Jinhe Bi
Author directory2026
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models
Kailin Jiang | Ning Jiang | Yuntao Du | Yuchen Ren | Yuchen Li | Yifan Gao | Jinhe Bi | Yunpu Ma | Bin Li | Lei Liu | Qing Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kailin Jiang | Ning Jiang | Yuntao Du | Yuchen Ren | Yuchen Li | Yifan Gao | Jinhe Bi | Yunpu Ma | Bin Li | Lei Liu | Qing Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encode rich factual knowledge via cross-modal pre-training, yet their static representations struggle to maintain an accurate understanding of time-sensitive knowledge. Existing benchmarks remain constrained by static designs, inadequately evaluating LMMs’ ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. To address this gap, we propose MINED, a comprehensive benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types, which evaluates temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks: cognition, awareness, trustworthiness, understanding, reasoning, and robustness. Evaluating 15 widely used LMMs on MINED shows that Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves the highest average CEM score of 63.07, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. Meanwhile, LMMs perform best on organization knowledge, whereas their performance is weakest on sport. To address these challenges, we investigate the feasibility of updating time-sensitive knowledge in LMMs through knowledge editing methods and observe that LMMs can effectively update knowledge via knowledge editing methods in single editing scenarios.
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. The proposed framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.
PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Memory has become an increasingly important component of agentic systems, as these systems are expected to reason over long-term experience. However, prior work has largely focused on unimodal memory, leaving multimodal memory relatively underexplored despite its central role in real-world applications. Compared with unimodal settings, multimodal memory introduces additional challenges, including heterogeneous input integration, person-centric information alignment, and evidence aggregation across different granularities. We present PyraVid, a hierarchical multimodal memory framework inspired by Event Segmentation Theory from cognitive science. PyraVid organizes long videos into a coarse-to-fine pyramid structure, enabling structured memory access and effective evidence aggregation. It further supports structure-guided memory expansion with pruning, allowing the retrieval of related events with strong causal connectivity but low semantic similarity while reducing noise. Experiments on multiple long-video understanding benchmarks show that PyraVid consistently improves performance across datasets, model scales, and question types, highlighting the effectiveness of hierarchical multimodal memory for long-horizon reasoning.
PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection
Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Zengjie Jin | Yifan Wang | Danqi Yan | Wenke Huang | Xiaowen Ma | Sikuan Yan | Artur Hecker | Mang Ye | Xun Xiao | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Zengjie Jin | Yifan Wang | Danqi Yan | Wenke Huang | Xiaowen Ma | Sikuan Yan | Artur Hecker | Mang Ye | Xun Xiao | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Visual instruction tuning adapts pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to follow human instructions for real-world applications. However, rapidly growing instruction datasets introduce substantial redundancy and computational costs. Existing data selection methods aim to prune this redundancy, but predominantly rely on computationally demanding proxy-based inference or training-based metrics, often exacerbating the efficiency bottlenecks they are intended to resolve. To address this challenge, we identify a critical yet overlooked factor: anisotropy in visual feature distributions. We find that this anisotropy induces a Global Semantic Drift that distorts similarity estimates and limits efficient data selection. Motivated by this insight, we devise PRISM, a training-free framework for efficient visual instruction selection. PRISM mitigates the dominant global drift through implicit re-centering, allowing intrinsic visual semantics to provide a reliable redundancy signal without proxy models or additional training. Empirically, PRISM reduces end-to-end GPU time by about 70% while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multimodal and language understanding benchmarks and reaching 101.7% relative performance against the full-data baseline.
MemWM: Memory-Augmented Text-Based World Model
Yujun Wang | Tao Zhang | Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Wenxuan Ye | Boliang Liu | Sikuan Yan | Shuning Wang | Xuebing Zhou | Soren Pirk | Hinrich Schuetze | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yujun Wang | Tao Zhang | Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Wenxuan Ye | Boliang Liu | Sikuan Yan | Shuning Wang | Xuebing Zhou | Soren Pirk | Hinrich Schuetze | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
World models are increasingly used to support planning in agents by predicting how environment states evolve in response to agent actions. Yet fluent next-state predictions can still omit task-critical facts, corrupt product attributes, or apply incorrect transition rules. To address such systematic prediction errors, we introduce MemWM, a memory-augmented text-based world model. MemWM uses world memory, a curated memory bank of transition rules, state caches, and hard-to-predict facts, to condition next-state imagination. We evaluate factual state preservation with Structured State Fidelity (SSF), which scores predicted states through benchmark-specific facts and fields. Compared with SFT, memory-augmented training improves SSF by up to 206.3%. In the full planning setting, we keep the policy model frozen and provide policy-side world skill: retrieved task-level skills and step-wise corrective guidance for action selection. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld, memory-augmented agents improve downstream success over an SFT-trained world-model agent, with up to a 65.4% relative gain. Sensitivity analyses further show that retrieved memory improves task success and efficiency under different memory and action-budget settings.
Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning
Sikuan Yan | Xiufeng Yang | Zuchao Huang | Ercong Nie | Zifeng Ding | Zonggen Li | Xiaowen Ma | Jinhe Bi | Kristian Kersting | Jeff Z. Pan | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Sikuan Yan | Xiufeng Yang | Zuchao Huang | Ercong Nie | Zifeng Ding | Zonggen Li | Xiaowen Ma | Jinhe Bi | Kristian Kersting | Jeff Z. Pan | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of NLP tasks, but they remain fundamentally stateless, constrained by limited context windows that hinder long-horizon reasoning. Recent efforts to address this limitation often augment LLMs with an external memory bank, yet most existing pipelines are static and heuristic-driven, lacking a learned mechanism for deciding what to store, update, or retrieve. We present Memory-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that equips LLMs with the ability to actively manage and utilize external memory through two specialized agents: a Memory Manager that learns structured operations, including ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, and NOOP; and an Answer Agent that pre-selects and reasons over relevant entries. Both agents are fine-tuned with outcome-driven RL (PPO and GRPO), enabling adaptive memory management with minimal supervision. With only 152 training QA pairs, Memory-R1 outperforms strong baselines and generalizes across diverse question types, three benchmarks (LoCoMo, MSC, LongMemEval), and multiple model scales (3B–14B).
2025
LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steering
Jinhe Bi | Yujun Wang | Haokun Chen | Xun Xiao | Artur Hecker | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jinhe Bi | Yujun Wang | Haokun Chen | Xun Xiao | Artur Hecker | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models (LLMs). The textual modality, inherited from LLMs, enables instruction following and in-context learning, while the visual modality boosts downstream task performance through rich semantic content, spatial information, and grounding capabilities. These modalities work synergistically across various visual tasks. Our research reveals a persistent imbalance between these modalities, with text often dominating output generation during visual instruction tuning, regardless of using full or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We found that re-balancing these modalities can significantly reduce trainable parameters, inspiring further optimization of visual instruction tuning. To this end, we introduce Modality Linear Representation-Steering (MoReS), which re-balances intrinsic modalities by steering visual representations through linear transformations in the visual subspace across each model layer. We validated our approach by developing LLaVA Steering, a suite of models using MoReS. Results show that LLaVA Steering requires, on average, 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance across three visual benchmarks and eight visual question-answering tasks. Finally, we introduce the LLaVA Steering Factory, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs with a component-based architecture, seamlessly integrating state-of-the-art models and evaluating intrinsic modality imbalance. This open-source project facilitates a deeper understanding of MLLMs within the research community.
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Co-authors
- Yunpu Ma 7
- Volker Tresp 5
- Sikuan Yan 5
- Hinrich Schütze 4
- Xiaowen Ma 3
- Aniri 2
- Artur Hecker 2
- Ercong Nie 2
- Yujun Wang 2
- Xun Xiao 2
- Zixuan Cao 1
- Haokun Chen 1
- Zifeng Ding 1
- Sicheng Dong 1
- Yuntao Du 1
- Yifan Gao 1
- Wenke Huang 1
- Zuchao Huang 1
- Kailin Jiang 1
- Ning Jiang 1
- Zengjie Jin 1
- Kristian Kersting 1
- Bin Li 1
- Qing Li 1
- Yuchen Li 1
- Zonggen Li 1
- Chenyang Lin 1
- Boliang Liu 1
- Lei Liu 1
- Yilun Liu 1
- Jeff Z. Pan 1
- Soren Pirk 1
- Yuchen Ren 1
- Susanna Schwarzmann 1
- Yijun Tian 1
- Riccardo Trivisonno 1
- Haotong Wang 1
- Shuning Wang 1
- Yifan Wang 1
- Yingjie Xu 1
- Danqi Yan 1
- Xiufeng Yang 1
- Mang Ye 1
- Wenxuan Ye 1
- Tao Zhang 1
- Xuebing Zhou 1