Yu Li
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Unverified author pages with similar names: Yu Li
2026
SPARK: Skeleton-Guided Reasoning Synthesis from Large-Scale Scientific Literature
Yu Li | Wei Li | Xin Gao | Mengyuan Sun | Xiaoyang Wang | Qizhi Pei | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yu Li | Wei Li | Xin Gao | Mengyuan Sun | Xiaoyang Wang | Qizhi Pei | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Scientific reasoning remains challenging for open-source models, largely due to the lack of high-quality scientific reasoning data. Existing datasets are often dominated by factual recall or formulaic problem solving, with limited emphasis on mechanism understanding, evidence-grounded reasoning, and hypothesis evaluation. To address this, we introduce **SPARK (Scientific Paper Abstracted Reasoning sKeleton)**, a paper-oriented synthesis framework built on Sci-Base, a large-scale corpus of research papers spanning 10 scientific disciplines. Instead of directly converting papers into question-answer pairs, SPARK treats the claim-evidence-derivation structure of a paper as the fundamental unit of reasoning synthesis. Specifically, SPARK (1) distills each paper into a compact reasoning skeleton capturing its central claims and supporting evidence, enabling self-contained question generation, and (2) synthesizes reasoning tasks from four scientific perspectives: mechanistic reasoning, hypothesis falsification, quantitative derivation, and boundary calibration. A final consistency verification stage further removes unsupported or contradictory outputs. Using this framework, we construct Spark-234K, a scientific reasoning dataset with substantially higher difficulty and diversity than existing resources. Experiments show that Spark-234K consistently outperforms existing scientific reasoning datasets while achieving stronger performance with significantly fewer training samples.
Support Vector Rubrics: Closing the Gap Between Self-Generated and Human Rubrics
Mengyuan Sun | Yu Li | Zhuohao Yu | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mengyuan Sun | Yu Li | Zhuohao Yu | Shikun Zhang | Wei Ye
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Rubric-based evaluation is a promising paradigm for judging large language model (LLM) outputs, yet self-generated rubrics lag human-annotated criteria on hard instances. We argue this discriminative gap reflects an objective mismatch: self-generated rubrics describe good responses, whereas effective criteria must discriminate between close candidates. To close this gap, we introduce SVR (Support Vector Rubrics), a framework that recasts rubric construction as max-margin boundary learning over preference data. SVR mines contrastive features from preference pairs into a rubric bank, learns a prompt-conditioned selector together with global rubric weights, and iteratively refines the bank through support-pair selection and adversarial probing of hard negatives. At inference, given only the prompt, SVR retrieves the top-k rubrics from the bank and scores responses. On RubricBench, SVR narrows the gap to human reference rubrics from 24.1 to 0.3 points and outperforms strong self-rubric and judge baselines, and the learned bank transfers across judges without retraining. On RewardBench 1 2, and RM-Bench, it remains competitive with dedicated reward models, demonstrating broader reward modeling capability. Overall, boundary-defining rubrics offer a principled route to closing the discriminative gap in LLM evaluation.
Tracing the Roots: A Multi-Agent Framework for Uncovering Data Lineage in Post-Training LLMs
Yu Li | Xiaoran Shang | Qizhi Pei | Yun Zhu | Xin Gao | Honglin Lin | Zhanping Zhong | Zhuoshi Pan | Zheng Liu | Xiaoyang Wang | Conghui He | Dahua Lin | Feng Zhao | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yu Li | Xiaoran Shang | Qizhi Pei | Yun Zhu | Xin Gao | Honglin Lin | Zhanping Zhong | Zhuoshi Pan | Zheng Liu | Xiaoyang Wang | Conghui He | Dahua Lin | Feng Zhao | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Post-training data plays a pivotal role in shaping the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet datasets are often treated as isolated artifacts, overlooking the systemic connections that underlie their evolution. To disentangle these complex relationships, we introduce the concept of data lineage to the LLM ecosystem and propose an automated multi-agent framework to reconstruct the evolutionary graph of dataset development. Through large-scale lineage analysis, we characterize domain-specific structural patterns, such as vertical refinement in Math-oriented datasets and horizontal aggregation in General-domain corpora. Moreover, we uncover pervasive systemic issues, including structural redundancy induced by implicit dataset intersections and the propagation of benchmark contamination along lineage paths. To demonstrate the practical value of lineage analysis for data construction, we leverage the reconstructed lineage graph to create a lineage-aware diversity-oriented dataset. By anchoring instruction sampling at upstream leaf sources, this approach mitigates downstream homogenization and hidden redundancy, yielding a more diverse post-training corpus. We further highlight lineage-centric analysis as an efficient and robust topological alternative to sample-level dataset comparison for large-scale data ecosystems. By grounding data construction in explicit lineage structures, our work advances post-training data curation toward a more systematic and controllable paradigm.
ChartVerse: Scaling Chart Reasoning via Reliable Programmatic Synthesis from Scratch
Zheng Liu | Honglin Lin | Xiaoyang Wang | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Yun Zhu | Zhanping Zhong | Qizhi Pei | Zhuoshi Pan | Xiaoran Shang | Conghui He | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zheng Liu | Honglin Lin | Xiaoyang Wang | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Yun Zhu | Zhanping Zhong | Qizhi Pei | Zhuoshi Pan | Xiaoran Shang | Conghui He | Bin Cui | Wentao Zhang | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chart reasoning is a critical capability for Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, the development of open-source models is severely hindered by the lack of high-quality training data. Existing datasets suffer from a dual challenge: synthetic charts are often simplistic and repetitive, while the associated QA pairs are prone to hallucinations and lack the reasoning depth required for complex tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ChartVerse, a scalable framework designed to synthesize complex charts and reliable reasoning data from scratch. (1) To address the bottleneck of simple patterns, we first introduce Rollout Posterior Entropy (RPE), a novel metric that quantifies chart complexity. Guided by RPE, we develop complexity-aware chart coder to autonomously synthesize diverse, high-complexity charts via executable programs. (2) To guarantee reasoning rigor, we develop truth-anchored inverse QA synthesis. Diverging from standard generation, we adopt an answer-first paradigm: we extract deterministic answers directly from the source code, generate questions conditional on these anchors, and enforce strict consistency verification. To further elevate difficulty and reasoning depth, we filter samples based on model fail-rate and distill high-quality Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We curate ChartVerse-SFT-600K and ChartVerse-RL-40K using Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking as the teacher. Experimental results demonstrate that ChartVerse-8B achieves state-of-the-art performance, notably surpassing its teacher and rivaling the stronger Qwen3-32B-Thinking.
REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once
Zhuoshi Pan | Qizhi Pei | Yu Li | Zinan Tang | QiYao Sun | H. Vicky Zhao | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zhuoshi Pan | Qizhi Pei | Yu Li | Zinan Tang | QiYao Sun | H. Vicky Zhao | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their evaluation still relies on a narrow paradigm: evaluating one question at a time. This single-question setup suffers from two major limitations: (1) vulnerability to data contamination and diminishing difficulty, forcing costly creation of new questions with significant human effort, (2) failure to evaluate models under multi-context pressure, a key requirement for real-world deployment. To bridge this gap, we present REST (Reasoning Evaluation through Simultaneous Testing), a stress-testing framework that exposes LRMs to multiple problems simultaneously. Beyond basic reasoning, REST evaluates two under-tested capabilities: contextual priority allocation and robustness against contextual interference. Our evaluation of more than 30 advanced reasoning models on 9 reasoning benchmarks reveals several striking findings: Even state-of-the-art (SOTA) models such as DeepSeek-R1 exhibit substantial performance degradation under stress testing, challenging the prevailing assumption that “LLMs are multi-problem solvers”. Crucially, REST demonstrates stronger discriminative power than existing benchmarks, revealing performance gaps among models that exhibit similar, near-ceiling performance under traditional evaluation. Some key insights emerge from our analysis: (1) the “overthinking trap” is a critical factor contributing to the performance degradation; (2) models trained with the “Long2Short” technique preserve more of their single-problem accuracy under REST, outperforming their standard-trained counterparts. These results establish REST as a cost-efficient, future-proof evaluation paradigm while reducing reliance on continuous human annotation. Code is available at https://github.com/opendatalab/REST.
2025
MetaLadder: Ascending Mathematical Solution Quality via Analogical-Problem Reasoning Transfer
Honglin Lin | Zhuoshi Pan | Qizhi Pei | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Honglin Lin | Zhuoshi Pan | Qizhi Pei | Xin Gao | Yu Li | Mengzhang Cai | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in solving mathematical reasoning tasks, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data as a vital component in guiding answer generation. Current paradigms typically generate CoT and answers directly for a given problem, diverging from human problem-solving strategies to some extent. Humans often solve problems by recalling analogous cases and leveraging their solutions to reason about the current task. Inspired by this cognitive process, we propose MetaLadder, a novel framework that explicitly prompts LLMs to recall and reflect on meta-problems, those structurally or semantically analogical problems, alongside their CoT solutions before addressing the target problem. Additionally, we introduce a problem-restating mechanism to enhance the model’s comprehension of the target problem by regenerating the original question, which further improves reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the model can achieve reasoning transfer from analogical problems, mimicking human-like “learning from examples” and generalization abilities. Extensive experiments on mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that our MetaLadder significantly boosts LLMs’ problem-solving accuracy, largely outperforming standard CoT-based methods (10.3% accuracy gain) and other methods.
LEMMA: Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement in LLMs
Zhuoshi Pan | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Qizhi Pei | Zinan Tang | Wei Wu | Chenlin Ming | H. Vicky Zhao | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Zhuoshi Pan | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Qizhi Pei | Zinan Tang | Wei Wu | Chenlin Ming | H. Vicky Zhao | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capability in solving mathematical problems. However, existing approaches primarily focus on improving the quality of correct training data, e.g., distilling high-quality correct solutions from advanced models, neglecting the value contained in error data, potentially hindering the model’s reflective ability. Though some studies attempted to leverage error data, they often involve complex mechanisms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore error nodes.In this work, we propose to enhance LLM’s reasoning ability by Learning from Errors for MatheMatical Advancement (LEMMA). LEMMA constructs data consists of an incorrect solution with an erroneous step and a reflection connection to a correct solution for fine-tuning. Specifically, we systematically analyze the model-generated error types and introduce an error-type grounded mistake augmentation method to collect diverse and representative errors. Correct solutions are either from fixing the errors or generating a fresh start. By fine-tuning on the constructed dataset, the model is able to self-correct errors autonomously within the generation process without relying on external critique models. Experimental results demonstrate that LEMMA achieves significant performance improvements over other strong models with less than 90k data.
CipherBank: Exploring the Boundary of LLM Reasoning Capabilities through Cryptography Challenge
Yu Li | Qizhi Pei | Mengyuan Sun | Honglin Lin | Chenlin Ming | Xin Gao | Jiang Wu | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Yu Li | Qizhi Pei | Mengyuan Sun | Honglin Lin | Chenlin Ming | Xin Gao | Jiang Wu | Conghui He | Lijun Wu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, especially the recent advancements in reasoning, such as o1 and o3, pushing the boundaries of AI. Despite these impressive achievements in mathematics and coding, the reasoning abilities of LLMs in domains requiring cryptographic expertise remain underexplored. In this paper, we introduce CipherBank, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of LLMs in cryptographic decryption tasks. CipherBank comprises 2,358 meticulously crafted problems, covering 262 unique plaintexts across 5 domains and 14 subdomains, with a focus on privacy-sensitive and real-world scenarios that necessitate encryption. From a cryptographic perspective, CipherBank incorporates 3 major categories of encryption methods, spanning 9 distinct algorithms, ranging from classical ciphers to custom cryptographic techniques. We evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on CipherBank, e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and cutting-edge reasoning-focused models such as o1 and DeepSeek-R1. Our results reveal significant gaps in reasoning abilities not only between general-purpose chat LLMs and reasoning-focused LLMs but also in the performance of current reasoning-focused models when applied to classical cryptographic decryption tasks, highlighting the challenges these models face in understanding and manipulating encrypted data. Through detailed analysis and error investigations, we provide several key observations that shed light on the limitations and potential improvement areas for LLMs in cryptographic reasoning.These findings underscore the need for continuous advancements in LLM reasoning capabilities.
A Strategic Coordination Framework of Small LMs Matches Large LMs in Data Synthesis
Xin Gao | Qizhi Pei | Zinan Tang | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Jiang Wu | Lijun Wu | Conghui He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xin Gao | Qizhi Pei | Zinan Tang | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Jiang Wu | Lijun Wu | Conghui He
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While data synthesis and distillation are promising strategies to enhance small language models, current approaches heavily rely on Large Language Models (LLMs), which suffer from high computational costs, environmental inefficiency, and potential biases inherited from monolithic architectures. In contrast, smaller LMs are more accessible and sustainable, but their individual capabilities often fall short in generating high-quality, diverse, and reliable data. Inspired by collaborative human processes (e.g., peer review), we propose a multiple small LMs involved framework, GRA, that aggregates specialized roles across small LMs to iterative refinement and quality control typically achieved by a single large LM. In this collaborative framework, multiple small LMs assume distinct roles—Generator, Reviewer, and Adjudicator—to simulate a peer-review-inspired data synthesis pipeline. The Generator proposes initial data samples, the Reviewer critiques their quality and diversity, and the Adjudicator resolves conflicts to finalize the output. By decomposing the synthesis process into specialized sub-tasks, collaborative small LMs can achieve data-level parity with distillation from large LMs. Through experiments across multiple benchmarks, we demonstrate that GRA-produced data matches or exceeds the quality of single large LM outputs, e.g., Qwen-2.5-72B-Instruct. Our results challenge the necessity of monolithic large models for high-quality data synthesis, advocating instead for strategic coordination of smaller agents.
MathFusion: Enhancing Mathematical Problem-solving of LLM through Instruction Fusion
Qizhi Pei | Lijun Wu | Zhuoshi Pan | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Chenlin Ming | Xin Gao | Conghui He | Rui Yan
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Qizhi Pei | Lijun Wu | Zhuoshi Pan | Yu Li | Honglin Lin | Chenlin Ming | Xin Gao | Conghui He | Rui Yan
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive progress in mathematical reasoning. While data augmentation is promising to enhance mathematical problem-solving ability, current approaches are predominantly limited to instance-level modifications—such as rephrasing or generating syntactic variations—which fail to capture and leverage the intrinsic relational structures inherent in mathematical knowledge. Inspired by human learning processes, where mathematical proficiency develops through systematic exposure to interconnected concepts, we introduce MathFusion, a novel framework that enhances mathematical reasoning through cross-problem instruction synthesis. MathFusion implements this through three fusion strategies: (1) sequential fusion, which chains related problems to model solution dependencies; (2) parallel fusion, which combines analogous problems to reinforce conceptual understanding; and (3) conditional fusion, which creates context-aware selective problems to enhance reasoning flexibility. By applying these strategies, we generate a new dataset, MathFusionQA, followed by fine-tuning models (DeepSeekMath-7B, Mistral-7B, Llama3-8B) on it. Experimental results demonstrate that MathFusion achieves substantial improvements in mathematical reasoning while maintaining high data efficiency, boosting performance by 18.0 points in accuracy across diverse benchmarks while requiring only 45K additional synthetic instructions, representing a substantial improvement over traditional single-instruction approaches.