Publications

My advisees*. Equal contribution^.

2025

  1. Preprint
    Revisiting Prompt Optimization with Large Reasoning Models-A Case Study on Event Extraction
    Saurabh Srivastava*, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.07357, 2025
    PDF
  2. Preprint
    Failure by Interference: Language Models Make Balanced Parentheses Errors When Faulty Mechanisms Overshadow Sound Ones
    Daking Rai*, Samuel Miller*, Kevin Moran, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.00322, 2025
    PDF
  3. Preprint
    A Practical Review of Mechanistic Interpretability for Transformer-Based Language Models
    Daking Rai*, Yilun Zhou, Shi Feng, Abulhair Saparov, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.02646 (Version 2), 2025
    PDF Website
  4. Preprint
    A Survey on Large Language Models for Automated Planning
    Mohamed Aghzal*, Erion Plaku, Gregory J Stein, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12435, 2025
    PDF
  5. Preprint
    Reassessing Code Authorship Attribution in the Era of Language Models
    Atish Kumar Dipongkor, Ziyu Yao, and Kevin Moran
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.17120, 2025
    PDF
  6. Preprint
    Guiding AI to Fix Its Own Flaws: An Empirical Study on LLM-Driven Secure Code Generation
    Hao Yan*, Swapneel Suhas Vaidya, Xiaokuan Zhang, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.23034, 2025
    PDF
  7. EMNLP’25
    Feature Extraction and Steering for Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models
    Zihao Li, Xu Wang, Yuzhe Yang, Ziyu Yao, Haoyi Xiong, and Mengnan Du
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.15634 (to appear at EMNLP 2025 Main), 2025
    PDF
  8. EMNLP’25
    All for One: LLMs Solve Mental Math at the Last Token With Information Transferred From Other Tokens
    Siddarth Mamidanna*, Daking Rai*, Ziyu Yao, and Yilun Zhou
    To appear at EMNLP 2025 Main, 2025
    PDF
  9. EMNLP’25 Findings
    A survey on sparse autoencoders: Interpreting the internal mechanisms of large language models
    Dong Shu, Xuansheng Wu, Haiyan Zhao, Daking Rai*, Ziyu Yao, Ninghao Liu, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.05613 (to appear at EMNLP 2025 Findings), 2025
    PDF
  10. EMNLP’25 Findings
    Beneath the Surface: How Large Language Models Reflect Hidden Bias
    Jinhao Pan, Chahat Raj, Ziyu Yao, and Ziwei Zhu
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.19749 (to appear at EMNLP 2025 Findings), 2025
    PDF
  11. COLM’25W
    Can LLMs Simulate Personas with Reversed Performance? A Benchmark for Counterfactual Instruction Following
    Sai Adith Senthil Kumar^*, Hao Yan^*, Saipavan Perepa*, Murong Yue*, and Ziyu Yao
    COLM Workshop on Social Simulation with LLMs, 2025
    PDF
  12. ACL’25 Findings
    Efficient but Vulnerable: Benchmarking and Defending LLM Batch Prompting Attack
    Murong Yue*, and Ziyu Yao
    Findings of ACL 2025, 2025
    PDF Code
  13. ACL’25 Findings
    Instruction-Tuning LLMs for Event Extraction with Annotation Guidelines
    Saurabh Srivastava^*, Sweta Pati^*, and Ziyu Yao
    Findings of ACL 2025, 2025
    PDF Code
  14. IROS’25
    Autospatial: Visual-language reasoning for social robot navigation through efficient spatial reasoning learning
    Yangzhe Kong, Daeun Song, Jing Liang, Dinesh Manocha, Ziyu Yao, and Xuesu Xiao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.07557 (to appear at IROS 2025), 2025
    PDF
  15. AAAI’25W
    Mechanistic Understanding of Language Models in Syntactic Code Completion
    Samuel Miller^*, Daking Rai^*, and Ziyu Yao
    AAAI Workshop on Towards Knowledgeable Foundation Models, 2025
    PDF
  16. CVPR’25
    Evaluating Vision-Language Models as Evaluators in Path Planning
    Mohamed Aghzal*, Xiang Yue, Erion Plaku, and Ziyu Yao
    IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
    PDF Code
  17. ICLR’25
    DOTS: Learning to Reason Dynamically in LLMs via Optimal Reasoning Trajectories Search
    Murong Yue*, Wenlin Yao, Haitao Mi, Dian Yu, Ziyu Yao, and Dong Yu
    The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025
    PDF
  18. AAAI’25W
    MathVC: An LLM-Simulated Multi-Character Virtual Classroom for Mathematics Education
    (Invited Presentation at Wolfram Research LLM Agent Colloquium)
    Murong Yue^*, Wenhan Lyu^, Wijdane Mifdal*, Yixuan Zhang, Jennifer Suh, and Ziyu Yao
    AAAI AI4Edu Workshop, 2025
    PDF Website

2024

  1. Preprint
    Understanding the Effect of Algorithm Transparency of Model Explanations in Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing
    Daking Rai*, Rydia R Weiland, Kayla Margaret Gabriella Herrera, Tyler H Shaw, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.16283, 2024
    PDF
  2. Preprint
    IntelliExplain: Enhancing Conversational Code Generation for Non-Professional Programmers
    Hao Yan*, Thomas D. Latoza, and Ziyu Yao
    arXiv Preprint, 2024
    PDF Code Website
  3. EMNLP’24
    Navigating the Shortcut Maze: A Comprehensive Analysis of Shortcut Learning in Text Classification by Language Models
    Yuqing Zhou, Ruixiang Tang, Ziyu Yao, and Ziwei Zhu
    Findings of EMNLP, 2024
    PDF Code
  4. CASE’24
    Look Further Ahead: Testing the Limits of GPT-4 in Path Planning
    Mohamed Aghzal*, Erion Plaku, and Ziyu Yao
    IEEE CASE 2024 (also present at AAAI 2025 LM4Plan Workshop), 2024
    PDF Code
  5. ACL’24
    An Investigation of Neuron Activation as a Unified Lens to Explain Chain-of-Thought Eliciting Arithmetic Reasoning of LLMs
    (Covered by MIT Technology Review China [English Translate])
    Daking Rai*, and Ziyu Yao
    ACL, 2024
    PDF Code Website
  6. ACL’24
    Instances Need More Care: Rewriting Prompts for Instances with LLMs in the Loop Yields Better Zero-Shot Performance
    Saurabh Srivastava*, Chengyue Huang, Weiguo Fan, and Ziyu Yao
    Findings of ACL, 2024
    PDF Code
  7. ICLR’24W
    Can Large Language Models be Good Path Planners? A Benchmark and Investigation on Spatial-temporal Reasoning
    Mohamed Aghzal*, Erion Plaku, and Ziyu Yao
    ICLR Workshop on LLM Agents, 2024
    PDF Code
  8. Preprint
    Lens: A Foundation Model for Network Traffic
    Qineng Wang, Chen Qian, Xiaochang Li, Ziyu Yao, and Huajie Shao
    arXiv Preprint, 2024
    PDF
  9. ICLR’24
    Large Language Model Cascades with Mixture of Thoughts Representations for Cost-efficient Reasoning
    (Featured in Hugging Face Daily Papers)
    Murong Yue*, Jie Zhao, Min Zhang, Liang Du, and Ziyu Yao
    The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (also at ICLR Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models), 2024
    PDF Code

2023

  1. EMNLP’23 Demo
    Gentopia: A Collaborative Platform for Tool-Augmented LLMs
    (An open-source planform for creating, evaluating, and community-sharing Augmented Language Model (ALM)-based Agents)
    Binfeng Xu, Xukun Liu, Hua Shen, Zeyu Han, Yuhan Li, Murong Yue*, and 4 more authors
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.04030 (to appear at EMNLP’23), 2023
    PDF Code
  2. EMNLP’23
    MAILEX: Email Event and Argument Extraction
    Saurabh Srivastava*, Gaurav Singh*, Shou Matsumoto, Ali Raz, Paulo Costa, Joshua Poore, and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.13469 (to appear at EMNLP’23), 2023
    PDF Code
  3. ACL’23
    Improving Generalization in Language Model-based Text-to-SQL Semantic Parsing: Two Simple Semantic Boundary-based Techniques
    (Rank#8 on Spider leaderboard as of Aug 2023)
    Daking Rai*, Bailin Wang, Yilun Zhou, and Ziyu Yao
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), 2023
    PDF Code
  4. ACL’23
    Learning to Simulate Natural Language Feedback for Interactive Semantic Parsing
    Hao Yan*, Saurabh Srivastava*, Yintao Tai*, Sida I. Wang, Wen-tau Yih, and Ziyu Yao
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2023
    PDF Code
  5. AAAI’23 SA
    Explaining Large Language Model-Based Neural Semantic Parsers (Student Abstract)
    Daking Rai*, Yilun Zhou, Bailin Wang, and Ziyu Yao
    AAAI Student Abstract, 2023
    PDF
  6. JBP’23
    A paradigm shift from “human writing” to “machine generation” in personality test development: An application of state-of-the-art natural language processing
    (Editor Commendation, one of 13 out of 1,000+ submissions in 2022)
    Philseok Lee, Shea Fyffe, Mina Son, Zihao Jia, and Ziyu Yao
    Journal of Business and Psychology, 2023
    PDF

2022

  1. EMNLP’22
    UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models
    Tianbao Xie^, Chen Henry Wu^, Peng Shi, Ruiqi Zhong, Torsten Scholak, Michihiro Yasunaga, and 17 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2022
    PDF Code Website
  2. ICLR’22 DL4Code
    Code Editing from Few Exemplars by Adaptive Multi-Extent Composition
    Peizhao Li, Xuchao Zhang, Ziyu Yao, Wei Cheng, Haifeng Chen, and Hongfu Liu
    In Deep Learning for Code Workshop at International Conference on Learning Representations, 2022
    PDF
  3. ACL’22
    Synthetic Question Value Estimation for Domain Adaptation of Question Answering
    Xiang Yue, Ziyu Yao, and Huan Sun
    In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2022
    PDF Code

2021

  1. Dissertation
    On Advancing Natural Language Interfaces: Data Collection, Model Development, and User Interaction
    Ziyu Yao
    2021
    PDF
  2. ICLR’21
    Learning Structural Edits via Incremental Tree Transformations
    Ziyu Yao, Frank F. Xu, Pengcheng Yin, Huan Sun, and Graham Neubig
    In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2021
    PDF Code
  3. BIBM’21
    Cliniqg4qa: Generating diverse questions for domain adaptation of clinical question answering
    (Best Paper Award)
    Xiang Yue, Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Ziyu Yao, Simon Lin, and Huan Sun
    In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM), 2021
    PDF Code

2020

  1. EMNLP’20
    An Imitation Game for Learning Semantic Parsers from User Interaction
    Ziyu Yao, Yiqi Tang, Wen-tau Yih, Huan Sun, and Yu Su
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020
    PDF Code Slides

2019

  1. EMNLP-IJCNLP’19
    Model-based Interactive Semantic Parsing: A Unified Framework and A Text-to-SQL Case Study
    Ziyu Yao, Yu Su, Huan Sun, and Wen-tau Yih
    In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), 2019
    PDF Code
  2. ACL’19
    Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning for Conversational Question Generation
    Boyuan Pan, Hao Li, Ziyu Yao, Deng Cai, and Huan Sun
    In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2019
    PDF Code
  3. WWW’19
    CoaCor: Code annotation for code retrieval with reinforcement learning
    Ziyu Yao, Jayavardhan Reddy Peddamail, and Huan Sun
    In The World Wide Web Conference, 2019
    PDF Code
  4. AAAI’19
    Interactive semantic parsing for if-then recipes via hierarchical reinforcement learning
    Ziyu Yao, Xiujun Li, Jianfeng Gao, Brian Sadler, and Huan Sun
    In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2019
    PDF Code Poster Slides

2018

  1. KDD’18 DL Day
    A comprehensive study of staqc for deep code summarization
    Jayavardhan Reddy Peddamail, Ziyu Yao, Zhen Wang, and Huan Sun
    In Deep Learning Day at KDD, 2018
    PDF
  2. WWW’18
    Staqc: A systematically mined question-code dataset from stack overflow
    Ziyu Yao, Daniel S Weld, Wei-Peng Chen, and Huan Sun
    In Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference, 2018
    PDF Code Slides

2016

  1. AAAI’16
    Semi-supervised multinomial naive bayes for text classification by leveraging word-level statistical constraint
    Li Zhao, Minlie Huang, Ziyu Yao, Rongwei Su, Yingying Jiang, and Xiaoyan Zhu
    In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2016
    PDF