Zhengying Liu

dblp:241/1782 · DBLP profile ↗
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19ranked-venue papers
2as first author
15since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · conflict

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 17 · 2 first-author · 13 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1 · 1 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 ToolACE: Winning the Points of LLM Function Calling
abstract
Function calling significantly extends the application boundary of large language models (LLMs), where high-quality and diverse training data is critical for unlocking this capability. However, collecting and annotating real function-calling data is challenging, while synthetic data from existing pipelines often lack coverage and accuracy. In this paper, we present ToolACE, an automatic agentic pipeline designed to generate accurate, complex, and diverse tool-learning data, specifically tailored to the capabilities of LLMs. ToolACE leverages a novel self-evolution synthesis process to curate a comprehensive API pool of 26,507 diverse APIs. Dialogs are further generated through the interplay among multiple agents, under the guidance of a complexity evaluator. To ensure data accuracy, we implement a dual-layer verification system combining rule-based and model-based checks. We demonstrate that models trained on our synthesized data---even with only 8B parameters---achieve state-of-the-art performance, comparable to the latest GPT-4 models. Our model and a subset of the data are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/Team-ACE.
Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang 0008, Xingshan Zeng, Xinlong Hao, Dexun Li, Shuai Wang 0020, Weinan Gan, Zhengying Liu, Yuanqing Yu, Zezhong Wang 0004, Yuxian Wang, Wu Ning, Yutai Hou, Bin Wang 0004, Chuhan Wu, Yong Liu 0020, Yasheng Wang, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang 0002, Ruiming Tang, Defu Lian, Qun Liu 0001, Enhong Chen
ICLR9
2025 FormalAlign: Automated Alignment Evaluation for Autoformalization
abstract
Autoformalization aims to convert informal mathematical proofs into machine-verifiable formats, bridging the gap between natural and formal languages. However, ensuring semantic alignment between the informal and formalized statements remains challenging. Existing approaches heavily rely on manual verification, hindering scalability. To address this, we introduce FormalAlign, a framework for automatically evaluating the alignment between natural and formal languages in autoformalization. FormalAlign trains on both the autoformalization sequence generation task and the representational alignment between input and output, employing a dual loss that combines a pair of mutually enhancing autoformalization and alignment tasks. Evaluated across four benchmarks augmented by our proposed misalignment strategies, FormalAlign demonstrates superior performance. In our experiments, FormalAlign outperforms GPT-4, achieving an Alignment-Selection Score 11.58\% higher on \forml-Basic (99.21\% vs. 88.91\%) and 3.19\% higher on MiniF2F-Valid (66.39\% vs. 64.34\%). This effective alignment evaluation significantly reduces the need for manual verification.
Jianqiao Lu, Yingjia Wan, Yinya Huang, Zhengying Liu, Zhijiang Guo
ICLR5
2025 Uncovering human behavioral heterogeneity in urban mobility under the impacts of disruptive weather events
abstract
Understanding the response of human mobility to disruptive weather events is beneficial for the development of urban risk mitigation and emergency response policies, thus enhancing urban resilience. Most human mobility studies relying on aggregate flow data inevitably neglect the heterogeneity of disaggregate travel patterns with distinctive spatiotemporal characteristics, causing the uncertainty problem for identifying meaningful travel behaviors. Moreover, there is a lack of robust methodological approaches to extracting stable and genuine travel patterns under normal or disruptive situations. To address these issues, this study proposes a data-driven approach to spatiotemporal flow decomposition based on non-negative matrix factorization. With sparseness factored in the decomposition, stable disaggregate travel patterns can be extracted from origin-destination mobility flows. By combining temporal, spatial, and urban functional perspectives, heterogeneous travel behaviors can be analyzed and inferred. With a case study of the Zhengzhou ‘7.20’ heavy rainfall in 2021, the most extreme rainfall ever recorded in China, this study validated the effectiveness of the proposed approach and managed to identify representative and interesting travel patterns and behaviors, facilitating a better understanding of human travel behaviors under external impacts. In practice, this study can provide valuable insights for coping strategies in the face of increasingly frequent disruptive events.
Zhaoya Gong, Zhicheng Deng, Junqing Tang, Zhengying Liu
Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Sci.5
2024 Gaining Wisdom from Setbacks: Aligning Large Language Models via Mistake Analysis
abstract
The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has not only provided numerous opportunities but also presented significant challenges. This becomes particularly evident when LLMs inadvertently generate harmful or toxic content, either unintentionally or because of intentional inducement. Existing alignment methods usually direct LLMs toward the favorable outcomes by utilizing human-annotated, flawless instruction-response pairs. Conversely, this study proposes a novel alignment technique based on mistake analysis, which deliberately exposes LLMs to erroneous content to learn the reasons for mistakes and how to avoid them. In this case, mistakes are repurposed into valuable data for alignment, effectively helping to avoid the production of erroneous responses. Without external models or human annotations, our method leverages a model's intrinsic ability to discern undesirable mistakes and improves the safety of its generated responses. Experimental results reveal that our method outperforms existing alignment approaches in enhancing model safety while maintaining the overall utility.
Kai Chen 0023, Chunwei Wang, Jianhua Han, Lanqing Hong, Fei Mi, Hang Xu 0004, Zhengying Liu, Wenyong Huang, Zhenguo Li, Dit-Yan Yeung, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang 0002, Qun Liu 0001
ICLR8
2024 MUSTARD: Mastering Uniform Synthesis of Theorem and Proof Data
abstract
Recent large language models (LLMs) have witnessed significant advancement in various tasks, including mathematical reasoning and theorem proving. As these two tasks require strict and formal multi-step inference, they are appealing domains for exploring the reasoning ability of LLMs but still face important challenges. Previous studies such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) have revealed the effectiveness of intermediate steps guidance. However, such step-wise annotation requires heavy labor, leading to insufficient training steps for current benchmarks. To fill this gap, this work introduces MUSTARD, a data generation framework that masters uniform synthesis of theorem and proof data of high quality and diversity. MUSTARD synthesizes data in three stages: (1) It samples a few mathematical concept seeds as the problem category. (2) Then, it prompts a generative language model with the sampled concepts to obtain both the problems and their step-wise formal solutions. (3) Lastly, the framework utilizes a proof assistant (e.g., Lean Prover) to filter the valid proofs. With the proposed MUSTARD, we present a theorem-and-proof benchmark MUSTARDSAUCE with 5,866 valid data points. Each data point contains an informal statement, an informal proof, and a translated formal proof that passes the prover validation. We perform extensive analysis and demonstrate that MUSTARD generates validated high-quality step-by-step data. We further apply the MUSTARDSAUCE for fine-tuning smaller language models. The fine-tuned Llama 2-7B achieves a 15.41% average relative performance gain in automated theorem proving, and 8.18% in math word problems. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/Eleanor-H/MUSTARD.
Yinya Huang, Xiaohan Lin, Zhengying Liu, Qingxing Cao, Huajian Xin, Zhenguo Li, Linqi Song, Xiaodan Liang
ICLR3
2024 Large Language Models as Automated Aligners for benchmarking Vision-Language Models
abstract
With the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have reached a new level of sophistication, showing notable competence in executing intricate cognition and reasoning tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks, primarily relying on rigid, hand-crafted datasets to measure task-specific performance, face significant limitations in assessing the alignment of these increasingly anthropomorphic models with human intelligence. In this work, we address the limitations via Auto-Bench, which delves into exploring LLMs as proficient aligners, measuring the alignment between VLMs and human intelligence and value through automatic data curation and assessment. Specifically, for data curation, Auto-Bench utilizes LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to automatically generate a vast set of question-answer-reasoning triplets via prompting on visual symbolic representations (e.g., captions, object locations, instance relationships, and etc. The curated data closely matches human intent, owing to the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. Through this pipeline, a total of 28.5K human-verified and 3,504K unfiltered question-answer-reasoning triplets have been curated, covering 4 primary abilities and 16 sub-abilities. We subsequently engage LLMs like GPT-3.5 to serve as judges, implementing the quantitative and qualitative automated assessments to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs. Our validation results reveal that LLMs are proficient in both evaluation data curation and model assessment, achieving an average agreement rate of 85%. We envision Auto-Bench as a flexible, scalable, and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the evolving sophisticated VLMs.
Yuanfeng Ji, Chongjian Ge, Weikai Kong, Enze Xie, Zhengying Liu, Zhenguo Li, Ping Luo 0002
ICLR5
2024 LEGO-Prover: Neural Theorem Proving with Growing Libraries
abstract
Despite the success of large language models (LLMs), the task of theorem proving still remains one of the hardest reasoning tasks that is far from being fully solved. Prior methods using language models have demonstrated promising results, but they still struggle to prove even middle school level theorems. One common limitation of these methods is that they assume a fixed theorem library during the whole theorem proving process. However, as we all know, creating new useful theorems or even new theories is not only helpful but crucial and necessary for advancing mathematics and proving harder and deeper results. In this work, we present LEGO-Prover, which employs a growing skill library containing verified lemmas as skills to augment the capability of LLMs used in theorem proving. By constructing the proof modularly, LEGO-Prover enables LLMs to utilize existing skills retrieved from the library and to create new skills during the proving process. These skills are further evolved (by prompting an LLM) to enrich the library on another scale. Modular and reusable skills are constantly added to the library to enable tackling increasingly intricate mathematical problems. Moreover, the learned library further bridges the gap between human proofs and formal proofs by making it easier to impute missing steps. LEGO-Prover advances the state-of-the-art pass rate on miniF2F-valid (48.0\% to 57.0\%) and miniF2F-test (45.5\% to 50.0\%). During the proving process, LEGO-Prover also generates over 20,000 skills (theorems/lemmas) and adds them to the growing library. Our ablation study indicates that these newly added skills are indeed helpful for proving theorems, resulting in a 4.9\% improvement in success rate
Huajian Xin, Chuanyang Zheng, Zhengying Liu, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Enze Xie, Jian Yin 0001, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
ICLR4
2024 MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models
abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have pushed the limits of natural language understanding and exhibited excellent problem-solving ability. Despite the great success, most existing open-source LLMs (\eg, LLaMA-2) are still far away from satisfactory for solving mathematical problems due to the complex reasoning procedures. To bridge this gap, we propose \emph{MetaMath}, a finetuned language model that specializes in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we start by bootstrapping mathematical questions by rewriting the question from multiple perspectives, which results in a new dataset called MetaMathQA. Then we finetune the LLaMA-2 models on MetaMathQA. Experimental results on two popular benchmarks (\ie, GSM8K and MATH) for mathematical reasoning demonstrate that MetaMath outperforms a suite of open-source LLMs by a significant margin. Our MetaMath-7B model achieves $66.5\%$ on GSM8K and $19.8\%$ on MATH, exceeding the state-of-the-art models of the same size by $11.5\%$ and $8.7\%$. Particularly, MetaMath-70B achieves an accuracy of $82.3\%$ on GSM8K, slightly better than GPT-3.5-Turbo. We release the MetaMathQA dataset, the MetaMath models with different model sizes and the training code for public use.
Longhui Yu, Weisen Jiang, Zhengying Liu, Yu Zhang 0006, James T. Kwok, Zhenguo Li, Adrian Weller, Weiyang Liu
ICLR5
2024 FVEL: Interactive Formal Verification Environment with Large Language Models via Theorem Proving
abstract
Formal verification (FV) has witnessed growing significance with current emerging program synthesis by the evolving large language models (LLMs). However, current formal verification mainly resorts to symbolic verifiers or hand-craft rules, resulting in limitations for extensive and flexible verification. On the other hand, formal languages for automated theorem proving, such as Isabelle, as another line of rigorous verification, are maintained with comprehensive rules and theorems. In this paper, we propose FVEL, an interactive Formal Verification Environment with LLMs. Specifically, FVEL transforms a given code to be verified into Isabelle, and then conducts verification via neural automated theorem proving with an LLM. The joined paradigm leverages the rigorous yet abundant formulated and organized rules in Isabelle and is also convenient for introducing and adjusting cutting-edge LLMs. To achieve this goal, we extract a large-scale FVELER. The FVELER dataset includes code dependencies and verification processes that are formulated in Isabelle, containing 758 theories, 29,304 lemmas, and 201,498 proof steps in total with in-depth dependencies. We benchmark FVELER in the FVEL environment by first fine-tuning LLMs with FVELER and then evaluating them on Code2Inv and SV-COMP. The results show that FVEL with FVELER fine-tuned Llama3-8B solves 17.39% (69→81) more problems, and Mistral-7B 12% (75→84) more problems in SV-COMP. And the proportion of proof errors is reduced. Project page: https://fveler.github.io/.
Xiaohan Lin, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Jianqiao Lu, Zhengying Liu, Linqi Song, Xiaodan Liang
NeurIPS6
2024 Proving Theorems Recursively
abstract
Recent advances in automated theorem proving leverages language models to explore expanded search spaces by step-by-step proof generation. However, such approaches are usually based on short-sighted heuristics (e.g., log probability or value function scores) that potentially lead to suboptimal or even distracting subgoals, preventing us from finding longer proofs. To address this challenge, we propose POETRY (PrOvE Theorems RecursivelY), which proves theorems in a recursive, level-by-level manner in the Isabelle theorem prover. Unlike previous step-by-step methods, POETRY searches for a verifiable sketch of the proof at each level and focuses on solving the current level's theorem or conjecture. Detailed proofs of intermediate conjectures within the sketch are temporarily replaced by a placeholder tactic called sorry, deferring their proofs to subsequent levels. This approach allows the theorem to be tackled incrementally by outlining the overall theorem at the first level and then solving the intermediate conjectures at deeper levels. Experiments are conducted on the miniF2F and PISA datasets and significant performance gains are observed in our POETRY approach over state-of-the-art methods. POETRY on miniF2F achieves an average proving success rate improvement of 5.1%. Moreover, we observe a substantial increase in the maximum proof length found by POETRY, from 10 to 26.
Huajian Xin, Zhengying Liu, Yinya Huang, Jianqiao Lu, Jing Tang 0004, Jian Yin 0001, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
NeurIPS3
2023 DT-Solver: Automated Theorem Proving with Dynamic-Tree Sampling Guided by Proof-level Value Function
abstract
Haiming Wang, Ye Yuan, Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Jing Xiong, Enze Xie, Han Shi, Yujun Li, Lin Li, Jian Yin, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.
Zhengying Liu, Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Enze Xie, Jian Yin 0001, Zhenguo Li, Xiaodan Liang
ACL (1)3
2023 TRIGO: Benchmarking Formal Mathematical Proof Reduction for Generative Language Models
abstract
Jing Xiong, Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan, Haiming Wang, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Lin Li, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang, Qun Liu. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.
Jianhao Shen, Ye Yuan 0016, Yichun Yin, Zhengying Liu, Zhijiang Guo, Qingxing Cao, Yinya Huang, Chuanyang Zheng, Xiaodan Liang, Ming Zhang 0004, Qun Liu 0001
EMNLP6
2022 Filtering participants improves generalization in competitions and benchmarks
abstract
We address the problem of selecting a winning algorithm in a challenge or benchmark.While evaluations of algorithms carried out by third party organizers eliminate the inventor-evaluator bias, little attention has been paid to the risk of over-fitting the winner's selection by the organizers.In this paper, we carry out an empirical evaluation using the results of several challenges and benchmarks, evidencing this phenomenon.We show that a heuristic commonly used by organizers consisting of pre-filtering participants using a trial run, reduces over-fitting.We formalize this method and derive a semi-empirical formula to determine the optimal number of top k participants to retain from the trial run.
Adrien Pavão, Isabelle Guyon, Zhengying Liu
ESANN3
2021 AgEBO-tabular: joint neural architecture and hyperparameter search with autotuned data-parallel training for tabular data
abstract
Developing high-performing predictive models for large tabular data sets is a challenging task. Neural architecture search (NAS) is an AutoML approach that generates and evaluates multiple neural networks with different architectures concurrently to automatically discover an high performing model. A key issue in NAS, particularly for large data sets, is the large computation time required to evaluate each generated architecture. While data-parallel training has the potential to address this issue, a straightforward approach can result in significant loss of accuracy. To that end, we develop AgEBO-Tabular, which combines Aging Evolution (AE) to search over neural architectures and asynchronous Bayesian optimization (BO) to search over hyperparameters to adapt data-parallel training. We evaluate the efficacy of our approach on two large predictive modeling tabular data sets from the Exascale Computing Project-CANcer Distributed Learning Environment (ECP-CANDLE).
Romain Egele, Prasanna Balaprakash, Isabelle Guyon, Venkatram Vishwanath, Fangfang Xia, Rick L. Stevens, Zhengying Liu
SC7
2021 Winning Solutions and Post-Challenge Analyses of the ChaLearn AutoDL Challenge 2019
abstract
This paper reports the results and post-challenge analyses of ChaLearn's AutoDL challenge series, which helped sorting out a profusion of AutoML solutions for Deep Learning (DL) that had been introduced in a variety of settings, but lacked fair comparisons. All input data modalities (time series, images, videos, text, tabular) were formatted as tensors and all tasks were multi-label classification problems. Code submissions were executed on hidden tasks, with limited time and computational resources, pushing solutions that get results quickly. In this setting, DL methods dominated, though popular Neural Architecture Search (NAS) was impractical. Solutions relied on fine-tuned pre-trained networks, with architectures matching data modality. Post-challenge tests did not reveal improvements beyond the imposed time limit. While no component is particularly original or novel, a high level modular organization emerged featuring a "meta-learner", "data ingestor", "model selector", "model/learner", and "evaluator". This modularity enabled ablation studies, which revealed the importance of (off-platform) meta-learning, ensembling, and efficient data management. Experiments on heterogeneous module combinations further confirm the (local) optimality of the winning solutions. Our challenge legacy includes an ever-lasting benchmark (http://autodl.chalearn.org), the open-sourced code of the winners, and a free "AutoDL self-service."
Zhengying Liu, Adrien Pavão, Zhen Xu 0007, Sergio Escalera, Fabio Ferreira, Isabelle Guyon, Sirui Hong, Frank Hutter, Rongrong Ji, Júlio C. S. Jacques Júnior, Marius Lindauer, Meysam Madadi, Thomas Nierhoff, Kangning Niu, Chunguang Pan, Danny Stoll, Sébastien Treguer, Peng Wang 0095, Chenglin Wu 0001, Youcheng Xiong, Arber Zela, Yang Zhang 0079
IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell.1
2020 Deep Statistical Solvers
abstract
This paper introduces Deep Statistical Solvers (DSS), a new class of trainable solvers for optimization problems, arising e.g., from system simulations. The key idea is to learn a solver that generalizes to a given distribution of problem instances. This is achieved by directly using as loss the objective function of the problem, as opposed to most previous Machine Learning based approaches, which mimic the solutions attained by an existing solver. Though both types of approaches outperform classical solvers with respect to speed for a given accuracy, a distinctive advantage of DSS is that they can be trained without a training set of sample solutions. Focusing on use cases of systems of interacting and interchangeable entities (e.g. molecular dynamics, power systems, discretized PDEs), the proposed approach is instantiated within a class of Graph Neural Networks. Under sufficient conditions, we prove that the corresponding set of functions contains approximations to any arbitrary precision of the actual solution of the optimization problem. The proposed approach is experimentally validated on large linear problems, demonstrating super-generalisation properties; And on AC power grid simulations, on which the predictions of the trained model have a correlation higher than 99.99% with the outputs of the classical Newton-Raphson method (known for its accuracy), while being 2 to 3 orders of magnitude faster.
Balthazar Donon, Zhengying Liu, Wenzhuo Liu, Isabelle Guyon, Antoine Marot, Marc Schoenauer
NeurIPS2
2020 LEAP nets for system identification and application to power systems
Balthazar Donon, Benjamin Donnot, Isabelle Guyon, Zhengying Liu, Antoine Marot, Patrick Panciatici, Marc Schoenauer
Neurocomputing4
2020 Towards automated computer vision: analysis of the AutoCV challenges 2019
Zhengying Liu, Zhen Xu 0007, Sergio Escalera, Isabelle Guyon, Júlio C. S. Jacques Júnior, Meysam Madadi, Adrien Pavão, Sébastien Treguer, Wei-Wei Tu
Pattern Recognit. Lett.1
2019 LEAP nets for power grid perturbations
Benjamin Donnot, Balthazar Donon, Isabelle Guyon, Zhengying Liu, Antoine Marot, Patrick Panciatici, Marc Schoenauer
ESANN4