Liang Chen
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2026
ClawBench: Can AI Agents Complete Everyday Online Tasks?
Yuxuan Zhang | Yubo Wang | Yipeng Zhu | Penghui Du | Junwen Miao | Xuan Lu | Zhuofeng Li | Xingwei Qu | Zhengkang Guo | Yuanzhe Shen | Dingjie Song | Han Zhou | Tuney Zheng | Xian Wu | Hao Yu | Songcheng Cai | Yi Lu | Yunzhuo Hao | Minyi Lei | Liang Chen | Kai Zou | Huifeng Yin | Wendong XU | Dongfu Jiang | Ping Nie | Jiaheng Liu | Wenhu Chen | Kelsey R Allen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yuxuan Zhang | Yubo Wang | Yipeng Zhu | Penghui Du | Junwen Miao | Xuan Lu | Zhuofeng Li | Xingwei Qu | Zhengkang Guo | Yuanzhe Shen | Dingjie Song | Han Zhou | Tuney Zheng | Xian Wu | Hao Yu | Songcheng Cai | Yi Lu | Yunzhuo Hao | Minyi Lei | Liang Chen | Kai Zou | Huifeng Yin | Wendong XU | Dongfu Jiang | Ping Nie | Jiaheng Liu | Wenhu Chen | Kelsey R Allen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
AI agents may assist with emails and documents, but can they reliably complete everyday online workflows on real websites? Everyday online tasks offer a realistic yet unsolved testbed for evaluating next-generation AI agents. To this end, we introduce ClawBench, an evaluation framework comprising 153 everyday online tasks common in daily life and work, spanning 144 platforms across 15 categories, from completing purchases and booking appointments to submitting job applications. These tasks require capabilities beyond existing benchmarks, such as obtaining relevant information from user-provided documents, navigating multi-step workflows across diverse platforms, and write-heavy operations like filling in many detailed forms correctly. Unlike existing benchmarks that evaluate agents in offline sandboxes with static pages, ClawBench operates on production websites, preserving the full complexity, dynamic nature, and interaction challenges of real-world web environments. An interception layer captures and blocks the final submission request, ensuring safe evaluation without real-world side effects. Our evaluations of 8 frontier models show that both proprietary and open-source models complete only a small portion of these tasks. For example, Claude Sonnet 4.6 achieves only 33.3%, which exposes gaps in current AI agents. Progress on ClawBench brings us closer to AI agents that can function as general-purpose assistants.
MENTOR: Efficient Autoregressive Image Generation with Balanced Multimodal Control
Haozhe Zhao | Zefan Cai | Shuzheng Si | Liang Chen | Jiuxiang Gu | Wen Xiao | Minjia Zhang | Junjie Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Haozhe Zhao | Zefan Cai | Shuzheng Si | Liang Chen | Jiuxiang Gu | Wen Xiao | Minjia Zhang | Junjie Hu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Recent text-to-image models achieve impressive visual quality but still face challenges in precise controllability, balancing multimodal inputs, and high training cost for multimodal image generation. To address these limitations, we propose MENTOR, an autoregressive (AR) framework with a two-stage training paradigm for controllable multimodal image generation: (1) a multimodal alignment stage that establishes robust pixel and semantic-level alignment between inputs and generated tokens, followed by (2) a multimodal instruction tuning stage that balance model’s integration of multimodal inputs and enhance generation controllability. Extensive experiments on DreamBench++ and DreamBench demonstrate that, despite modest model size and training resources, achieves a strong balance between textual and visual guidance for controllable image generation, delivering competitive performance at significantly lower computational cost compared to leading baselines. Moreover, our approach attains superior image reconstruction fidelity, broad adaptability across different tasks, and training efficiency.
2025
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation
Jinsheng Huang | Liang Chen | Taian Guo | Fu Zeng | Yusheng Zhao | Bohan Wu | Ye Yuan | Haozhe Zhao | Zhihui Guo | Yichi Zhang | Jingyang Yuan | Wei Ju | Luchen Liu | Tianyu Liu | Baobao Chang | Ming Zhang
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)
Jinsheng Huang | Liang Chen | Taian Guo | Fu Zeng | Yusheng Zhao | Bohan Wu | Ye Yuan | Haozhe Zhao | Zhihui Guo | Yichi Zhang | Jingyang Yuan | Wei Ju | Luchen Liu | Tianyu Liu | Baobao Chang | Ming Zhang
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)
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, often assessed through multiple-choice questions (MCQs) that include an image, a question, and several options. However, many benchmarks used for such evaluations suffer from systematic biases. Remarkably, Large Language Models (LLMs) without any visual perception capabilities achieve non-trivial performance, undermining the credibility of these evaluations. To address this issue while maintaining the efficiency of MCQ evaluations, we propose MMEVALPRO, a benchmark designed to avoid Type-I errors through a trilogy evaluation pipeline and more rigorous metrics. For each original question from existing benchmarks, human annotators augment it by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. MMEVALPRO comprises 2,138 question triplets, totaling 6,414 distinct questions. Two-thirds of these questions are manually labeled by human experts, while the rest are sourced from existing benchmarks (MMMU, ScienceQA, and MathVista). Compared with the existing benchmarks, our experiments with the latest LLMs and LMMs demonstrate that MMEVALPRO is more challenging (the best LMM lags behind human performance by 31.73%, compared to an average gap of 8.03% in previous benchmarks) and more trustworthy (the best LLM trails the best LMM by 23.09%, whereas the gap for previous benchmarks is just 14.64%). Our in-depth analysis explains the reason for the large performance gap and justifies the trustworthiness of evaluation, underscoring its significant potential for advancing future research.
SG-FSM: A Self-Guiding Zero-Shot Prompting Paradigm for Multi-Hop Question Answering Based on Finite State Machine
Xiaochen Wang | Junqing He | Liang Chen | Gholamreza Haffari | Yiru Wang | Zhe Yang | Xiangdi Meng | Kunhao Pan | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Xiaochen Wang | Junqing He | Liang Chen | Gholamreza Haffari | Yiru Wang | Zhe Yang | Xiangdi Meng | Kunhao Pan | Zhifang Sui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025
Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. However, Multi-hop Question Answering (MHQA) remains challenging for many existing models due to issues like hallucination, error propagation, and limited context length. To address these challenges and enhance LLMs’ performance on MHQA, we propose the Self-Guiding prompting Finite State Machine (SG-FSM), designed to strengthen multi-hop reasoning abilities. Unlike traditional chain-of-thought methods, SG-FSM tackles MHQA by iteratively breaking down complex questions into sub-questions, correcting itself to improve accuracy. It processes one sub-question at a time, dynamically deciding the next step based on the current context and results, functioning much like an automaton. Experiments across various benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, outperforming strong baselines on challenging datasets such as Musique. SG-FSM reduces hallucination, enabling recovery of the correct final answer despite intermediate errors. It also improves adherence to specified output formats, simplifying evaluation significantly.
Looking Beyond Text: Reducing Language Bias in Large Vision-Language Models via Multimodal Dual-Attention and Soft-Image Guidance
Haozhe Zhao | Shuzheng Si | Liang Chen | Yichi Zhang | Maosong Sun | Baobao Chang | Minjia Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haozhe Zhao | Shuzheng Si | Liang Chen | Yichi Zhang | Maosong Sun | Baobao Chang | Minjia Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved impressive results in vision-language tasks. However, Therefore, we propose LACING, designed to address such bias with Mu ̲Ltimodal Du ̲Al-attention Me ̲Chan ̲Ism (MDA) a ̲Nd Soft-Image ̲Guidance (SIG). Specifically, MDA adopts a parallel dual-attention mechanism that constructs separate attention for visual and text inputs to enhance integration of visual inputs across model. SIG uses a learnable soft visual prompt during training and inference to replace visual inputs, designed to compel LVLMs to prioritize text inputs during inference. Experiments across different model architectures and scales demonstrate that LACING effectively debiases LVLMs from their language bias, enhancing visual comprehension and reducing hallucinations without additional resources.
2024
PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain
Liang Chen | Yichi Zhang | Shuhuai Ren | Haozhe Zhao | Zefan Cai | Yuchi Wang | Peiyi Wang | Xiangdi Meng | Tianyu Liu | Baobao Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Liang Chen | Yichi Zhang | Shuhuai Ren | Haozhe Zhao | Zefan Cai | Yuchi Wang | Peiyi Wang | Xiangdi Meng | Tianyu Liu | Baobao Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
We present PCA-Bench, a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating the integrated capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Departing from previous benchmarks focusing on simplistic tasks and individual model capability, PCA-Bench introduces three complex scenarios: autonomous driving, domestic robotics, and open-world games. Given task instructions and diverse contexts, the model is required to seamlessly integrate multiple capabilities of Perception, Cognition, and Action in a reasoning chain to make accurate decisions. Moreover, PCA-Bench features error localization capabilities, scrutinizing model inaccuracies in areas such as perception, knowledge, or reasoning. This enhances the reliability of deploying MLLMs. To balance accuracy and efficiency in evaluation, we propose PCA-Eval, an automatic evaluation protocol, and assess 10 prevalent MLLMs. The results reveal significant performance disparities between open-source models and powerful proprietary models like GPT-4 Vision. To address this, we introduce Embodied-Instruction-Evolution (EIE), an automatic framework for synthesizing instruction tuning examples in multimodal embodied environments. EIE generates 7,510 training examples in PCA-Bench and enhances the performance of open-source MLLMs, occasionally surpassing GPT-4 Vision (+3% in decision accuracy), thereby validating the effectiveness of EIE. Our findings suggest that robust MLLMs like GPT4-Vision show promise for decision-making in embodied agents, opening new avenues for MLLM research. All benchmark data and evaluation code are made public.
VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment
Lei Li | Zhihui Xie | Mukai Li | Shunian Chen | Peiyi Wang | Liang Chen | Yazheng Yang | Benyou Wang | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Lei Li | Zhihui Xie | Mukai Li | Shunian Chen | Peiyi Wang | Liang Chen | Yazheng Yang | Benyou Wang | Lingpeng Kong | Qi Liu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial. However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs. We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations. To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback. Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9% and 9.5% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at https://vlf-silkie.github.io.
2022
ATP: AMRize Then Parse! Enhancing AMR Parsing with PseudoAMRs
Liang Chen | Peiyi Wang | Runxin Xu | Tianyu Liu | Zhifang Sui | Baobao Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
Liang Chen | Peiyi Wang | Runxin Xu | Tianyu Liu | Zhifang Sui | Baobao Chang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022
As Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) implicitly involves compound semantic annotations, we hypothesize auxiliary tasks which are semantically or formally related can better enhance AMR parsing. We find that 1) Semantic role labeling (SRL) and dependency parsing (DP), would bring more performance gain than other tasks e.g. MT and summarization in the text-to-AMR transition even with much less data. 2) To make a better fit for AMR, data from auxiliary tasks should be properly “AMRized” to PseudoAMR before training. Knowledge from shallow level parsing tasks can be better transferred to AMR Parsing with structure transform. 3) Intermediate-task learning is a better paradigm to introduce auxiliary tasks to AMR parsing, compared to multitask learning. From an empirical perspective, we propose a principled method to involve auxiliary tasks to boost AMR parsing. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on different benchmarks especially in topology-related scores. Code and models are released at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/ATP.
Focus on the Target’s Vocabulary: Masked Label Smoothing for Machine Translation
Liang Chen | Runxin Xu | Baobao Chang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Liang Chen | Runxin Xu | Baobao Chang
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Label smoothing and vocabulary sharing are two widely used techniques in neural machine translation models. However, we argue that simply applying both techniques can be conflicting and even leads to sub-optimal performance. When allocating smoothed probability, original label smoothing treats the source-side words that would never appear in the target language equally to the real target-side words, which could bias the translation model. To address this issue, we propose Masked Label Smoothing (MLS), a new mechanism that masks the soft label probability of source-side words to zero. Simple yet effective, MLS manages to better integrate label smoothing with vocabulary sharing. Our extensive experiments show that MLS consistently yields improvement over original label smoothing on different datasets, including bilingual and multilingual translation from both translation quality and model’s calibration. Our code is released at https://github.com/PKUnlp-icler/MLS
Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for AMR Parsing
Peiyi Wang | Liang Chen | Tianyu Liu | Damai Dai | Yunbo Cao | Baobao Chang | Zhifang Sui
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Peiyi Wang | Liang Chen | Tianyu Liu | Damai Dai | Yunbo Cao | Baobao Chang | Zhifang Sui
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to translate sentences to semantic representation with a hierarchical structure, and is recently empowered by pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. However, there exists a gap between their flat training objective (i.e., equally treats all output tokens) and the hierarchical AMR structure, which limits the model generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Curriculum Learning (HCL) framework with Structure-level (SC) and Instance-level Curricula (IC). SC switches progressively from core to detail AMR semantic elements while IC transits from structure-simple to -complex AMR instances during training. Through these two warming-up processes, HCL reduces the difficulty of learning complex structures, thus the flat model can better adapt to the AMR hierarchy. Extensive experiments on AMR2.0, AMR3.0, structure-complex and out-of-distribution situations verify the effectiveness of HCL.
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- Baobao Chang (常宝宝) 6
- Tianyu Liu 4
- Peiyi Wang (王培懿) 4
- Haozhe Zhao 4
- Zhifang Sui (穗志方) 3
- Yichi Zhang 3
- Zefan Cai 2
- Xiangdi Meng 2
- Shuzheng Si 2
- Runxin Xu 2
- Minjia Zhang 2
- Kelsey R Allen 1
- Songcheng Cai 1
- Yunbo Cao 1
- Shunian Chen 1
- Wenhu Chen 1
- Damai Dai 1
- Penghui Du 1
- Jiuxiang Gu 1
- Taian Guo 1
- Zhengkang Guo 1
- Zhihui Guo 1
- Gholamreza Haffari 1
- Yunzhuo Hao 1
- Junqing He 1
- Junjie Hu 1
- Jinsheng Huang 1
- Dongfu Jiang 1
- Wei Ju 1
- Lingpeng Kong 1
- Minyi Lei 1
- Lei Li 1
- Mukai Li 1
- Zhuofeng Li 1
- Jiaheng Liu 1
- Luchen Liu 1
- Qi Liu 1
- Xuan Lu 1
- Yi Lu 1
- Junwen Miao 1
- Ping Nie 1
- Kunhao Pan 1
- Xingwei Qu 1
- Shuhuai Ren 1
- Yuanzhe Shen 1
- Dingjie Song 1
- Maosong Sun (孙茂松) 1
- Benyou Wang 1
- Xiaochen Wang 1
- Yiru Wang 1
- Yubo Wang 1
- Yuchi Wang 1
- Bohan Wu 1
- Xian Wu 1
- Wendong XU 1
- Wen Xiao 1
- Zhihui Xie 1
- Yazheng Yang 1
- Zhe Yang 1
- Huifeng Yin 1
- Hao Yu 1
- Jingyang Yuan 1
- Ye Yuan 1
- Fu Zeng 1
- Ming Zhang 1
- Yuxuan Zhang 1
- Yusheng Zhao 1
- Tianyu Zheng 1
- Han Zhou 1
- Yipeng Zhu 1
- Kai Zou 1