Liyao Li
Author directory2026
OmniDA: Grounding Agentic Multimodal Data Analysis with Evidence-Aware Process Rewards
Xuhang Zhu | Liyao Li | Ningtao Wang | Yanyu Chen | Hao Chen | Wentao Ye | Ziquan Wang | Haoxing Zhai | Yu Cheng | Gang Chen | Xiu Tang | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xuhang Zhu | Liyao Li | Ningtao Wang | Yanyu Chen | Hao Chen | Wentao Ye | Ziquan Wang | Haoxing Zhai | Yu Cheng | Gang Chen | Xiu Tang | Haobo Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Real-world data analysis often requires joint reasoning over heterogeneous artifacts such as tables, charts, and textual reports. Training reliable multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents for this setting remains challenging, as large-scale aligned training data are scarce, and outcome-only rewards are too coarse to distinguish grounded cross-source analysis from spurious success. We introduce OmniDA, a training recipe that addresses these two challenges with a scalable multimodal data-synthesis pipeline and an Evidence-Aware Process Reward (EAPR) that supervises both evidence recovery and procedural validity. Through this pipeline, we construct OmniDA-11K, a high-quality training corpus for multimodal data analysis. When instantiated with Qwen3-VL-8B, OmniDA improves over the corresponding agentic baseline by 19.2 points on average across five challenging benchmarks and achieves the strongest overall performance among existing open-source data-analysis agents. These results highlight the value of supervising evidence recovery and analytical procedure beyond final-answer correctness.
Can LLMs Spot Data Anomalies That Make Table QA Impossible?
Yucheng Wei | Shenzhi Yang | Ning Wang | Jinchang Zhang | Yuhang Yang | Haobo Wang | Liangyu Zha | Wentao Ye | Liyao Li | Cheng Peng | Gang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yucheng Wei | Shenzhi Yang | Ning Wang | Jinchang Zhang | Yuhang Yang | Haobo Wang | Liangyu Zha | Wentao Ye | Liyao Li | Cheng Peng | Gang Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Existing tabular reasoning benchmarks typically assume that input tables are clean and error-free, which contrasts sharply with real-world data pipelines where noise and anomalies are pervasive. While humans routinely validate tables and reject conclusions when anomalies render a question unanswerable, it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar anomaly awareness. In this work, we introduce AnTBench, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate LLM behavior under anomalous tabular data. AnTBench consists of 1,571 curated instances covering five common and verifiable anomaly types. Experiments on 14 representative LLMs reveal a pronounced capability–behavior gap: even the strongest model achieves 76.07% on explicit anomaly detection, yet only 19.03% on spontaneous anomaly perception during standard table QA. As an inference-time mitigation, we introduce the Multi-Path Thinker, a multi-path reasoning framework. While this approach improves explicit anomaly detection, enforcing proactive verification for every query is practically prohibitive. We urge the community to move beyond inference-time patches and instill spontaneous anomaly awareness directly into the training and alignment phases. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Wei12097/AnTBench.
2025
LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains
Liyao Li | Jiaming Tian | Hao Chen | Wentao Ye | Chao Ye | Haobo Wang | Ningtao Wang | Xing Fu | Gang Chen | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Liyao Li | Jiaming Tian | Hao Chen | Wentao Ye | Chao Ye | Haobo Wang | Ningtao Wang | Xing Fu | Gang Chen | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
We introduce LongTableBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context reasoning over semi-structured tables across diverse formats, tasks, and domains. It comprises 5,950 QA instances spanning 7 table formats (e.g., Markdown, HTML, SQL), 18 domains, and input lengths up to 128K tokens, including multi-turn and multi-table settings. To ensure data quality, we combine symbolic supervision, cross-model validation, and human review. Evaluating 52 LLMs—including general-purpose, table-specific, and reasoning-enhanced models—reveals that only the strongest models maintain robust performance under increasing context lengths and format diversity. We further show that end-to-end models outperform compression-based approaches, especially on tasks requiring semantic integration. LongTableBench provides a rigorous, scalable testbed for advancing long-context tabular understanding and highlights key limitations in current LLMs’ structural and reasoning capabilities. The code and data are available at https://github.com/liyaooi/LongTableBench.
2024
Data Contamination Calibration for Black-box LLMs
Wentao Ye | Jiaqi Hu | Liyao Li | Haobo Wang | Gang Chen | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Wentao Ye | Jiaqi Hu | Liyao Li | Haobo Wang | Gang Chen | Junbo Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
The rapid advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs) tightly associate with the expansion of the training data size. However, the unchecked ultra-large-scale training sets introduce a series of potential risks like data contamination, i.e. the benchmark data is used for training. In this work, we propose a holistic method named Polarized Augment Calibration (PAC) along with a new to-be-released dataset to detect the contaminated data and diminish the contamination effect. PAC extends the popular MIA (Membership Inference Attack) — from machine learning community — by forming a more global target at detecting training data to Clarify invisible training data. As a pioneering work, PAC is very much plug-and-play that can be integrated with most (if not all) current white- and black-box LLMs. By extensive experiments, PAC outperforms existing methods by at least 4.5%, towards data contamination detection on more 4 dataset formats, with more than 10 base LLMs. Besides, our application in real-world scenarios highlights the prominent presence of contamination and related issues.
Navigate Complex Physical Worlds via Geometrically Constrained LLM
Yongqiang Huang | Wentao Ye | Liyao Li | Junbo Zhao
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U)
Yongqiang Huang | Wentao Ye | Liyao Li | Junbo Zhao
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U)
This study investigates the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) for reconstructing and understanding the physical world based solely on textual knowledge. It explores the impact of model performance on spatial understanding abilities by introducing a set of geometric conventions and developing a workflow based on multi-layer graphs and multi-agent systems. The study examines how LLMs achieve multi-step and multi-objective geometric inference in a spatial environment, using unified geometric conventions and a graph-driven framework. A genetic algorithm, inspired by large-scale model knowledge, is employed to solve geometric constraint problems, enhancing the spatial reasoning capabilities of LLMs. This work innovatively explores the feasibility of using text-based LLMs as builders of the physical world and designs a workflow to enhance their spatial comprehension and construction capabilities.