Evgeny Kharlamov
Author directory2026
AWM: Answerable Working Memory for Long-Document VQA Agents
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yule Liu | Zhen Yang | Rui Lu | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yule Liu | Zhen Yang | Rui Lu | Yuxiao Dong | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Long-document visual question answering increasingly relies on VLM agents that retrieve candidate pages, inspect page images, write findings to working memory, and synthesize answers. Working memory should carry answer-supporting evidence across page inspections for later grounded answering, yet existing evaluation mainly checks final-answer correctness and evidence-page access. This creates a memory-quality blind spot: an agent may reach the right page and answer correctly while leaving behind memory too generic or incomplete to support answering once page context is removed. We introduce memory-only answerability, a diagnostic that asks whether a reader can answer from the question and terminal working memory alone. Building on this diagnostic, Answerable Working Memory (AWM) treats terminal working memory as an answerable evidence artifact, and AWM-GRPO incorporates this signal into the GRPO reward while preserving final-answer priority. Under GRPO, this reward assigns higher advantages to answer-correct trajectories whose terminal working memory remains answerable. On MMLongBench-Doc, even when gold evidence pages are provided, 42.5% of correct answers still cannot be answered from terminal working memory alone. AWM-GRPO improves final-answer accuracy over the RAG baseline by 8.1 and 11.9 points on MMLongBench-Doc and LongDocURL and reduces the memory-missing-correct rate by 2.7 points over answer-only GRPO.
Conformalized Large Language Models under Configuration Shift
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jialin Yu | Lin Li | Gengyuan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Steffen Staab | Puneet K. Dokania | Philip Torr | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jialin Yu | Lin Li | Gengyuan Zhang | Zhen Yang | Steffen Staab | Puneet K. Dokania | Philip Torr | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Conformal prediction (CP) is a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification that has recently been adapted to large language models (LLMs), providing prediction sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees under exchangeability. Yet for LLMs, nonconformity scores are often induced by an inference pipeline, not just a fixed model, making them depend not only on the data distribution but also on configurable factors such as the prompt template, decoding parameters, and deployment setting. Since such configurations are routinely modified in practice but rarely treated as a source of shift, their impact on CP validity remains poorly understood. We call this configuration shift and study it systematically along three axes: prompt template, decoding temperature, and weight quantization. In a broad empirical study spanning 9 LLMs, 4 datasets, and 4 nonconformity scores, we find that configuration shift consistently erodes CP validity, often driving empirical coverage below the target. By contrast, efficiency is largely preserved: valid prediction sets remain close in size to the i.i.d. baseline. We derive coverage lower bounds that attribute this loss to a discrepancy between calibration and test score distributions, and use their finite-sample plug-in versions as empirical diagnostics of shift severity. We further show that these findings lead to practical mitigations: bound-inspired recalibration is effective with limited test examples, while fragility-aware calibration ensembling recovers much of the lost coverage without test data.
Logic Meets Language: Hybrid Query Answering over Incomplete Text-Labeled Graphs
Yunjie He | Bo Xiong | Daniel Hernández | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yi Wang | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yunjie He | Bo Xiong | Daniel Hernández | Yuqicheng Zhu | Yi Wang | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Text-labeled graph databases combine symbolic graph structures with rich textual descriptions, enabling expressive representations for real-world data. However, answering queries over such databases remains challenging when queries require both precise logical constraints and flexible semantic text interpretation, especially under information incompleteness. We introduce the task of hybrid query answering (hybrid QA) over incomplete text-labeled graph databases, which requires joint reasoning over both symbolic and textual knowledge under incompleteness. To investigate this problem, we formalize a query language that integrates logical constraints with free-form textual descriptions and construct two new benchmark datasets from biological and e-commerce domains. We propose HybridQE, a hybrid query embedding framework that aligns with our query language via embedding and combining the symbolic and textual constraints in a unified embedding space. Experiments on the proposed benchmarks show that existing methods struggle with this setting, while HybridQE provides consistent improvements across diverse hybrid query types, highlighting both the difficulty of HybridQA and the promise of hybrid query embeddings for reasoning under incompleteness.
What Breaks Knowledge Graph based RAG? Benchmarking and Empirical Insights into Reasoning under Incomplete Knowledge
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Xiaxia Wang | Hongkuan Zhou | Yuan He | Jiaoyan Chen | Steffen Staab | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yuqicheng Zhu | Xiaxia Wang | Hongkuan Zhou | Yuan He | Jiaoyan Chen | Steffen Staab | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) is an increasingly explored approach for combining the reasoning capabilities of large language models with the structured evidence of knowledge graphs. However, current evaluation practices fall short: existing benchmarks often include questions that can be directly answered using existing triples in KG, making it unclear whether models perform reasoning or simply retrieve answers directly. Moreover, inconsistent evaluation metrics and lenient answer matching criteria further obscure meaningful comparisons. In this work, we introduce a general method for constructing benchmarks and present BRINK (Benchmark for Reasoning under Incomplete Knowledge) to systematically assess KG-RAG methods under knowledge incompleteness. Our empirical results show that current KG-RAG methods have limited reasoning ability under missing knowledge, often rely on internal memorization, and exhibit varying degrees of generalization depending on their design.
SCAIR: Schema-Conditioned Agentic Iterative Reasoning for Enterprise Knowledge Graphs
Prateek Chaturvedi | Yuqicheng Zhu | Hongkuan Zhou | Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yunjie He | Steffen Staab | Fei Du | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Prateek Chaturvedi | Yuqicheng Zhu | Hongkuan Zhou | Dongzhuoran Zhou | Yunjie He | Steffen Staab | Fei Du | Jie Tang | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track)
Knowledge Graph–based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (KG-RAG) enables natural language interaction with structured enterprise knowledge, yet existing agentic approaches that perform well on public benchmarks often fail to generalize to real-world enterprise Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which are dense, schema-driven, and operationally constrained. To address these limitations, we propose SCAIR (Schema-Conditioned Agentic Iterative Reasoning), a training-free framework that integrates structured planning with controlled iterative reasoning by injecting schema-conditioned structural priors and enforcing schema-aware traversal during multi-hop reasoning. Experiments on an enterprise-oriented benchmark constructed from a real-world Configuration Management DataBase (CMDB) demonstrate that SCAIR substantially improves performance over existing KG-RAG methods. Crucially, our study highlights that reliable enterprise graph reasoning cannot rely on generic agentic designs; instead, it must explicitly incorporate the target domain’s structural and operational constraints into the reasoning process. We demonstrate that by aligning agent design with business logic, substantial performance gains can be achieved without the need for costly model retraining.
2025
Conformalized Answer Set Prediction for Knowledge Graph Embedding
Yuqicheng Zhu | Nico Potyka | Jiarong Pan | Bo Xiong | Yunjie He | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuqicheng Zhu | Nico Potyka | Jiarong Pan | Bo Xiong | Yunjie He | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Knowledge graph embeddings (KGE) apply machine learning methods on knowledge graphs (KGs) to provide non-classical reasoning capabilities based on similarities and analogies. The learned KG embeddings are typically used to answer queries by ranking all potential answers, but rankings often lack a meaningful probabilistic interpretation - lower-ranked answers do not necessarily have a lower probability of being true. This limitation makes it difficult to quantify uncertainty of model’s predictions, posing challenges for the application of KGE methods in high-stakes domains like medicine. We address this issue by applying the theory of conformal prediction that allows generating answer sets, which contain the correct answer with probabilistic guarantees. We explain how conformal prediction can be used to generate such answer sets for link prediction tasks. Our empirical evaluation on four benchmark datasets using six representative KGE methods validates that the generated answer sets satisfy the probabilistic guarantees given by the theory of conformal prediction. We also demonstrate that the generated answer sets often have a sensible size and that the size adapts well with respect to the difficulty of the query.
Predicate-Conditional Conformalized Answer Sets for Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Yuqicheng Zhu | Daniel Hernández | Yuan He | Zifeng Ding | Bo Xiong | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yuqicheng Zhu | Daniel Hernández | Yuan He | Zifeng Ding | Bo Xiong | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Uncertainty quantification in Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) methods is crucial for ensuring the reliability of downstream applications. A recent work applies conformal prediction to KGE methods, providing uncertainty estimates by generating a set of answers that is guaranteed to include the true answer with a predefined confidence level. However, existing methods provide probabilistic guarantees averaged over a reference set of queries and answers (marginal coverage guarantee). In high-stakes applications such as medical diagnosis, a stronger guarantee is often required: the predicted sets must provide consistent coverage per query (conditional coverage guarantee). We propose CondKGCP, a novel method that approximates predicate-conditional coverage guarantees while maintaining compact prediction sets. CondKGCP merges predicates with similar vector representations and augments calibration with rank information. We prove the theoretical guarantees and demonstrate empirical effectiveness of CondKGCP by comprehensive evaluations.
GQC: LLM-Based Grouped QA Consolidation for Open-Domain Fact Verification at AVeriTeC
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Roxana Pop | Yuqicheng Zhu | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Dongzhuoran Zhou | Roxana Pop | Yuqicheng Zhu | Evgeny Kharlamov
Proceedings of the Eighth Fact Extraction and VERification Workshop (FEVER)
Structured fact verification benchmarks like AVeriTeC decompose claims into QA pairs to support fine-grained reasoning. However, current systems generate QA pairs independently for each evidence sentence, leading to redundancy, drift, and noise. We introduce a modular LLM-based QA consolidation module that jointly filters, clusters, and rewrites QA pairs at the claim level. Experiments show that this method improves evidence quality and veracity prediction accuracy. Our analysis also highlights the impact of model scale and alignment on downstream performance.
Certainty in Uncertainty: Reasoning over Uncertain Knowledge Graphs with Statistical Guarantees
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jingcheng Wu | Yizhen Wang | Hongkuan Zhou | Jiaoyan Chen | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yuqicheng Zhu | Jingcheng Wu | Yizhen Wang | Hongkuan Zhou | Jiaoyan Chen | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Uncertain knowledge graph embedding (UnKGE) methods learn vector representations that capture both structural and uncertainty information to predict scores of unseen triples. However, existing methods produce only point estimates, without quantifying predictive uncertainty—limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications where understanding confidence in predictions is crucial. To address this limitation, we propose UnKGCP, a framework that generates prediction intervals guaranteed to contain the true score with a user-specified level of confidence. The length of the intervals reflects the model’s predictive uncertainty. UnKGCP builds on the conformal prediction framework but introduces a novel nonconformity measure tailored to UnKGE methods and an efficient procedure for interval construction. We provide theoretical guarantees for the intervals and empirically verify these guarantees. Extensive experiments on standard UKG benchmarks across diverse UnKGE methods further demonstrate that the intervals are sharp and effectively capture predictive uncertainty.
2024
Predictive Multiplicity of Knowledge Graph Embeddings in Link Prediction
Yuqicheng Zhu | Nico Potyka | Mojtaba Nayyeri | Bo Xiong | Yunjie He | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Yuqicheng Zhu | Nico Potyka | Mojtaba Nayyeri | Bo Xiong | Yunjie He | Evgeny Kharlamov | Steffen Staab
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models are often used to predict missing links for knowledge graphs (KGs). However, multiple KG embeddings can perform almost equally well for link prediction yet give conflicting predictions for unseen queries. This phenomenon is termed predictive multiplicity in the literature. It poses substantial risks for KGE-based applications in high-stake domains but has been overlooked in KGE research. We define predictive multiplicity in link prediction, introduce evaluation metrics and measure predictive multiplicity for representative KGE methods on commonly used benchmark datasets. Our empirical study reveals significant predictive multiplicity in link prediction, with 8% to 39% testing queries exhibiting conflicting predictions. We address this issue by leveraging voting methods from social choice theory, significantly mitigating conflicts by 66% to 78% in our experiments.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Yuqicheng Zhu 10
- Steffen Staab 8
- Yunjie He 4
- Bo Xiong 4
- Dongzhuoran Zhou 4
- Jie Tang 3
- Hongkuan Zhou 3
- Jiaoyan Chen 2
- Yuan He 2
- Daniel Hernández 2
- Nico Potyka 2
- Zhen Yang 2
- Prateek Chaturvedi 1
- Zifeng Ding 1
- Puneet K. Dokania 1
- Yuxiao Dong 1
- Fei Du 1
- Lin Li 1
- Yule Liu 1
- Rui Lu 1
- Mojtaba Nayyeri 1
- Jiarong Pan 1
- Roxana Pop 1
- Philip Torr 1
- Xiaxia Wang 1
- Yi Wang 1
- Yizhen Wang 1
- Jingcheng Wu 1
- Jialin Yu 1
- Gengyuan Zhang 1