Xun Yang
2026
TableVista: Benchmarking Multimodal Table Reasoning under Visual and Structural Complexity
Zheyuan Yang | Liqiang Shang | Junjie Chen | Xun Yang | Chenglong Xu | Bo Yuan | Chenyuan Jiao | Yaoru Sun | Yilun Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zheyuan Yang | Liqiang Shang | Junjie Chen | Xun Yang | Chenglong Xu | Bo Yuan | Chenyuan Jiao | Yaoru Sun | Yilun Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
We introduce TableVista, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating foundation models in multimodal table reasoning under visual and structural complexity. TableVista consists of 3,000 high-quality table reasoning problems, where each instance is expanded into 10 distinct visual variants through our multi-style rendering and transformation pipeline. This process encompasses diverse scenario styles, robustness perturbations, and vision-only configurations, culminating in 30,000 multimodal samples for a multi-dimensional evaluation. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 29 state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary foundation models on TableVista. Through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that while evaluated models remain largely stable across diverse rendering styles, they exhibit pronounced performance degradation on complex structural layouts and vision-only settings, revealing that current models struggle to maintain reasoning consistency when structural complexity combines with visually integrated presentations. These findings highlight critical gaps in current multimodal capabilities, providing insights for advancing more robust and reliable table understanding models.
Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning
Chongyuan Dai | Jinpeng Hu | Hongchang Shi | Zhuo Li | Dan Guo | Xun Yang | Meng Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Chongyuan Dai | Jinpeng Hu | Hongchang Shi | Zhuo Li | Dan Guo | Xun Yang | Meng Wang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Amidst a shortage of qualified mental health professionals, the integration of large language models (LLMs) into psychological applications offers a promising way to alleviate the growing burden of mental health disorders. Recent reasoning-augmented LLMs have achieved remarkable performance in mathematics and programming, while research in the psychological domain has predominantly emphasized emotional support and empathetic dialogue, with limited attention to reasoning mechanisms that are beneficial to generating accurate responses. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Psyche-R1, the first Chinese psychological LLM that jointly integrates empathy, psychological expertise, and reasoning, built upon a novel data curation pipeline. Specifically, we design a comprehensive data synthesis pipeline that produces over 75k high-quality psychological questions paired with detailed rationales, generated through and iterative prompt-rationale optimization procedure, along with 73k empathetic dialogues. Subsequently, we employ a hybrid training strategy wherein challenging samples are identified through a multi-LLM cross-selection strategy for group relative policy optimization (GRPO) to improve reasoning ability, while the remaining data are used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to enhance empathetic response generation and psychological domain knowledge. Extensive experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness of Psyche-R1 across several psychological benchmarks, where our 7B Psyche-R1 achieves comparable results to 671B DeepSeek-R1.
Maximizing Local Entropy Where It Matters: Prefix-Aware Localized LLM Unlearning
Naixin Zhai | Pengyang Shao | Binbin Zheng | Yonghui Yang | Fei Shen | Long Bai | Xun Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Naixin Zhai | Pengyang Shao | Binbin Zheng | Yonghui Yang | Fei Shen | Long Bai | Xun Yang
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Machine unlearning aims to forget sensitive knowledge from Large Language Models (LLMs) while maintaining general utility. However, existing approaches typically treat all tokens in a response indiscriminately and enforce uncertainty over the entire vocabulary. This global treatment results in unnecessary utility degradation and extends optimization to content-agnostic regions. To address these limitations, we propose PALU (Prefix-Aware Localized Unlearning), a framework driven by a local entropy maximization objective across both temporal and vocabulary dimensions. PALU reveals that (i) suppressing the sensitive prefix alone is sufficient to sever the causal generation link, and (ii) flattening only the top-K logits is adequate to maximize uncertainty in the critical subspace. These findings allow PALU to alleviate redundant optimization across the full vocabulary and parameter space while minimizing collateral damage to general model performance. Comprehensive evaluations validate that PALU achieves superior forgetting efficacy and utility preservation compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/nxZhai/PALU.
2025
Enhancing Partially Relevant Video Retrieval with Robust Alignment Learning
Long Zhang | Peipei Song | Jianfeng Dong | Kun Li | Xun Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Long Zhang | Peipei Song | Jianfeng Dong | Kun Li | Xun Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Partially Relevant Video Retrieval (PRVR) aims to retrieve untrimmed videos partially relevant to a given query. The core challenge lies in learning robust query-video alignment against spurious semantic correlations arising from inherent data uncertainty: 1) query ambiguity, where the query incompletely characterizes the target video and often contains uninformative tokens, and 2) partial video relevance, where abundant query-irrelevant segments introduce contextual noise in cross-modal alignment. Existing methods often focus on enhancing multi-scale clip representations and retrieving the most relevant clip. However, the inherent data uncertainty in PRVR renders them vulnerable to distractor videos with spurious similarities, leading to suboptimal performance. To fill this research gap, we propose Robust Alignment Learning (RAL) framework, which explicitly models the uncertainty in data. Key innovations include: 1) we pioneer probabilistic modeling for PRVR by encoding videos and queries as multivariate Gaussian distributions. This not only quantifies data uncertainty but also enables proxy-level matching to capture the variability in cross-modal correspondences; 2) we consider the heterogeneous informativeness of query words and introduce learnable confidence gates to dynamically weight similarity. As a plug-and-play solution, RAL can be seamlessly integrated into the existing architectures. Extensive experiments across diverse retrieval backbones demonstrate its effectiveness.
MultiAgentESC: A LLM-based Multi-Agent Collaboration Framework for Emotional Support Conversation
Yangyang Xu | Jinpeng Hu | Zhuoer Zhao | Zhangling Duan | Xiao Sun | Xun Yang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Yangyang Xu | Jinpeng Hu | Zhuoer Zhao | Zhangling Duan | Xiao Sun | Xun Yang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The development of Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) systems is critical for delivering mental health support tailored to the needs of help-seekers. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have contributed to progress in this domain, while most existing studies focus on generating responses directly and overlook the integration of domain-specific reasoning and expert interaction.Therefore, in this paper, we propose a training-free Multi-Agent collaboration framework for ESC (MultiAgentESC).The framework is designed to emulate the human-like process of providing emotional support through three stages: dialogue analysis, strategy deliberation, and response generation.At each stage, a multi-agent system is employed to iteratively enhance information understanding and reasoning, simulating real-world decision-making processes by incorporating diverse interactions among these expert agents.Additionally, we introduce a novel response-centered approach to handle the one-to-many problem on strategy selection, where multiple valid strategies are initially employed to generate diverse responses, followed by the selection of the optimal response through multi-agent collaboration.Experiments on the ESConv dataset reveal that our proposed framework excels at providing emotional support as well as diversifying support strategy selection.
2024
Finding and Editing Multi-Modal Neurons in Pre-Trained Transformers
Haowen Pan | Yixin Cao | Xiaozhi Wang | Xun Yang | Meng Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Haowen Pan | Yixin Cao | Xiaozhi Wang | Xun Yang | Meng Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Understanding the internal mechanisms by which multi-modal large language models (LLMs) interpret different modalities and integrate cross-modal representations is becoming increasingly critical for continuous improvements in both academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify key neurons for interpretability — how multi-modal LLMs bridge visual and textual concepts for captioning. Our method improves conventional works upon efficiency and applied range by removing needs of costly gradient computation. Based on those identified neurons, we further design a multi-modal knowledge editing method, beneficial to mitigate sensitive words or hallucination. For rationale of our design, we provide theoretical assumption. For empirical evaluation, we have conducted extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. The results not only validate the effectiveness of our methods, but also offer insightful findings that highlight three key properties of multi-modal neurons: sensitivity, specificity and causal-effect, to shed light for future research.
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- Jinpeng Hu 2
- Long Bai 1
- Yixin Cao 1
- Junjie Chen 1
- Chongyuan Dai 1
- Jianfeng Dong 1
- Zhangling Duan 1
- Dan Guo 1
- Chenyuan Jiao 1
- Kun Li 1
- Zhuo Li 1
- Haowen Pan 1
- Liqiang Shang 1
- Pengyang Shao 1
- Fei Shen 1
- Hongchang Shi 1
- Peipei Song 1
- Xiao Sun 1
- Yaoru Sun 1
- Xiaozhi Wang 1
- Meng Wang 1
- Meng Wang 1
- Yangyang Xu 1
- Chenglong Xu 1
- Zheyuan Yang 1
- Yonghui Yang 1
- Bo Yuan 1
- Naixin Zhai 1
- Long Zhang 1
- Zhuoer Zhao 1
- Yilun Zhao 1
- Binbin Zheng 1