Yifan Yao
Author directory2026
WebCompass: Evaluating Multimodal Code Agents in Web Development from Vision, Instruction, and Interaction to Implementation
Xinping Lei | Xinyu Che | Junqi Xiong | Chenchen Zhang | Yukai Huang | Chenyu Zhou | Haoyang Huang | Minghao Liu | Letian Zhu | Hongyi Ye | Ken Deng | Zizheng Zhan | Han Li | Yifan Yao | Ming Sun | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Jiaheng Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Xinping Lei | Xinyu Che | Junqi Xiong | Chenchen Zhang | Yukai Huang | Chenyu Zhou | Haoyang Huang | Minghao Liu | Letian Zhu | Hongyi Ye | Ken Deng | Zizheng Zhan | Han Li | Yifan Yao | Ming Sun | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Jiaheng Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models are increasingly deployed as interactive coding agents for end-to-end web development, yet existing benchmarks evaluate narrow slices of this workflow—typically text-conditioned generation with static correctness metrics—overlooking visual fidelity, interactivity, and codebase-level reasoning. We introduce WebCompass, a benchmark that covers the full web development lifecycle by spanning three input modalities (text, image, video) and three task types (generation, editing, repair). To match the diverse nature of these tasks, we pair checklist-guided LLM-as-a-Judge for patch-based evaluation with a novel Agent-as-a-Judge protocol that executes generated websites in a real browser and synthesizes targeted test cases. Experiments on ten models reveal a 25-point gap between the best closed- and open-source models, persistent weaknesses in visual aesthetics even among frontier systems, and divergent performance profiles across task types that challenge the notion of a single "best" web coding agent.
CriticLean: Critic-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Mathematical Formalization
Zhongyuan Peng | Yifan Yao | Kaijing Ma | Shuyue Guo | Yizhe Li | Yichi Zhang | Chenchen Zhang | Yifan Zhang | Zhouliang Yu | Luming Li | Minghao Liu | Yihang Xia | Jiawei Shen | Yuchen Wu | Yixin Cao | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wenhao Huang | Jiaheng Liu | Ge Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhongyuan Peng | Yifan Yao | Kaijing Ma | Shuyue Guo | Yizhe Li | Yichi Zhang | Chenchen Zhang | Yifan Zhang | Zhouliang Yu | Luming Li | Minghao Liu | Yihang Xia | Jiawei Shen | Yuchen Wu | Yixin Cao | Zhaoxiang Zhang | Wenhao Huang | Jiaheng Liu | Ge Zhang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Translating natural language mathematical statements into formal, executable code is a fundamental challenge in automated theorem proving. While prior work has focused on generation and compilation success, little attention has been paid to the critic phase—the evaluation of whether generated formalizations truly capture the semantic intent of the original problem. In this paper, we introduce CriticLean, a novel critic-guided reinforcement learning framework that elevates the role of the critic from a passive validator to an active learning component. Specifically, first, we propose the CriticLeanGPT, trained via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to rigorously assess the semantic fidelity of Lean 4 formalizations. Then, we introduce CriticLeanBench, a benchmark designed to measure models’ ability to distinguish semantically correct from incorrect formalizations, and demonstrate that our trained CriticLeanGPT models can significantly outperform strong open- and closed-source baselines. Building on the CriticLean framework, we construct FineLeanCorpus, a dataset comprising over 509K problems that exhibits rich domain diversity, broad difficulty coverage, and high correctness based on human evaluation.Overall, our findings highlight that optimizing the critic phase is essential for producing reliable formalizations and we hope our CriticLean will provide valuable insights for future advances in formal mathematical reasoning.