Yanjun Zhao
2026
Mem-Gallery: Benchmarking Multimodal Long-Term Conversational Memory for MLLM Agents
Yuanchen Bei | Tianxin Wei | Xuying Ning | Yanjun Zhao | Zhining Liu | Xiao Lin | Yada Zhu | Hendrik Hamann | Jingrui He | Hanghang Tong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yuanchen Bei | Tianxin Wei | Xuying Ning | Yanjun Zhao | Zhining Liu | Xiao Lin | Yada Zhu | Hendrik Hamann | Jingrui He | Hanghang Tong
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Long-term memory is a critical capability for multimodal large language model (MLLM) agents, particularly in conversational settings where information accumulates and evolves over time. However, existing benchmarks either evaluate multi-session memory in text-only conversations or assess multimodal understanding within localized contexts, failing to evaluate how multimodal memory is preserved, organized, and evolved across long-term conversational trajectories. Thus, we introduce Mem-Gallery, a new benchmark for evaluating multimodal long-term conversational memory in MLLM agents. Mem-Gallery features high-quality multi-session conversations grounded in both visual and textual information, with long interaction horizons and rich multimodal dependencies. Building on this dataset, we propose a systematic evaluation framework that assesses key memory capabilities along three functional dimensions: memory extraction and test-time adaptation, memory reasoning, and memory knowledge management. Extensive benchmarking across twelve memory systems reveals several key findings, highlighting the necessity of explicit multimodal information retention and memory organization, the persistent limitations in memory reasoning and knowledge management, as well as the efficiency bottleneck of current models. Our benchmark and dataset are available at https://github.com/YuanchenBei/Mem-Gallery.
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs
Yanjun Zhao | Tianxin Wei | Jiaru Zou | Xuying Ning | Yuanchen Bei | Lingjie Chen | Simmi Rana | Wendy H. Yang | Hanghang Tong | Jingrui He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Yanjun Zhao | Tianxin Wei | Jiaru Zou | Xuying Ning | Yuanchen Bei | Lingjie Chen | Simmi Rana | Wendy H. Yang | Hanghang Tong | Jingrui He
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Understanding scientific papers requires more than answering isolated questions or summarizing content. It involves an integrated reasoning process that grounds textual and visual information, interprets experimental evidence, synthesizes information across sources, and critically evaluates scientific claims. However, existing benchmarks typically assess these abilities in isolation, making it difficult to evaluate scientific paper understanding as a unified set of interacting cognitive abilities. In this work, we introduce PaperMind , a benchmark designed to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers. PaperMind is constructed from real scientific papers across seven domains, including agriculture, biology, chemistry, computer science, medicine, physics, and economics. It comprises four complementary task families that collectively operationalize distinct cognitive facets of scientific paper reasoning, including multimodal grounding, experimental interpretation, cross-source evidence reasoning, and critical assessment. By analyzing model behavior across multiple tasks, PaperMind enables a diagnostic evaluation of integrated scientific reasoning behaviors that are difficult to assess through isolated task evaluations. Extensive experiments on both open-source and closed-source multimodal LLMs reveal consistent performance gaps across tasks, highlighting persistent challenges in integrated scientific reasoning and critique. Our benchmark and dataset are available at https://github.com/Yanjun-Zhao/PaperMind.
2025
RIVAL: Reinforcement Learning with Iterative and Adversarial Optimization for Machine Translation
Tianjiao Li | Mengran Yu | Chenyu Shi | Yanjun Zhao | Xiaojing Liu | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang | Qiang Zhang | Jiayin Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Tianjiao Li | Mengran Yu | Chenyu Shi | Yanjun Zhao | Xiaojing Liu | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang | Qiang Zhang | Jiayin Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Large language models (LLMs) possess strong multilingual capabilities, and combining Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) with translation tasks has shown great potential. However, we observe that this paradigm performs unexpectedly poorly when applied to colloquial subtitle translation tasks. In this work, we investigate this issue and find that the offline reward model (RM) gradually diverges from the online LLM due to distributional shift, ultimately leading to undesirable training outcomes. To address this, we propose RIVAL, an adversarial training framework that formulates the process as a min–max game between the RM and the LLM. RIVAL iteratively updates the both models, with the RM trained to distinguish strong from weak translations (qualitative preference reward), and the LLM trained to enhance its translation for closing this gap. To stabilize training and improve generalizability, we also incorporate quantitative preference reward (e.g., BLEU) into the RM, enabling reference-free quality modeling aligned with human evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed training framework significantly improves upon translation baselines.