinforcement learning (RL). However, they still struggle to activate complex reasoning.…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Spotlight on Token Perception for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026poster

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), most existing methods in multimodal reasoning neglect the critical role of visual perception within the RLVR optimization process. In this paper, we undertake…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

VideoSSR: Video Self-Supervised Reinforcement Learning

CVPR 2026

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has substantially advanced the video understanding capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, the rapid progress of MLLMs is outpacing the complexity of existing video datasets, while the manual annotation of new, high-qual

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Keys to Robust Edits: From Theoretical Insights to Practical Advances

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with maintaining accurate knowledge due to conflicting/outdated parametric memories. While locate-and-edit methods address this, their reliance on models’ internal representations leads to robustness failures in long-context reasoning and paraphrased queries. We…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Learning to Reason under Off-Policy Guidance

NeurIPS 2025poster

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) demonstrate that sophisticated behaviors such as multi-step reasoning and self-reflection can emerge via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards~(RLVR). However, existing RLVR approaches are inherently ``on-policy'', limiting learning to a mod…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Lost in Literalism: How Supervised Training Shapes Translationese in LLMs

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in machine translation, demonstrating impressive performance across diverse languages. However, translationese—characterized by overly literal and unnatural translations—remains a persistent challenge in LLM-based translation systems. Des…

2025

Test-Time Preference Optimization: On-the-Fly Alignment via Iterative Textual Feedback

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have presented impressive performance but often lack the flexibility to adapt to human preferences quickly without retraining. Inspired by the recent efforts on test-time scaling, we make the first attempt to propose Test-time Preference Optimization (TPO), a framework t…

2025

Unveiling Attractor Cycles in Large Language Models: A Dynamical Systems View of Successive Paraphrasing

ACL 2025long

Dynamical systems theory provides a framework for analyzing iterative processes and evolution over time. Within such systems, repetitive transformations can lead to stable configurations, known as attractors, including fixed points and limit cycles. Applying this perspective to large language models…

2024

LexMatcher: Dictionary-centric Data Curation for LLM-based Machine Translation

EMNLP 2024finding

The fine-tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) for machine translation has recently received considerable attention, marking a shift towards data-centric research from traditional neural machine translation. However, the area of data collection for instruction fine-tuning in machine tra…

2024

MAGE: Machine-generated Text Detection in the Wild

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved human-level text generation, emphasizing the need for effective deepfake text detection to mitigate risks like the spread of fake news and plagiarism. Existing research has been constrained by evaluating detection methods o specific domains or particular la…

2024

Spotting AI’s Touch: Identifying LLM-Paraphrased Spans in Text

ACL 2024findings

AI-generated text detection has attracted increasing attention as powerful language models approach human-level generation. Limited work is devoted to detecting (partially) AI-paraphrased texts. However, AI paraphrasing is commonly employed in various application scenarios for text refinement and di…

2024

Understanding In-Context Learning from Repetitions

ICLR 2024poster

This paper explores the elusive mechanism underpinning in-context learning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our work provides a novel perspective by examining in-context learning via the lens of surface repetitions. We quantitatively investigate the role of surface features in text generation, and e…

2024

What Have We Achieved on Non-autoregressive Translation?

ACL 2024findings

Recent advances have made non-autoregressive (NAT) translation comparable to autoregressive methods (AT). However, their evaluation using BLEU has been shown to weakly correlate with human annotations. Limited research compares non-autoregressive translation and autoregressive translation comprehens…

2023

Consistency Regularization Training for Compositional Generalization

ACL 2023long

Existing neural models have difficulty generalizing to unseen combinations of seen components. To achieve compositional generalization, models are required to consistently interpret (sub)expressions across contexts. Without modifying model architectures, we improve the capability of Transformer on c…

2023

Explicit Syntactic Guidance for Neural Text Generation

ACL 2023long

Most existing text generation models follow the sequence-to-sequence paradigm. Generative Grammar suggests that humans generate natural language texts by learning language grammar. We propose a syntax-guided generation schema, which generates the sequence guided by a constituency parse tree in a top…

2023

GLUE-X: Evaluating Natural Language Understanding Models from an Out-of-Distribution Generalization Perspective

ACL 2023findings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are known to improve the generalization performance of natural language understanding models by leveraging large amounts of data during the pre-training phase. However, the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization problem remains a challenge in many NLP tasks, limi…

2023

Revisiting Cross-Lingual Summarization: A Corpus-based Study and A New Benchmark with Improved Annotation

ACL 2023long

Most existing cross-lingual summarization (CLS) work constructs CLS corpora by simply and directly translating pre-annotated summaries from one language to another, which can contain errors from both summarization and translation processes. To address this issue, we propose ConvSumX, a cross-lingual…

2022

Categorizing Semantic Representations for Neural Machine Translation

COLING 2022main

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks. However, they have recently been shown to suffer limitation in compositional generalization, failing to effectively learn the translation of atoms (e.g., words) and their semantic composition…

2022

Multi-Granularity Optimization for Non-Autoregressive Translation

EMNLP 2022main

Despite low latency, non-autoregressive machine translation (NAT) suffers severe performance deterioration due to the naive independence assumption. This assumption is further strengthened by cross-entropy loss, which encourages a strict match between the hypothesis and the reference token by token.…

2021

On Compositional Generalization of Neural Machine Translation

ACL 2021long

Modern neural machine translation (NMT) models have achieved competitive performance in standard benchmarks such as WMT. However, there still exist significant issues such as robustness, domain generalization, etc. In this paper, we study NMT models from the perspective of compositional generalizati…