Yunpu Ma
Author directory2026
DeepLook: Uncertainty-Guided Branching with Lookahead Confidence for Efficient Reasoning
Tingxin Yang | Zefeng Wang | Mengyue Wang | Jinhe Bi | Xingcheng Zhou | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
The Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP
Tingxin Yang | Zefeng Wang | Mengyue Wang | Jinhe Bi | Xingcheng Zhou | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
The Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP
Test-time scaling improves large language model reasoning, but spends compute uniformly along a reasoning trace, even in stretches that are already stable. Motivated by the observation that reasoning failures show an early onset of uncertainty, we introduce DeepLook, a training-free decoding framework that monitors segment-level confidence, branches only at uncertainty bottlenecks, and ranks candidate continuations by Average Lookahead Confidence (ALC)—their mean confidence over fixed-horizon rollouts—before completing and voting over a pruned subset. On four competition mathematics benchmarks across four open models, DeepLook matches or exceeds the accuracy of DeepConf-low in 12 of 16 settings while generating 87.3% fewer tokens, showing that a model’s own confidence is informative enough to decide where extra decoding compute is worth spending. On knowledge-intensive GPQA-Diamond the accuracy advantage disappears even though the token saving does not: coherent hallucinations also receive high ALC, so internal confidence localizes instability, not falsehood. Code will be released upon acceptance.
miniReranker: Efficient Multimodal Reranking through Visual Cache Reuse and Interaction Sparsity
Yingqi Fan | Xuan Lu | Anhao Zhao | Junlong Tong | Ping Nie | Kai Zou | Yunpu Ma | Wei Zhang | Xiaoyu Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Yingqi Fan | Xuan Lu | Anhao Zhao | Junlong Tong | Ping Nie | Kai Zou | Yunpu Ma | Wei Zhang | Xiaoyu Shen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown strong potential as point-wise rerankers by directly modeling query–document relevance through next-token prediction. However, point-wise reranking suffers from substantial repeated computation across query–document pairs, while the causal structure of transformers allows only prefix segments to be reused via pre-caching. To address the misalignment of existing query-first and document-first formats with both VQA-style prompting and computation-aware reuse, we propose a vision-first formulation that improves both cache reuse efficiency and reranking performance. However, the remaining cost is still considerable and stems from three main sources: (1) *model depth*, for which we reduce active parameters via early exit; (2) *cross-segment attention*, which we restrict to a narrow interaction band across a few layers; and (3) *visual tokens*, where we reduce the number of tokens via embedder-guided pruning. Together, these designs form *miniReranker*, which reduces reranking runtime to <1% of the dense implementation under high-reuse settings for a single query, while preserving >96% of the dense model performance.
Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning: Mixture-of-Experts Demands Mixture of Adaptation Modules
Yilun Liu | Yunpu Ma | Yuetian Lu | Shuo Chen | Zifeng Ding | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Yilun Liu | Yunpu Ma | Yuetian Lu | Shuo Chen | Zifeng Ding | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) benefits from a dynamic routing mechanism among their specialized experts, which existing Parameter- Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) strategies often fail to leverage. This motivates us to investigate whether adaptation modules themselves should incorporate routing mechanisms to align with MoE’s multi-expert architecture. We analyze dynamics of core components when applying PEFT to MoE language models, and examine how different routing strategies affect adaptation effectiveness. Extensive experiments adapting OLMoE-1B-7B and Mixtral-8×7B on various commonsense and math reasoning tasks validate the performance and efficiency of our routed approach. We identify optimal configurations for different scenarios and provide empirical analyses with practical insights to facilitate better PEFT and MoE applications.
MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Models
Kailin Jiang | Ning Jiang | Yuntao Du | Yuchen Ren | Yuchen Li | Yifan Gao | Jinhe Bi | Yunpu Ma | Bin Li | Lei Liu | Qing Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Kailin Jiang | Ning Jiang | Yuntao Du | Yuchen Ren | Yuchen Li | Yifan Gao | Jinhe Bi | Yunpu Ma | Bin Li | Lei Liu | Qing Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) encode rich factual knowledge via cross-modal pre-training, yet their static representations struggle to maintain an accurate understanding of time-sensitive knowledge. Existing benchmarks remain constrained by static designs, inadequately evaluating LMMs’ ability to understand time-sensitive knowledge. To address this gap, we propose MINED, a comprehensive benchmark containing 2,104 time-sensitive knowledge samples spanning six knowledge types, which evaluates temporal awareness along 6 key dimensions and 11 challenging tasks: cognition, awareness, trustworthiness, understanding, reasoning, and robustness. Evaluating 15 widely used LMMs on MINED shows that Gemini-2.5-Pro achieves the highest average CEM score of 63.07, while most open-source LMMs still lack time understanding ability. Meanwhile, LMMs perform best on organization knowledge, whereas their performance is weakest on sport. To address these challenges, we investigate the feasibility of updating time-sensitive knowledge in LMMs through knowledge editing methods and observe that LMMs can effectively update knowledge via knowledge editing methods in single editing scenarios.
Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Xiaowen Ma | Yunpu Ma | Chenyang Lin | Sikuan Yan | Jinhe Bi | Zixuan Cao | Yijun Tian | Volker Tresp | Hinrich Schuetze
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. The proposed framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, ANN surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.
PyraVid: Hierarchical Multimodal Memory for Long-Horizon Video Reasoning
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Sikuan Yan | Sicheng Dong | Haotong Wang | Ercong Nie | Yilun Liu | Jinhe Bi | Yingjie Xu | Susanna Schwarzmann | Riccardo Trivisonno | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Memory has become an increasingly important component of agentic systems, as these systems are expected to reason over long-term experience. However, prior work has largely focused on unimodal memory, leaving multimodal memory relatively underexplored despite its central role in real-world applications. Compared with unimodal settings, multimodal memory introduces additional challenges, including heterogeneous input integration, person-centric information alignment, and evidence aggregation across different granularities. We present PyraVid, a hierarchical multimodal memory framework inspired by Event Segmentation Theory from cognitive science. PyraVid organizes long videos into a coarse-to-fine pyramid structure, enabling structured memory access and effective evidence aggregation. It further supports structure-guided memory expansion with pruning, allowing the retrieval of related events with strong causal connectivity but low semantic similarity while reducing noise. Experiments on multiple long-video understanding benchmarks show that PyraVid consistently improves performance across datasets, model scales, and question types, highlighting the effectiveness of hierarchical multimodal memory for long-horizon reasoning.
PRISM: Self-Pruning Intrinsic Selection Method for Training-Free Multimodal Data Selection
Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Zengjie Jin | Yifan Wang | Danqi Yan | Wenke Huang | Xiaowen Ma | Sikuan Yan | Artur Hecker | Mang Ye | Xun Xiao | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Zengjie Jin | Yifan Wang | Danqi Yan | Wenke Huang | Xiaowen Ma | Sikuan Yan | Artur Hecker | Mang Ye | Xun Xiao | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Visual instruction tuning adapts pre-trained Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to follow human instructions for real-world applications. However, rapidly growing instruction datasets introduce substantial redundancy and computational costs. Existing data selection methods aim to prune this redundancy, but predominantly rely on computationally demanding proxy-based inference or training-based metrics, often exacerbating the efficiency bottlenecks they are intended to resolve. To address this challenge, we identify a critical yet overlooked factor: anisotropy in visual feature distributions. We find that this anisotropy induces a Global Semantic Drift that distorts similarity estimates and limits efficient data selection. Motivated by this insight, we devise PRISM, a training-free framework for efficient visual instruction selection. PRISM mitigates the dominant global drift through implicit re-centering, allowing intrinsic visual semantics to provide a reliable redundancy signal without proxy models or additional training. Empirically, PRISM reduces end-to-end GPU time by about 70% while simultaneously enhancing performance, surpassing models fine-tuned on the full dataset across multimodal and language understanding benchmarks and reaching 101.7% relative performance against the full-data baseline.
Routing-Free Mixture of Experts
Yilun Liu | Jinru Han | Sikuan Yan | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yilun Liu | Jinru Han | Sikuan Yan | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Standard Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) designs rely heavily on centralized routing mechanisms that introduce rigid inductive biases. We propose Routing-Free MoE, which eliminates all hard-coded centralized components, including external routers, Softmax, TopK, and fixed load balancing. All related functionalities become encapsulated within individual experts, allowing each expert to determine its activation entirely on its own. We introduce a unified, adaptively scheduled load-balancing framework to simultaneously optimize both expert-balancing and token-balancing objectives through a customizable interpolation, letting optimal resource allocation pattern emerge locally during training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Routing-Free MoE achieves consistently better performance, efficiency, and robustness than baseline approaches at both training and deployment. We further analyze its emergent behavior in detail and offer insights that may facilitate future MoE design and optimization. Code is available at https://liuyilun2000.github.io/RoutingFreeMoE/.
MemWM: Memory-Augmented Text-Based World Model
Yujun Wang | Tao Zhang | Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Wenxuan Ye | Boliang Liu | Sikuan Yan | Shuning Wang | Xuebing Zhou | Soren Pirk | Hinrich Schuetze | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yujun Wang | Tao Zhang | Jinhe Bi | Aniri | Wenxuan Ye | Boliang Liu | Sikuan Yan | Shuning Wang | Xuebing Zhou | Soren Pirk | Hinrich Schuetze | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
World models are increasingly used to support planning in agents by predicting how environment states evolve in response to agent actions. Yet fluent next-state predictions can still omit task-critical facts, corrupt product attributes, or apply incorrect transition rules. To address such systematic prediction errors, we introduce MemWM, a memory-augmented text-based world model. MemWM uses world memory, a curated memory bank of transition rules, state caches, and hard-to-predict facts, to condition next-state imagination. We evaluate factual state preservation with Structured State Fidelity (SSF), which scores predicted states through benchmark-specific facts and fields. Compared with SFT, memory-augmented training improves SSF by up to 206.3%. In the full planning setting, we keep the policy model frozen and provide policy-side world skill: retrieved task-level skills and step-wise corrective guidance for action selection. Across ALFWorld, WebShop, and ScienceWorld, memory-augmented agents improve downstream success over an SFT-trained world-model agent, with up to a 65.4% relative gain. Sensitivity analyses further show that retrieved memory improves task success and efficiency under different memory and action-budget settings.
Policy of Thoughts: Scaling LLM Reasoning via Test-time Policy Evolution
Zhengbo Jiao | Hongyu Xian | Qinglong Wang | Yunpu Ma | Zhebo Wang | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhengbo Jiao | Hongyu Xian | Qinglong Wang | Yunpu Ma | Zhebo Wang | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability from the frozen-policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or rewriting trajectories, without internalizing it to improve reasoning strategies. Inspired by Popper’s “conjectures and refutations,” we posit that effective reasoning requires real-time policy adaptation through learning from failures. We introduce Policy of Thoughts (PoT), a framework that recasts reasoning as a within-instance online optimization process. PoT effectively generates diverse candidates via targeted exploration, then applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update a transient LoRA adapter using execution feedback. This closed-loop design enables dynamic, instance-specific refinement of reasoning priors. Experiments demonstrate PoT’s substantial gains across multiple benchmarks. On LiveCodeBench, a 4B model achieves 49.71% accuracy, surpassing 12 test-time scaling baselines and commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3) despite being over 50 smaller.
Beyond Planning: Sparse Context Reset for Long-Horizon GUI Agents
Weiyao Huang | Xinye Wu | Zeming Liu | Xiaoyu Shen | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weiyao Huang | Xinye Wu | Zeming Liu | Xiaoyu Shen | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by vision-language models (VLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for computer-use automation, but remain unreliable on long-horizon tasks. Existing planner–executor frameworks address this by shifting more reasoning to the planner, thereby decomposing rather than decoupling long-horizon reasoning. Our failure analysis reveals that many long-horizon failures are not pure capability gaps: from the same failure state, executors recover substantially more often when their accumulated context is reset with a locally executable subtask. To bridge this gap, we propose SCoR, a sparse context reset framework that restores the executor’s short-horizon capability by resetting its accumulated task context. At subtask boundaries, a lightweight Refiner emits a locally executable subtask and resets the Executor’s context; the executor then autonomously executes multiple GUI actions within the reset context. We train the Refiner with turn-level GRPO. In OSWorld, SCoR achieves a success rate of 53.16%, yielding a 25.41% relative improvement over the standalone EvoCUA-8B executor. Our code is available at https://github.com/huia711/SCoR.
Beyond FLOPs: Benchmarking Real Inference Acceleration of LLM Pruning under a GEMM-Centric Taxonomy
Haozhe Hu | Hao Wu | Anhao Zhao | Longwei Ding | Peiran Yin | Yunpu Ma | Xiaoyu Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haozhe Hu | Hao Wu | Anhao Zhao | Longwei Ding | Peiran Yin | Yunpu Ma | Xiaoyu Shen
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Pruning has emerged as a dominant paradigm for accelerating large language model (LLM) inference, spanning a broad spectrum of methods that remove computation across tokens, layers, heads, dimensions, and attention patterns. Despite sharing the same objective, these pruning approaches induce fundamentally different execution behaviors, causing realized speedups to depend heavily on hardware and kernel implementations. Consequently, the practical acceleration benefits of different pruning families remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce a GEMM-centric taxonomy that reorganizes existing pruning methods according to the logical M, N, and K dimensions of general matrix multiplication (GEMM). Leveraging this abstraction, we build a unified benchmarking framework that enables implementation-consistent comparison across the pruning design space and systematically characterizes the acceleration–quality Pareto frontier. Our results on Llama3.1-8B show that static depth pruning remains the strongest Pareto-optimal baseline and stays closest to its theoretical acceleration upper bound in memory-bounded scenarios. During prefill, the frontier transitions from static depth at low quality loss (0%–4%), to dynamic depth at moderate loss (5%–16%), and finally to static width pruning at higher loss levels (17%–26%). These findings establish the first unified view of the practical limits of pruning-based LLM acceleration and provide guidance for future pruning research.[Code is available at <https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLM-Pruning/tree/main/PruningInferSim>]
Ask, Answer, or Act: Learning Interaction Modes for Tool-Use Agents
Tianyu Fu | Yangrui Xie | Yunpu Ma | Wanyuan Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Tianyu Fu | Yangrui Xie | Yunpu Ma | Wanyuan Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Robust tool-use agents must navigate mixed-intent interactions, deciding whether to ask for missing information, answer directly, or invoke tools. We tackle this challenge by introducing a novel task formulation that structures the planner’s action space into explicit interaction instructions over an explicit Ask/Answer/Act space, thereby making these behavioral boundaries an explicit target of optimization. In this framework, a planner predicts the interaction mode and semantic payload, while a frozen executor realizes the instruction into an observable behavior. Coupled with this structured decision process, we propose Executor-Grounded Failure-Routed Planner Learning (EFPL). EFPL optimizes the planner via executor-observed outcomes and strategically leverages privileged feedback for targeted correction when outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, further refining these behavioral boundaries. Experiments on BFCL and When2Call across three backbone sizes show that EFPL consistently improves clarification, abstention, when-to-call decisions, and robustness to irrelevant tools, while fully preserving strong multi-turn tool-calling performance.
Mem2Evolve: Towards Self-Evolving Agents via Co-Evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation
Zihao Cheng | Zeming Liu | Yingyu Shan | Xinyi Wang | Xiangrong Zhu | Yunpu Ma | Hongru Wang | Yuhang Guo | Wei Lin | Yunhong Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zihao Cheng | Zeming Liu | Yingyu Shan | Xinyi Wang | Xiangrong Zhu | Yunpu Ma | Hongru Wang | Yuhang Guo | Wei Lin | Yunhong Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
While large language model–powered agents can self-evolve by accumulating experience or by dynamically creating new assets (i.e., tools or expert agents), existing frameworks typically treat these two evolutionary processes in isolation. This separation overlooks their intrinsic interdependence: the former is inherently bounded by a manually predefined static toolset, while the latter generates new assets from scratch without experiential guidance, leading to limited capability growth and unstable evolution. To address this limitation, we introduce a novel paradigm of co-evolutionary Capability Expansion and Experience Distillation. Guided by this paradigm, we propose the Mem2Evolve, which integrates two core components: Experience Memory and Asset Memory. Specifically, Mem2Evolve leverages accumulated experience to guide the dynamic creation of assets, thereby expanding the agent’s capability space while simultaneously acquiring new experience to achieve co-evolution. Extensive experiments across 6 task categories and 8 benchmarks demonstrate that Mem2Evolve achieves improvement of 18.53% over standard LLMs, 11.80% over agents evolving solely through experience, and 6.46% over those evolving solely through asset creation, establishing it as a substantially more effective and stable self-evolving agent framework.
Memory-R1: Enhancing Large Language Model Agents to Manage and Utilize Memories via Reinforcement Learning
Sikuan Yan | Xiufeng Yang | Zuchao Huang | Ercong Nie | Zifeng Ding | Zonggen Li | Xiaowen Ma | Jinhe Bi | Kristian Kersting | Jeff Z. Pan | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Sikuan Yan | Xiufeng Yang | Zuchao Huang | Ercong Nie | Zifeng Ding | Zonggen Li | Xiaowen Ma | Jinhe Bi | Kristian Kersting | Jeff Z. Pan | Hinrich Schuetze | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of NLP tasks, but they remain fundamentally stateless, constrained by limited context windows that hinder long-horizon reasoning. Recent efforts to address this limitation often augment LLMs with an external memory bank, yet most existing pipelines are static and heuristic-driven, lacking a learned mechanism for deciding what to store, update, or retrieve. We present Memory-R1, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that equips LLMs with the ability to actively manage and utilize external memory through two specialized agents: a Memory Manager that learns structured operations, including ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, and NOOP; and an Answer Agent that pre-selects and reasons over relevant entries. Both agents are fine-tuned with outcome-driven RL (PPO and GRPO), enabling adaptive memory management with minimal supervision. With only 152 training QA pairs, Memory-R1 outperforms strong baselines and generalizes across diverse question types, three benchmarks (LoCoMo, MSC, LongMemEval), and multiple model scales (3B–14B).
2025
Improving LLM Reasoning through Interpretable Role-Playing Steering
Anyi Wang | Dong Shu | Yifan Wang | Yunpu Ma | Mengnan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Anyi Wang | Dong Shu | Yifan Wang | Yunpu Ma | Mengnan Du
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Role-playing has emerged as an effective technique for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, existing methods primarily rely on prompt engineering, which often lacks stability and interpretability. In this paper, we introduce Sparse Autoencoder Role-Playing Steering (SRPS), a novel framework that identifies and manipulates internal model features associated with role-playing behavior. Our approach extracts latent representations from role-play prompts, selects the most relevant features based on activation patterns, and constructs a steering vector that can be injected into the model’s residual stream with controllable intensity. Our method enables fine-grained control over role-specific behavior and offers insights into how role information influences internal model activations. Extensive experiments across various reasoning benchmarks and model sizes demonstrate consistent performance gains. Notably, in the zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) setting, the accuracy of Llama3.1-8B on CSQA improves from 31.86% to 39.80%, while Gemma2-9B on SVAMP increases from 37.50% to 45.10%. These results highlight the potential of SRPS to enhance reasoning ability in LLMs, providing better interpretability and stability compared to traditional prompt-based role-playing.
METok: Multi-Stage Event-based Token Compression for Efficient Long Video Understanding
Mengyue Wang | Shuo Chen | Kristian Kersting | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mengyue Wang | Shuo Chen | Kristian Kersting | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (VLLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to understand video content. Nonetheless, processing long videos remains challenging due to high computational demands and the redundancy present in the visual data. In this work, we propose METok, a training-free, Multi-stage Event-based Token compression framework designed to accelerate VLLMs’ inference while preserving accuracy. METok progressively eliminates redundant visual tokens across three critical stages: (1) event-aware compression during vision encoding, (2) hierarchical token pruning in the prefilling stage based on semantic alignment and event importance, and (3) a decoding-stage KV Cache optimization that further reduces memory consumption. Our experiments on diverse video benchmarks demonstrate that METok achieves an optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy by dynamically selecting informative visual tokens. For instance, equipping LongVA-7B with METok realizes an 80.6% FLOPs reduction and 93.5% KV Cache memory savings, all while maintaining comparable or even superior accuracy.
SwarmAgentic: Towards Fully Automated Agentic System Generation via Swarm Intelligence
Yao Zhang | Chenyang Lin | Shijie Tang | Haokun Chen | Shijie Zhou | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yao Zhang | Chenyang Lin | Shijie Tang | Haokun Chen | Shijie Zhou | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The rapid progress of Large Language Models has advanced agentic systems in decision-making, coordination, and task execution. Yet, existing agentic system generation frameworks lack full autonomy, missing from-scratch agent generation, self-optimizing agent functionality, and collaboration, limiting adaptability and scalability. We propose SwarmAgentic, the first framework that fully automates agentic system generation, optimization, and collaboration, constructing agents from scratch and jointly refining functionality and coordination via language-driven exploration. To enable efficient search over system-level structures, SwarmAgentic maintains a population of candidate systems and evolves them via feedback-guided updates, drawing inspiration from Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). We evaluate our method on six real-world, open-ended, and exploratory tasks involving high-level planning, system-level coordination, and creative reasoning. Given only a task description and an objective function, SwarmAgentic outperforms all baselines, achieving a +261.8% relative improvement over ADAS on the TravelPlanner benchmark, highlighting the effectiveness of full automation in structurally unconstrained tasks. This framework marks a significant step toward scalable and autonomous agentic system design, bridging swarm intelligence with fully automated system multi-agent generation.
ImpliRet: Benchmarking the Implicit Fact Retrieval Challenge
Zeinab Sadat Taghavi | Ali Modarressi | Yunpu Ma | Hinrich Schuetze
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zeinab Sadat Taghavi | Ali Modarressi | Yunpu Ma | Hinrich Schuetze
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Retrieval systems are central to many NLP pipelines, but often rely on surface-level cues such as keyword overlap and lexical semantic similarity. To evaluate retrieval beyond these shallow signals, recent benchmarks introduce reasoning-heavy queries; however, they primarily shift the burden to query-side processing techniques – like prompting or multi-hop retrieval – that can help resolve complexity. In contrast, we present Impliret, a benchmark that shifts the reasoning challenge to document-side processing: The queries are simple, but relevance depends on facts stated implicitly in documents through temporal (e.g., resolving “two days ago”), arithmetic, and world knowledge relationships. We evaluate a range of sparse and dense retrievers, all of which struggle in this setting: the best nDCG@10 is only 14.91%. We also test whether long-context models can overcome this limitation. But even with a short context of only thirty documents, including the positive document, GPT-o4-mini scores only 55.54%, showing that document-side reasoning remains a challenge. Our codes are available at github.com/ZeinabTaghavi/IMPLIRET.
Language Mixing in Reasoning Language Models: Patterns, Impact, and Internal Causes
Mingyang Wang | Lukas Lange | Heike Adel | Yunpu Ma | Jannik Strötgen | Hinrich Schuetze
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mingyang Wang | Lukas Lange | Heike Adel | Yunpu Ma | Jannik Strötgen | Hinrich Schuetze
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Reasoning language models (RLMs) excel at complex tasks by leveraging a chain-of-thought process to generate structured intermediate steps. However, language mixing, i.e., reasoning steps containing tokens from languages other than the prompt, has been observed in their outputs and shown to affect performance, though its impact remains debated. We present the first systematic study of language mixing in RLMs, examining its patterns, impact, and internal causes across 15 languages, 7 task difficulty levels, and 18 subject areas, and show how all three factors influence language mixing. Moreover, we demonstrate that the choice of reasoning language significantly affects performance: forcing models to reason in Latin or Han scripts via constrained decoding notably improves accuracy. Finally, we show that the script composition of reasoning traces closely aligns with that of the model’s internal representations, indicating that language mixing reflects latent processing preferences in RLMs. Our findings provide actionable insights for optimizing multilingual reasoning and open new directions for reasoning language control to build more interpretable and adaptable RLMs.
LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steering
Jinhe Bi | Yujun Wang | Haokun Chen | Xun Xiao | Artur Hecker | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jinhe Bi | Yujun Wang | Haokun Chen | Xun Xiao | Artur Hecker | Volker Tresp | Yunpu Ma
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) enhance visual tasks by integrating visual representations into large language models (LLMs). The textual modality, inherited from LLMs, enables instruction following and in-context learning, while the visual modality boosts downstream task performance through rich semantic content, spatial information, and grounding capabilities. These modalities work synergistically across various visual tasks. Our research reveals a persistent imbalance between these modalities, with text often dominating output generation during visual instruction tuning, regardless of using full or parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). We found that re-balancing these modalities can significantly reduce trainable parameters, inspiring further optimization of visual instruction tuning. To this end, we introduce Modality Linear Representation-Steering (MoReS), which re-balances intrinsic modalities by steering visual representations through linear transformations in the visual subspace across each model layer. We validated our approach by developing LLaVA Steering, a suite of models using MoReS. Results show that LLaVA Steering requires, on average, 500 times fewer trainable parameters than LoRA while maintaining comparable performance across three visual benchmarks and eight visual question-answering tasks. Finally, we introduce the LLaVA Steering Factory, a platform that enables rapid customization of MLLMs with a component-based architecture, seamlessly integrating state-of-the-art models and evaluating intrinsic modality imbalance. This open-source project facilitates a deeper understanding of MLLMs within the research community.
2024
zrLLM: Zero-Shot Relational Learning on Temporal Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models
Zifeng Ding | Heling Cai | Jingpei Wu | Yunpu Ma | Ruotong Liao | Bo Xiong | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Zifeng Ding | Heling Cai | Jingpei Wu | Yunpu Ma | Ruotong Liao | Bo Xiong | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Modeling evolving knowledge over temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) has become a heated topic. Various methods have been proposed to forecast links on TKGs. Most of them are embedding-based, where hidden representations are learned to represent knowledge graph (KG) entities and relations based on the observed graph contexts. Although these methods show strong performance on traditional TKG forecasting (TKGF) benchmarks, they face a strong challenge in modeling the unseen zero-shot relations that have no prior graph context. In this paper, we try to mitigate this problem as follows. We first input the text descriptions of KG relations into large language models (LLMs) for generating relation representations, and then introduce them into embedding-based TKGF methods. LLM-empowered representations can capture the semantic information in the relation descriptions. This makes the relations, whether seen or unseen, with similar semantic meanings stay close in the embedding space, enabling TKGF models to recognize zero-shot relations even without any observed graph context. Experimental results show that our approach helps TKGF models to achieve much better performance in forecasting the facts with previously unseen relations, while still maintaining their ability in link forecasting regarding seen relations.
GenTKG: Generative Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph with Large Language Models
Ruotong Liao | Xu Jia | Yangzhe Li | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Ruotong Liao | Xu Jia | Yangzhe Li | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have ignited interest in the temporal knowledge graph (tKG) domain, where conventional embedding-based and rule-based methods dominate. The question remains open of whether pre-trained LLMs can understand structured temporal relational data and replace them as the foundation model for temporal relational forecasting. Therefore, we bring temporal knowledge forecasting into the generative setting. However, challenges occur in the huge chasms between complex temporal graph data structure and sequential natural expressions LLMs can handle, and between the enormous data sizes of tKGs and heavy computation costs of finetuning LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented generation framework named GenTKG combining a temporal logical rule-based retrieval strategy and few-shot parameter-efficient instruction tuning to solve the above challenges, respectively. Extensive experiments have shown that GenTKG outperforms conventional methods of temporal relational forecasting with low computation resources using extremely limited training data as few as 16 samples. GenTKG also highlights remarkable cross-domain generalizability with outperforming performance on unseen datasets without re-training, and in-domain generalizability regardless of time split in the same dataset. Our work reveals the huge potential of LLMs in the tKG domain and opens a new frontier for generative forecasting on tKGs. The code and data are released here: https://github.com/mayhugotong/GenTKG.
VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with LLMs
Ruotong Liao | Max Erler | Huiyu Wang | Guangyao Zhai | Gengyuan Zhang | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Ruotong Liao | Max Erler | Huiyu Wang | Guangyao Zhai | Gengyuan Zhang | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA , i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding.VideoINSTA contributes (1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; (2) an event-based temporalreasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; (3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence while balancing temporal factors.Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. Code is released: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.
2022
TempCaps: A Capsule Network-based Embedding Model for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Guirong Fu | Zhao Meng | Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Matthias Schubert | Volker Tresp | Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP
Guirong Fu | Zhao Meng | Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Matthias Schubert | Volker Tresp | Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP
Temporal knowledge graphs store the dynamics of entities and relations during a time period. However, typical temporal knowledge graphs often suffer from incomplete dynamics with missing facts in real-world scenarios. Hence, modeling temporal knowledge graphs to complete the missing facts is important. In this paper, we tackle the temporal knowledge graph completion task by proposing TempCaps, which is a Capsule network-based embedding model for Temporal knowledge graph completion. TempCaps models temporal knowledge graphs by introducing a novel dynamic routing aggregator inspired by Capsule Networks. Specifically, TempCaps builds entity embeddings by dynamically routing retrieved temporal relation and neighbor information. Experimental results demonstrate that TempCaps reaches state-of-the-art performance for temporal knowledge graph completion. Additional analysis also shows that TempCaps is efficient.
2021
Learning Neural Ordinary Equations for Forecasting Future Links on Temporal Knowledge Graphs
Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Yujia Gu | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhen Han | Zifeng Ding | Yunpu Ma | Yujia Gu | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
There has been an increasing interest in inferring future links on temporal knowledge graphs (KG). While links on temporal KGs vary continuously over time, the existing approaches model the temporal KGs in discrete state spaces. To this end, we propose a novel continuum model by extending the idea of neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) to multi-relational graph convolutional networks. The proposed model preserves the continuous nature of dynamic multi-relational graph data and encodes both temporal and structural information into continuous-time dynamic embeddings. In addition, a novel graph transition layer is applied to capture the transitions on the dynamic graph, i.e., edge formation and dissolution. We perform extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets for temporal KG reasoning, showing our model’s superior performance on the future link forecasting task.
TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting
Haohai Sun | Jialun Zhong | Yunpu Ma | Zhen Han | Kun He
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Haohai Sun | Jialun Zhong | Yunpu Ma | Zhen Han | Kun He
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Temporal knowledge graph (TKG) reasoning is a crucial task that has gained increasing research interest in recent years. Most existing methods focus on reasoning at past timestamps to complete the missing facts, and there are only a few works of reasoning on known TKGs to forecast future facts. Compared with the completion task, the forecasting task is more difficult that faces two main challenges: (1) how to effectively model the time information to handle future timestamps? (2) how to make inductive inference to handle previously unseen entities that emerge over time? To address these challenges, we propose the first reinforcement learning method for forecasting. Specifically, the agent travels on historical knowledge graph snapshots to search for the answer. Our method defines a relative time encoding function to capture the timespan information, and we design a novel time-shaped reward based on Dirichlet distribution to guide the model learning. Furthermore, we propose a novel representation method for unseen entities to improve the inductive inference ability of the model. We evaluate our method for this link prediction task at future timestamps. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate substantial performance improvement meanwhile with higher explainability, less calculation, and fewer parameters when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods.
Time-dependent Entity Embedding is not All You Need: A Re-evaluation of Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion Models under a Unified Framework
Zhen Han | Gengyuan Zhang | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhen Han | Gengyuan Zhang | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Various temporal knowledge graph (KG) completion models have been proposed in the recent literature. The models usually contain two parts, a temporal embedding layer and a score function derived from existing static KG modeling approaches. Since the approaches differ along several dimensions, including different score functions and training strategies, the individual contributions of different temporal embedding techniques to model performance are not always clear. In this work, we systematically study six temporal embedding approaches and empirically quantify their performance across a wide range of configurations with about 3000 experiments and 13159 GPU hours. We classify the temporal embeddings into two classes: (1) timestamp embeddings and (2) time-dependent entity embeddings. Despite the common belief that the latter is more expressive, an extensive experimental study shows that timestamp embeddings can achieve on-par or even better performance with significantly fewer parameters. Moreover, we find that when trained appropriately, the relative performance differences between various temporal embeddings often shrink and sometimes even reverse when compared to prior results. For example, TTransE (CITATION), one of the first temporal KG models, can outperform more recent architectures on ICEWS datasets. To foster further research, we provide the first unified open-source framework for temporal KG completion models with full composability, where temporal embeddings, score functions, loss functions, regularizers, and the explicit modeling of reciprocal relations can be combined arbitrarily.
KM-BART: Knowledge Enhanced Multimodal BART for Visual Commonsense Generation
Yiran Xing | Zai Shi | Zhao Meng | Gerhard Lakemeyer | Yunpu Ma | Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yiran Xing | Zai Shi | Zhao Meng | Gerhard Lakemeyer | Yunpu Ma | Roger Wattenhofer
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
We present Knowledge Enhanced Multimodal BART (KM-BART), which is a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model capable of reasoning about commonsense knowledge from multimodal inputs of images and texts. We adapt the generative BART architecture (Lewis et al., 2020) to a multimodal model with visual and textual inputs. We further develop novel pretraining tasks to improve the model performance on the Visual Commonsense Generation (VCG) task. In particular, our pretraining task of Knowledge-based Commonsense Generation (KCG) boosts model performance on the VCG task by leveraging commonsense knowledge from a large language model pretrained on external commonsense knowledge graphs. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a dedicated task for improving model performance on the VCG task. Experimental results show that our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on the VCG task (Park et al., 2020) by applying these novel pretraining tasks.
2020
DyERNIE: Dynamic Evolution of Riemannian Manifold Embeddings for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Zhen Han | Peng Chen | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Zhen Han | Peng Chen | Yunpu Ma | Volker Tresp
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
There has recently been increasing interest in learning representations of temporal knowledge graphs (KGs), which record the dynamic relationships between entities over time. Temporal KGs often exhibit multiple simultaneous non-Euclidean structures, such as hierarchical and cyclic structures. However, existing embedding approaches for temporal KGs typically learn entity representations and their dynamic evolution in the Euclidean space, which might not capture such intrinsic structures very well. To this end, we propose DyERNIE, a non-Euclidean embedding approach that learns evolving entity representations in a product of Riemannian manifolds, where the composed spaces are estimated from the sectional curvatures of underlying data. Product manifolds enable our approach to better reflect a wide variety of geometric structures on temporal KGs. Besides, to capture the evolutionary dynamics of temporal KGs, we let the entity representations evolve according to a velocity vector defined in the tangent space at each timestamp. We analyze in detail the contribution of geometric spaces to representation learning of temporal KGs and evaluate our model on temporal knowledge graph completion tasks. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate significantly improved performance, indicating that the dynamics of multi-relational graph data can be more properly modeled by the evolution of embeddings on Riemannian manifolds.
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- Volker Tresp 17
- Jinhe Bi 8
- Hinrich Schütze 6
- Sikuan Yan 6
- Zifeng Ding 5
- Zhen Han 5
- Ruotong Liao 3
- Yilun Liu 3
- Xiaowen Ma 3
- Xiaoyu Shen 3
- Aniri 2
- Haokun Chen 2
- Shuo Chen 2
- Artur Hecker 2
- Kristian Kersting 2
- Chenyang Lin 2
- Zeming Liu 2
- Zhao Meng 2
- Ercong Nie 2
- Mengyue Wang 2
- Yifan Wang 2
- Yujun Wang 2
- Roger Wattenhofer 2
- Xun Xiao 2
- Gengyuan Zhang 2
- Anhao Zhao 2
- Heike Adel 1
- Heling Cai 1
- Zixuan Cao 1
- Peng Chen 1
- Zihao Cheng 1
- Longwei Ding 1
- Sicheng Dong 1
- Mengnan Du 1
- Yuntao Du 1
- Max Erler 1
- Yingqi Fan 1
- Guirong Fu 1
- Tianyu Fu 1
- Yifan Gao 1
- Yujia Gu 1
- Yuhang Guo (郭宇航) 1
- Jinru Han 1
- Meng Han 1
- Kun He 1
- Haozhe Hu 1
- Weiyao Huang 1
- Wenke Huang 1
- Zuchao Huang 1
- Xu Jia 1
- Kailin Jiang 1
- Ning Jiang 1
- Zhengbo Jiao 1
- Zengjie Jin 1
- Dezhang Kong 1
- Gerhard Lakemeyer 1
- Lukas Lange 1
- Bin Li 1
- Qing Li 1
- Yangzhe Li 1
- Yuchen Li 1
- Zonggen Li 1
- Wei Lin 1
- Boliang Liu 1
- Lei Liu 1
- Xuan Lu 1
- Yuetian Lu 1
- Ali Modarressi 1
- Ping Nie 1
- Jeff Z. Pan 1
- Soren Pirk 1
- Yuchen Ren 1
- Matthias Schubert 1
- Susanna Schwarzmann 1
- Yingyu Shan 1
- Zai Shi 1
- Dong Shu 1
- Jannik Strötgen 1
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