Yu-Feng Li
Author directory2026
FormalImG: Evaluating Structural Compositional Generalization for T2I Models
Hong-Jie You | Jie-Jing Shao | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi-Fan Wu | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Hong-Jie You | Jie-Jing Shao | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi-Fan Wu | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
As natural language becomes a key interface for controlling text-to-image generation, users specify not only which visual concepts should appear but also how entities are constrained by attributes, relations, quantifiers, and cross-entity dependencies. Reliable controllable generation therefore requires generalization over semantic structure, not merely over novel combinations of concepts. Existing benchmarks mainly evaluate conceptual compositional generalization, while leaving the internal semantic structure of instructions underexplored. We study structural compositional generalization: whether text-to-image models can generalize across increasingly coupled semantic dependencies. We introduce FormalImG, a first-order-logic-based benchmark with 4,000 instructions across three complexity levels in two scenarios, together with computable structural compositional complexity and ε-structural compositional generalizability. Experiments on advanced text-to-image models show consistent degradation as structural complexity increases; even the strongest evaluated model generalizes only up to G0.7 = 6 in Natural and G0.7 = 4 in Knolling. Further analysis suggests that the main bottleneck lies in language-to-vision instantiation and can be partially mitigated by explicit intermediate layouts. The benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yhj137/FormalImG.
TabularMath: Understanding Math Reasoning over Tables with Large Language Models
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Wei Dong | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Zi-Jian Cheng | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Wei Dong | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Zi-Jian Cheng | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Mathematical reasoning has long been a key benchmark for evaluating large language models. Although substantial progress has been made on math word problems, the need for reasoning over tabular data in real-world applications has been overlooked. For instance, applications such as business intelligence demand not only multi-step numerical reasoning with tables but also robustness to incomplete or inconsistent information. However, comprehensive evaluation in this area is severely limited, constrained by the reliance on manually collected tables that are difficult to scale and the lack of coverage for potential traps encountered in real-world scenarios. To address this problem, we propose AutoT2T, a neuro-symbolic framework that controllably transforms math word problems into scalable and verified tabular reasoning tasks. Building on this pipeline, we develop TabularMath, a benchmark comprising four subsets that include both text-based and image-based tables, covering table complexity, table quality, and table representation dimensions. Our study reveals three key observations: (1) Table complexity and reasoning difficulty impact reasoning performance jointly; (2) Low-quality tables pose severe risks to reliable reasoning in current LLMs; (3) Different table modalities show similar trends, with text-based tables typically being easier for models to reason over. In-depth analyses are conducted for each observation to guide future research.
LookStep: Efficient Vision-Language Navigation with Linguistic Foresight and Event Driven Memory
Kun-Yang Yu | Yingzhe Li | Hongyu Xu | Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Yang Chen | Ming Yang | Sheng Wang | Qing Yu | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Kun-Yang Yu | Yingzhe Li | Hongyu Xu | Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Yang Chen | Ming Yang | Sheng Wang | Qing Yu | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an embodied agent to follow natural-language instructions in unseen environments. Recent progress has been largely driven by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing methods follow a next-step action prediction paradigm, supervising only the expert action, which requires a high quantity of data for training. They also rely on cognitive maps, accumulated historical frames, or external 3D tools to maintain states, leading to high computational and memory overhead. To realize resource efficiency VLN, we propose LookStep, a unified end-to-end framework that combines Language Centric Future State Modeling and Event Driven Rolling Memory that uses language labels to generate coarse-grained navigation progress and future states for each candidate action, while autonomously deciding whether to write each observation into a bounded rolling memory with a semantic role. We validate LookStep empirically. On VLN-CE tasks, LookStep outperforms existing methods under the same training settings, achieving a 49.7% success rate on R2R-CE Val-Unseen with better memory efficiency and less data usage. Code and model is available at https://github.com/kunyang-YU/LookStep.
SkillShift-Bench: Benchmarking Skill Learning under Environment Evolution for Web Agents
Bo-Yu Chen | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Bo-Yu Chen | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Skill learning enables web agents to reuse prior experience for long-horizon interactive tasks. However, learned skills are typically evaluated in closed environments, overlooking the fact that real-world web deployment involves continuous shifts in invocation context, perceptual grounding, and execution feasibility. To this end, we introduce SkillShift-Bench, the first benchmark for evaluating skill learning with controlled open-environment shifts. SkillShift-Bench simulates Contextual Shift, Perceptual Shift, and Execution Shift across three self-hosted web systems, and evaluates agents with diagnostics covering task success, interaction cost, skill use, and skill failure. Comprehensive experiments reveal systematic robustness degradation under controlled shifts, characterized by lower success rates, higher interaction costs, and more frequent skill failures, with Execution Shift exerting the strongest pressure. We further formulate shifted skill execution as a nonstationary local executability problem and provide both a dynamic-regret analysis and a practical test-time adaptation method, demonstrating the feasibility of improving learned-skill execution without relearning the skill library. Code, tasks, environments, documentation, and the leaderboard are available at https://skillshift-bench.github.io/.
SymboLLM-FE: LLM-Accelerated Symbolic Regression for Automated Feature Engineering on Tabular Data
Zi-Jian Cheng | Ziyi Jia | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zi-Jian Cheng | Ziyi Jia | Zhi Zhou | Yu-Feng Li | Lan-Zhe Guo
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tabular data, as a core data format in machine learning, often lacks the discriminative power needed for high-performance modeling due to insufficient feature informativeness. Automated Feature Engineering (AutoFE) overcomes this by automating feature generation and selection, ensuring both model performance and operational efficiency. However, traditional AutoFE often yield features with poor interpretability because they rely on blind mathematical transformations, while large language models (LLM)-based AutoFE faces challenges in requiring costly multi-round iterations to generate high-utility features to effectively enhance model performance, compounded by inherent risks of bias and hallucination. In this paper, we combine **symbo**lic regression with **LLM**s for **f**eature **e**ngineering (SymboLLM-FE) to solve these challenges. We extract mathematically expressive formulas strongly correlated with the target via symbolic regression, which can enhance model performance, then refine them by LLMs with rich prior knowledge to ensure interpretability. Empirical results on six real-world datasets and four Kaggle competitions demonstrate that SymboLLM-FE outperforms existing AutoFE. SymboLLM-FE also addresses the dual challenges of poor interpretability and numerous iterations by employing a statistical prior-grounded LLM refinement mechanism and single-digit LLM calls.
Project Page: [LAMDA-NeSy/SymboLLM-FE](https://lamda-nesy.github.io/SymboLLM-FE/index.html)
Project Page: [LAMDA-NeSy/SymboLLM-FE](https://lamda-nesy.github.io/SymboLLM-FE/index.html)
2025
AutoEvolve: Automatically Evolving Queries for Applicable and Scalable Retrieval-Augmented Generation Benchmarking
Ding-Chu Zhang | Xiaowen Zhang | Yue Fei | Renjun Hu | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi Zhou | Baixuan Li | Yu-Feng Li | Xing Shi | Wei Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Ding-Chu Zhang | Xiaowen Zhang | Yue Fei | Renjun Hu | Xiao-Wen Yang | Zhi Zhou | Baixuan Li | Yu-Feng Li | Xing Shi | Wei Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to address queries beyond their internal knowledge by integrating domain knowledge in specialized corpus, which necessitates the generation of benchmarks on specific corpus to evaluate RAG systems. However, existing automated generation methods exhibit Weak Applicability and Weak Scalability. Weak Applicability refers to the reliance on metadata from specific corpora for query generation, constraining applicability to other corpora. Weak Scalability is characterized by fixed query content after generation, unable to dynamically increase difficulty, limiting scalability of the query. To overcome these issues, we propose AutoEvolve, an applicable approach for dynamically evolving queries to construct scalable RAG benchmarks. Our approach is grounded in three key innovations: (i) a corpus-agnostic method for constructing the universal entity-document graph; (ii) a suite of evolution operations designed to dynamically update queries; and (iii) a difficulty-guided metric that directs query evolution process. Through experiments on three generated benchmarks, we demonstrate that AutoEvolve evolves queries that are significantly more challenging, paving the way for more applicable and scalable RAG evaluations.
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent
Ding-Chu Zhang | Yida Zhao | Jialong Wu | Liwen Zhang | Baixuan Li | Wenbiao Yin | Yong Jiang | Yu-Feng Li | Kewei Tu | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Ding-Chu Zhang | Yida Zhao | Jialong Wu | Liwen Zhang | Baixuan Li | Wenbiao Yin | Yong Jiang | Yu-Feng Li | Kewei Tu | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has transformed the landscape of agentic information seeking capabilities through the integration of tools such as search engines and web browsers. However, current mainstream approaches for enabling LLM web search proficiency face significant challenges: supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains, while RL converges quickly, limiting their data utilization efficiency. To address these issues, we propose EvolveSearch, a novel iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without any external human-annotated reasoning data. Extensive experiments on seven multi-hop question-answering (MHQA) benchmarks demonstrate that EvolveSearch consistently improves performance across iterations, ultimately achieving an average improvement of 4.7% over the current state-of-the-art across seven benchmarks, opening the door to self-evolution agentic capabilities in open web search domains.
VCSearch: Bridging the Gap Between Well-Defined and Ill-Defined Problems in Mathematical Reasoning
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Shi-Yu Tian | Zhi Zhou | Kun-Yang Yu | Ming Yang | Lin-Han Jia | Lan-Zhe Guo | Yu-Feng Li
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on reasoning tasks, including mathematical reasoning. However, the current evaluation mostly focuses on carefully constructed benchmarks and neglects the consideration of real-world reasoning problems that present missing or contradictory conditions, known as ill-defined problems. To further study this problem, we develop a large-scale benchmark called Problems with Missing and Contradictory conditions (PMC) containing over 5,000 validated ill-defined mathematical problems. Our preliminary experiments through PMC reveal two challenges about existing methods: (1) traditional methods exhibit a trade-off between solving accuracy and rejection capabilities, and (2) formal methods struggle with modeling complex problems. To address these challenges, We develop Variable-Constraint Search (VCSearch), a training-free framework that leverages formal language to detect ill-defined problems, where a variable-constraint pair search strategy is incorporated to improve the modeling capability of formal language. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VCSearch improves the accuracy of identifying unsolvable problems by at least 12% across different LLMs, thus achieving stronger robust mathematical reasoning ability.
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Co-authors
- Zhi Zhou 6
- Lan-Zhe Guo 5
- Shi-Yu Tian 3
- Ming Yang 3
- Kun-Yang Yu 3
- Zi-Jian Cheng 2
- Lin-Han Jia 2
- Baixuan Li 2
- Xiao-Wen Yang 2
- Ding-Chu Zhang 2
- Bo-Yu Chen 1
- Yang Chen 1
- Wei Dong 1
- Yue Fei 1
- Renjun Hu 1
- Fei Huang 1
- Ziyi Jia 1
- Yong Jiang 1
- Yingzhe Li 1
- Wei Lin 1
- Jie-Jing Shao 1
- Xing Shi 1
- Kewei Tu 1
- Sheng Wang 1
- Jialong Wu 1
- Zhi-Fan Wu 1
- Pengjun Xie 1
- Hongyu Xu 1
- Wenbiao Yin 1
- Hong-Jie You 1
- Qing Yu 1
- Liwen Zhang 1
- Xiaowen Zhang 1
- Yida Zhao 1