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Yixin Cao

67 accepted papers

2026

Beyond Literal Translation: Evaluating Cultural Effectiveness in Social Media UGC

ICML 2026poster

Social media platforms enable large-scale cross-lingual communication, yet translating user-generated content (UGC) remains challenging due to its informal style, culture-laden expressions, and interaction-driven nuances. While recent LLMs have advanced translation quality, existing benchmarks and m…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

DLEBench: Evaluating Small-scale Object Editing Ability for Instruction-based Image Editing Model

ICML 2026poster

Significant progress has been made in the field of Instruction-based Image Editing Models (IIEMs). However, while these models demonstrate plausible adherence to instructions and strong reasoning ability on current benchmarks, their ability to edit small objects remains underexplored, despite its im…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive generalization ability by learning from extensive unlabeled text. However, they still exhibit reasoning mistakes, which can affect their trustworthiness and reliability. Although users can interact with LLMs and provide diverse and comprehens…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Do LLMs Signal When They’re Right? Evidence from Neuron Agreement

ICML 2026spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) commonly boost reasoning via sample-evaluate-ensemble decoders (e.g., majority voting), achieving label free gains without ground truth. However, prevailing strategies score candidates using only external outputs such as token probabilities, entropies, or self evaluation…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FRABench and UFEval: Unified Fine-grained Evaluation with Task and Aspect Generalization

ICLR 2026oral

Evaluating open-ended outputs of Multimodal Large Language Models has become a bottleneck as model capabilities, task diversity, and modality rapidly expand. Existing ``MLLM-as-a-Judge'' evaluators, though promising, remain constrained to specific tasks and aspects (i.e., specific evaluation criteri…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

GAM-RAG: Gain-Adaptive Memory for Evolving Retrieval in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

ICML 2026poster

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models with external evidence, but many implementations rely on pre-built indices that remain static after construction. Related queries therefore repeat similar multi-hop traversal, increasing latency and compute. Motivated by \emph{schema…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Smarter Not Harder: Generative Process Evaluation with Intrinsic-Signal Driving and Ability‑Adaptive Reward Shaping

ICLR 2026poster

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have shown strong performance in complex mathematical reasoning when optimized via reinforcement learning (RL). However, conventional outcome-only reward provides sparse feedback, leading to inefficient optimization. In this work, we investigate whether generative proce…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Teach2Eval: An Interaction-Driven LLMs Evaluation Method via Teaching Effectiveness

ICLR 2026poster

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has outpaced the development of effective evaluation methods. Evaluating LLMs with static, task-specific benchmarks is increasingly fragile due to contamination and saturation, and it fails to capture interactive reasoning. We introduce Teach2Eval, whi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Are LLMs Rational Investors? A Study on the Financial Bias in LLMs

ACL 2025finding

Large language models (LLMs) excel in natural language generation but also exhibit biases, particularly in gender, race, and religion, which can be amplified with widespread use. However, research on biases in specific domains, such as finance, remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a co…

2025

Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution

ACL 2025finding

The release of OpenAI’s O1 and subsequent projects like DeepSeek R1 has significantly advanced research on complex reasoning in LLMs. This paper systematically analyzes existing reasoning studies from the perspective of self-evolution, structured into three components: data evolution, model evolutio…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Com2 : A Causal-Guided Benchmark for Exploring Complex Commonsense Reasoning in Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Large language models (LLMs) have mastered abundant simple and explicit commonsense knowledge through pre-training, enabling them to achieve human-like performance in simple commonsense reasoning. Nevertheless, LLMs struggle to reason with complex and implicit commonsense knowledge that is derived f…

2025

Disentangling Language and Culture for Evaluating Multilingual Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

This paper introduces a Dual Evaluation Framework to comprehensively assess the multilingual capabilities of LLMs. By decomposing the evaluation along the dimensions of linguistic medium and cultural context, this framework enables a nuanced analysis of LLMs’ ability to process questions within both…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

ForgerySleuth: Empowering Multimodal Large Language Models for Image Manipulation Detection

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multimodal large language models have unlocked new possibilities for various multimodal tasks. However, their potential in image manipulation detection remains unexplored. When directly applied to the IMD task, M-LLMs often produce reasoning texts that suffer from hallucinations and overthinking. To…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Grounded-VideoLLM: Sharpening Fine-grained Temporal Grounding in Video Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Despite their impressive performance in coarse-grained video understanding, Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) still face challenges in fine-grained temporal grounding, including ineffective temporal modeling and inadequate timestamp representations. In this work, we introduce Grounded-VideoLL

2025

Learning 3D Anisotropic Noise Distributions Improves Molecular Force Fields

NeurIPS 2025poster

Coordinate denoising has emerged as a promising method for 3D molecular pretraining due to its theoretical connection to learning molecular force field. However, existing denoising methods rely on oversimplied molecular dynamics that assume atomic motions to be isotropic and homoscedastic. To addres…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

LogicPro: Improving Complex Logical Reasoning via Program-Guided Learning

ACL 2025long

In this paper, we propose a new data synthesis method called LogicPro, which leverages LeetCode-style algorithm Problems and their corresponding Program solutions to synthesize Complex Logical Reasoning data in text format. First, we synthesize complex reasoning problems through source algorithm pro…

2025

Precise Localization of Memories: A Fine-grained Neuron-level Knowledge Editing Technique for LLMs

ICLR 2025poster

Knowledge editing aims to update outdated information in Large Language Models (LLMs). A representative line of study is locate-then-edit methods, which typically employ causal tracing to identify the modules responsible for recalling factual knowledge about entities. However, we find these methods…

2025

RM-Bench: Benchmarking Reward Models of Language Models with Subtlety and Style

ICLR 2025oral

Reward models are critical in techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Inference Scaling Laws, where they guide language model alignment and select optimal responses. Despite their importance, existing reward model benchmarks often evaluate models by asking them to dist…

2025

S^3cMath: Spontaneous Step-Level Self-Correction Makes Large Language Models Better Mathematical Reasoners

AAAI 2025technical

Self-correction is a novel method that can stimulate the potential reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It involves detecting and correcting errors during the inference process when LLMs solve reasoning problems. However, recent works do not regard self-correction as a spontaneous an…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2025

Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialogues

AAAI 2025technical

Recent advancements in proactive dialogues have garnered significant attention, particularly for more complex objectives (e.g. emotion support and persuasion). Unlike traditional task-oriented dialogues, proactive dialogues demand advanced policy planning and adaptability, requiring rich scenarios a…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Towards Storage-Efficient Visual Document Retrieval: An Empirical Study on Reducing Patch-Level Embeddings

ACL 2025finding

Despite the strong performance of ColPali/ColQwen2 in Visualized Document Retrieval (VDR), its patch-level embedding approach leads to excessive memory usage. This empirical study investigates methods to reduce patch embeddings per page while minimizing performance degradation. We evaluate two token…

2025

XFinBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Complex Financial Problem Solving and Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Solving financial problems demands complex reasoning, multimodal data processing, and a broad technical understanding, presenting unique challenges for current large language models (LLMs). We introduce **XFinBench**, a novel benchmark with 4,235 examples designed to evaluate LLM’s ability in solvin…

2024

A + B: A General Generator-Reader Framework for Optimizing LLMs to Unleash Synergy Potential

ACL 2024findings

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to supplement necessary knowledge to large language models (LLMs). Targeting its bottleneck of retriever performance, “generate-then-read” pipeline is proposed to replace the retrieval stage with generation from the LLM itself. Although p…

2024

Analyzing Temporal Complex Events with Large Language Models? A Benchmark towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding

ACL 2024long

The digital landscape is rapidly evolving with an ever-increasing volume of online news, emphasizing the need for swift and precise analysis of complex events.We refer to the complex events composed of many news articles over an extended period as Temporal Complex Event (TCE). This paper proposes a…

2024

Automating Dataset Updates Towards Reliable and Timely Evaluation of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across various natural language benchmarks, prompting a continual need to curate more difficult datasets for larger LLMs, which is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose to automate dataset updating and provide systemati…

2024

Combinatorial Approximations for Cluster Deletion: Simpler, Faster, and Better

ICML 2024poster

Cluster deletion is an NP-hard graph clustering objective with applications in computational biology and social network analysis, where the goal is to delete a minimum number of edges to partition a graph into cliques. We first provide a tighter analysis of two previous approximation algorithms, imp…

2024

Complex Logical Query Answering by Calibrating Knowledge Graph Completion Models

ACL 2024findings

Complex logical query answering (CLQA) is a challenging task that involves finding answer entities for complex logical queries over incomplete knowledge graphs (KGs). Previous research has explored the use of pre-trained knowledge graph completion (KGC) models, which can predict the missing facts in…

2024

Finding and Editing Multi-Modal Neurons in Pre-Trained Transformers

ACL 2024findings

Understanding the internal mechanisms by which multi-modal large language models (LLMs) interpret different modalities and integrate cross-modal representations is becoming increasingly critical for continuous improvements in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel method to id…

2024

Improving Large Language Models in Event Relation Logical Prediction

ACL 2024long

Event relations are crucial for narrative understanding and reasoning. Governed by nuanced logic, event relation extraction (ERE) is a challenging task that demands thorough semantic understanding and rigorous logical reasoning. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation to systematically e…

2024

Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs’ Behavior Style to Conflicting Prompts

ACL 2024long

This study investigates the behaviors of Large Language Models (LLMs) when faced with conflicting prompts versus their internal memory. This will not only help to understand LLMs’ decision mechanism but also benefit real-world applications, such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG).Drawing on cog…

2024

LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing

EMNLP 2024main

Claim: This work is not advocating the use of LLMs for paper (meta-)reviewing. Instead, wepresent a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities. Two research goals: i) Enable better recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing act…

2024

LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement

EMNLP 2024finding

This paper introduces the innovative “LLMs-as-Instructors” framework, which leverages the advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously enhance the training of smaller target models. Inspired by the theory of “Learning from Errors”, this framework employs an instructor LLM to meticulously an…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

MMLONGBENCH-DOC: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2024

Meaningful Learning: Enhancing Abstract Reasoning in Large Language Models via Generic Fact Guidance

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have developed impressive performance and strong explainability across various reasoning scenarios, marking a significant stride towards mimicking human-like intelligence. Despite this, when tasked with several simple questions supported by a generic fact, LLMs often str…

2024

Navigating the Nuances: A Fine-grained Evaluation of Vision-Language Navigation

EMNLP 2024finding

This study presents a novel evaluation framework for the Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) task. It aims to diagnose current models for various instruction categories at a finer-grained level. The framework is structured around the context-free grammar (CFG) of the task. The CFG serves as the basis f…

2024

Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planning

ACL 2024long

In proactive dialogue, the challenge lies not just in generating responses but in steering conversations toward predetermined goals, a task where Large Language Models (LLMs) typically struggle due to their reactive nature. Traditional approaches to enhance dialogue planning in LLMs, ranging from el…

2024

QRMeM: Unleash the Length Limitation through Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism

EMNLP 2024finding

While LLMs have made notable advancements in natural language processing, they continue to struggle with processing extensive text. Memory mechanisms offer a flexible solution for managing long contexts, utilizing techniques such as compression, summarization, and structuring to facilitate nuanced a…

2024

Quantifying and Mitigating Unimodal Biases in Multimodal Large Language Models: A Causal Perspective

EMNLP 2024finding

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have facilitated the development of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs). Despite their impressive capabilities, MLLMs often suffer from over-reliance on unimodal biases (e.g., language bias and vision bias), leading to incorrect answers in complex multimodal t…

2024

Recognizing Everything from All Modalities at Once: Grounded Multimodal Universal Information Extraction

ACL 2024findings

In the field of information extraction (IE), tasks across a wide range of modalities and their combinations have been traditionally studied in isolation, leaving a gap in deeply recognizing and analyzing cross-modal information. To address this, this work for the first time introduces the concept of…

2024

SciAgent: Tool-augmented Language Models for Scientific Reasoning

EMNLP 2024main

Scientific reasoning poses an excessive challenge for even the most advanced Large Language Models (LLMs). To make this task more practical and solvable for LLMs, we introduce a new task setting named tool-augmented scientific reasoning. This setting supplements LLMs with scalable toolsets, and shif…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Verifiable Generation: A Benchmark for Knowledge-aware Language Model Attribution

ACL 2024findings

Although achieving great success, Large Language Models (LLMs) usually suffer from unreliable hallucinations. Although language attribution can be a potential solution, there are no suitable benchmarks and evaluation metrics to attribute LLMs to structured knowledge. In this paper, we define a new t…

2024

X-Eval: Generalizable Multi-aspect Text Evaluation via Augmented Instruction Tuning with Auxiliary Evaluation Aspects

NAACL 2024long

Natural Language Generation (NLG) typically involves evaluating the generated text in various aspects (e.g., consistency and naturalness) to obtain a comprehensive assessment. However, multi-aspect evaluation remains challenging as it may require the evaluator to generalize to any given evaluation a…

2023

A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models on Legal Judgment Prediction

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential for domain-specific applications, such as the law domain. However, recent disputes over GPT-4's law evaluation raise questions concerning their performance in real-world legal tasks. To systematically investigate their competency in the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Benchmarking Foundation Models with Language-Model-as-an-Examiner

NeurIPS 2023poster

Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model's ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans. Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets,…

Cited by 141SourcePDFScholar
2023

CHEER: Centrality-aware High-order Event Reasoning Network for Document-level Event Causality Identification

ACL 2023long

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to recognize causal relations between events within a document. Recent studies focus on building a document-level graph for cross-sentence reasoning, but ignore important causal structures — there are one or two “central” events that prevail…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

CoVariance-based Causal Debiasing for Entity and Relation Extraction

EMNLP 2023long findings

Joint entity and relation extraction tasks aim to recognize named entities and extract relations simultaneously. Suffering from a variety of data biases, such as data selection bias, and distribution bias (out of distribution, long-tail distribution), serious concerns can be witnessed to threaten th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Discriminative Reasoning with Sparse Event Representation for Document-level Event-Event Relation Extraction

ACL 2023long

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to extract causal relations between events in a document. It challenges conventional sentence-level task (SECI) with difficult long-text understanding. In this paper, we propose a novel DECI model (SENDIR) for better document-level reasoning.…

2023

Examining Inter-Consistency of Large Language Models Collaboration: An In-depth Analysis via Debate

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various applications, but they still face various inconsistency issues. Existing works primarily focus on the inconsistency issues within a single LLM, while we complementarily explore the inter-consistency among multiple LLMs for co…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Information Screening whilst Exploiting! Multimodal Relation Extraction with Feature Denoising and Multimodal Topic Modeling

ACL 2023long

Existing research on multimodal relation extraction (MRE) faces two co-existing challenges, internal-information over-utilization and external-information under-exploitation. To combat that, we propose a novel framework that simultaneously implements the idea of internal-information screening and ex…

2023

Large Language Model Is Not a Good Few-shot Information Extractor, but a Good Reranker for Hard Samples!

EMNLP 2023long findings

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks. Whether LLMs are competitive few-shot solvers for information extraction (IE) tasks, however, remains an open problem. In this work, we aim to provide a thorough answer to this question. Through extensive experiments on nine…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

MolCA: Molecular Graph-Language Modeling with Cross-Modal Projector and Uni-Modal Adapter

EMNLP 2023long main

Language Models (LMs) have demonstrated impressive molecule understanding ability on various 1D text-related tasks. However, they inherently lack 2D graph perception — a critical ability of human professionals in comprehending molecules' topological structures. To bridge this gap, we propose MolCA:…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Robust Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts

EMNLP 2023long main

Large Language Model (LLM) has demonstrated significant ability in various Natural Language Processing tasks. However, their effectiveness is highly dependent on the phrasing of the task prompt, leading to research on automatic prompt optimization using labeled task data. We reveal that these prompt…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Take a Break in the Middle: Investigating Subgoals towards Hierarchical Script Generation

ACL 2023findings

Goal-oriented Script Generation is a new task of generating a list of steps that can fulfill the given goal. In this paper, we propose to extend the task from the perspective of cognitive theory. Instead of a simple flat structure, the steps are typically organized hierarchically — Human often decom…

2022

Debiasing NLU Models via Causal Intervention and Counterfactual Reasoning

AAAI 2022technical

Recent studies have shown that strong Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models are prone to relying on annotation biases of the datasets as a shortcut, which goes against the underlying mechanisms of the task of interest. To reduce such biases, several recent works introduce debiasing methods to…

2022

Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Knowledge Graph Completion? A Reliable Evaluation and a Reasonable Approach

ACL 2022findings

In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been shown to capture factual knowledge from massive texts, which encourages the proposal of PLM-based knowledge graph completion (KGC) models. However, these models are still quite behind the SOTA KGC models in terms of performance. In this w…

2022

DocEE: A Large-Scale and Fine-grained Benchmark for Document-level Event Extraction

NAACL 2022long

Event extraction aims to identify an event and then extract the arguments participating in the event. Despite the great success in sentence-level event extraction, events are more naturally presented in the form of documents, with event arguments scattered in multiple sentences. However, a major bar…

2022

ERGO: Event Relational Graph Transformer for Document-level Event Causality Identification

COLING 2022main

Document-level Event Causality Identification (DECI) aims to identify event-event causal relations in a document. Existing works usually build an event graph for global reasoning across multiple sentences. However, the edges between events have to be carefully designed through heuristic rules or ext…

2022

Prompt for Extraction? PAIE: Prompting Argument Interaction for Event Argument Extraction

ACL 2022long

In this paper, we propose an effective yet efficient model PAIE for both sentence-level and document-level Event Argument Extraction (EAE), which also generalizes well when there is a lack of training data. On the one hand, PAIE utilizes prompt tuning for extractive objectives to take the best advan…

2022

R2F: A General Retrieval, Reading and Fusion Framework for Document-level Natural Language Inference

EMNLP 2022main

Document-level natural language inference (DOCNLI) is a new challenging task in natural language processing, aiming at judging the entailment relationship between a pair of hypothesis and premise documents. Current datasets and baselines largely follow sentence-level settings, but fail to address th…

2021

Are Missing Links Predictable? An Inferential Benchmark for Knowledge Graph Completion

ACL 2021long

We present InferWiki, a Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) dataset that improves upon existing benchmarks in inferential ability, assumptions, and patterns. First, each testing sample is predictable with supportive data in the training set. To ensure it, we propose to utilize rule-guided train/test ge…

2021

How Knowledge Graph and Attention Help? A Qualitative Analysis into Bag-level Relation Extraction

ACL 2021long

Knowledge Graph (KG) and attention mechanism have been demonstrated effective in introducing and selecting useful information for weakly supervised methods. However, only qualitative analysis and ablation study are provided as evidence. In this paper, we contribute a dataset and propose a paradigm t…

2021

Is Multi-Hop Reasoning Really Explainable? Towards Benchmarking Reasoning Interpretability

EMNLP 2021main

Multi-hop reasoning has been widely studied in recent years to obtain more interpretable link prediction. However, we find in experiments that many paths given by these models are actually unreasonable, while little work has been done on interpretability evaluation for them. In this paper, we propos…

2021

Learning from Miscellaneous Other-Class Words for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition

ACL 2021long

Few-shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) exploits only a handful of annotations to iden- tify and classify named entity mentions. Pro- totypical network shows superior performance on few-shot NER. However, existing prototyp- ical methods fail to differentiate rich seman- tics in other-class words, wh…