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Yutao Zhu

34 accepted papers

2026

Agentic Reinforced Policy Optimization

ICLR 2026poster

Large-scale reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in harnessing the potential of large language models (LLMs) for single-turn reasoning tasks. In realistic reasoning scenarios, LLMs often rely on external tools to assist in task-solving processes. However, curren…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DeepImageSearch: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Context-Aware Image Retrieval in Visual Histories

ICML 2026poster

Existing multimodal retrieval systems excel at semantic matching but implicitly assume that query-image relevance can be measured in isolation. This paradigm overlooks the rich dependencies inherent in realistic visual streams, where information is distributed across temporal sequences rather than c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Evaluating the Factuality of Large Language Models Using Multiple Plug-and-Play Fact Sources

AAAI 2026technical

Large language models (LLMs) often produce factually inaccurate content, or hallucinations, which undermines their reliability. Existing factuality evaluation systems usually rely on a single predefined fact source, making them task-specific and hard to extend. We present UFO, a unified framework fo

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Hide and Seek with LLMs: An Adversarial Game for Sneaky Error Generation and Self-Improving Diagnosis

AAAI 2026technical

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents

EMNLP 2025

Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR).However, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency b

2025

Descriptive and Discriminative Document Identifiers for Generative Retrieval

AAAI 2025technical

Generative document retrieval is a novel retrieval framework, which represents documents as identifiers (DocID) and retrieves documents by generating DocIDs. It has the advantage of end-to-end optimization over traditional retrieval methods and has attracted much research interest. Nonetheless, the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Enhancing LLM Text Detection with Retrieved Contexts and Logits Distribution Consistency

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) can generate fluent text, raising concerns about misuse in online comments and academic writing, leading to issues like corpus pollution and copyright infringement. Existing LLM text detection methods often rely on features from the logit distribution of the input text.

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

FlatFusion: Delving Into Details of Sparse Transformer-Based Camera-LiDAR Fusion for Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2025

The integration of data from various sensor modalities (e.g. camera and LiDAR) constitutes a prevalent methodology within the ambit of autonomous driving scenarios. Recent advancements in efficient point cloud transformers have underscored the efficacy of integrating information in sparse formats. W

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2025

Hierarchical Document Refinement for Long-context Retrieval-augmented Generation

ACL 2025long

Real-world RAG applications often encounter long-context input scenarios, where redundant information and noise results in higher inference costs and reduced performance. To address these challenges, we propose LongRefiner, an efficient plug-and-play refiner that leverages the inherent structural ch…

2025

LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs

ACL 2025long

Personalization plays a critical role in numerous language tasks and applications, since users with the same requirements may prefer diverse outputs based on their interests. This has led to the development of various personalized approaches aimed at adapting large language models (LLMs) to generate…

2025

Little Giants: Synthesizing High-Quality Embedding Data at Scale

NAACL 2025long

Synthetic data generation has become an increasingly popular way of training models without the need for large, manually labeled datasets. For tasks like text embedding, synthetic data offers diverse and scalable training examples, significantly reducing the cost of human annotation. However, most c…

2025

One Token Can Help! Learning Scalable and Pluggable Virtual Tokens for Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

AAAI 2025technical

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a promising way to improve large language models (LLMs) for generating more factual, accurate, and up-to-date content. Existing methods either optimize prompts to guide LLMs in leveraging retrieved information or directly fine-tune LLMs to adapt to RAG scenari…

2025

Progressive Multimodal Reasoning via Active Retrieval

ACL 2025long

Multi-step multimodal reasoning tasks pose significant challenges for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), and finding effective ways to enhance their performance in such scenarios remains an unresolved issue. In this paper, we propose AR-MCTS, a universal framework designed to progressively im…

2025

RAG-Critic: Leveraging Automated Critic-Guided Agentic Workflow for Retrieval Augmented Generation

ACL 2025long

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technology in natural language processing, owing to its efficacy in generating factual content. However, its informative inputs and complex paradigms often lead to a greater variety of errors. Consequently, achieving automated on-policy a…

2025

RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

COLING 2025main

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) effectively addresses issues of static knowledge and hallucination in large language models. Existing studies mostly focus on question scenarios with clear user intents and concise answers. However, it is prevalent that users issue broad, open-ended queries with…

2025

Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Models

EMNLP 2025

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have demonstrated impressive long stepwise reasoning capabilities through large-scale reinforcement learning. However, their extended reasoning processes often suffer from knowledge insufficiency, leading to frequent uncertainties and potential errors. To

2025

Single LLM, Multiple Roles: A Unified Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework Using Role-Specific Token Optimization

EMNLP 2025

Existing studies have optimized retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) across various sub-tasks, such as query understanding and retrieval refinement, but integrating these optimizations into a unified framework remains challenging. To tackle this problem, this work proposes RoleRAG, a unified RAG fra

2025

Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exciting performance in listwise passage ranking. Due to the limited input length, existing methods often adopt the sliding window strategy. Such a strategy, though effective, is inefficient as it involves repetitive and serialized processing, which usually re…

2025

Toward Verifiable Instruction-Following Alignment for Retrieval Augmented Generation

AAAI 2025technical

Following natural instructions is crucial for the effective application of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), research on assessing and improving instruction-following (IF) alignment within the RAG domain remains limited. To add…

2025

Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models

ACL 2025long

Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. In this paper, we comprehensively study its key designs to balance the new abilities while retaining the original abilities, and present an effective CPT method that can greatly imp…

2025

WebThinker: Empowering Large Reasoning Models with Deep Research Capability

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, demonstrate impressive long-horizon reasoning capabilities. However, their reliance on static internal knowledge limits their performance on complex, knowledge-intensive tasks and hinders their ability to produce comprehensive researc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model

ACL 2025long

Due to the immense resource demands and the involved complex techniques, it is still challenging for successfully pre-training a large language models (LLMs) with state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we explore the key bottlenecks and designs during pre-training, and make the following contr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

mmE5: Improving Multimodal Multilingual Embeddings via High-quality Synthetic Data

ACL 2025finding

Multimodal embedding models have gained significant attention for their ability to map data from different modalities, such as text and images, into a unified representation space. However, the limited labeled multimodal data often hinders embedding performance. Recent approaches have leveraged data…

2024

BIDER: Bridging Knowledge Inconsistency for Efficient Retrieval-Augmented LLMs via Key Supporting Evidence

ACL 2024findings

Retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated efficacy in knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain QA, addressing inherent challenges in knowledge update and factual inadequacy.However, inconsistencies between retrieval knowledge and the necessary knowledge for LLMs, leadin…

2024

INTERS: Unlocking the Power of Large Language Models in Search with Instruction Tuning

ACL 2024long

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in various natural language processing tasks. Despite this, their application to information retrieval (IR) tasks is still challenging due to the infrequent occurrence of many IR-specific concepts in natural language. While promp…

2024

Small Models, Big Insights: Leveraging Slim Proxy Models To Decide When and What to Retrieve for LLMs

ACL 2024long

The integration of large language models (LLMs) and search engines represents a significant evolution in knowledge acquisition methodologies. However, determining the knowledge that an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine remains an unresolved issue. Most…

2023

ConvGQR: Generative Query Reformulation for Conversational Search

ACL 2023long

In conversational search, the user’s real search intent for the current conversation turn is dependent on the previous conversation history. It is challenging to determine a good search query from the whole conversation context. To avoid the expensive re-training of the query encoder, most existing…

2023

Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning

ACL 2023findings

Syllogistic reasoning, a typical form of deductive reasoning, is a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering. To better facilitate research on syllogistic reasoning, we develop a benchmark called SylloBase that differs…

2023

Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue

EMNLP 2023long findings

Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Learning from the Wisdom of Crowds: Exploiting Similar Sessions for Session Search

AAAI 2023technical

Search engines are essential internet services, enabling users to efficiently find the information they need. Session search employs users’ session logs of queries to solve complex retrieval tasks, in which users search multiple times until interested documents are found. Most existing session searc…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding

COLING 2022main

Generalized text representations are the foundation of many natural language understanding tasks. To fully utilize the different corpus, it is inevitable that models need to understand the relevance among them. However, many methods ignore the relevance and adopt a single-channel model (a coarse par…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2022

Less is More: Learning to Refine Dialogue History for Personalized Dialogue Generation

NAACL 2022long

Personalized dialogue systems explore the problem of generating responses that are consistent with the user’s personality, which has raised much attention in recent years. Existing personalized dialogue systems have tried to extract user profiles from dialogue history to guide personalized response…

Cited by 69SourcePDFScholar
2022

MCP: Self-supervised Pre-training for Personalized Chatbots with Multi-level Contrastive Sampling

EMNLP 2022finding

Personalized chatbots focus on endowing the chatbots with a consistent personality to behave like real users and further act as personal assistants. Previous studies have explored generating implicit user profiles from the user’s dialogue history for building personalized chatbots. However, these st…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2021

Neural Sentence Ordering Based on Constraint Graphs

AAAI 2021technical

Sentence ordering aims at arranging a list of sentences in the correct order. Based on the observation that sentence order at different distances may rely on different types of information, we devise a new approach based on multi-granular orders between sentences. These orders form multiple constrai…