I am now a PhD student (2022-) in Computer Science and Technology at Shanxi University, supervised by Prof. Ru Li. Meanwhile, I am co-supervised by Prof. Xiaoli Li, who is affiliated with the Singapore University of Technology and Design, Nanyang Technological University, and A*Star, Singapore. Before that, I received my B.S. degree from Shanxi University in 2020, majoring in computer science and technology.

My current research interests include data mining, trustworthy artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

Feel free to contact me by email if you are interested in discussing or collaborating with me. It has been attented times.

🔥 News

• [Nov. 2025]   One journal paper on self-explaining rationalization is accepted by IEEE TKDE.
• [Nov. 2025]   Welcome to our in-person meet-up at EMNLP 2025 in Suzhou, China!
• [May. 2025]   We attend DASFAA 2025 (International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications) in Carlton Hotel Singapore.
• [Apr. 2025]   We attend ICLR 2025 (International Conference on Learning Representations) in Singapore EXPO.
• [Jan. 2025]   One conference paper on explainable knowledge probing is accepted.
• [Nov. 2024]   One conference paper on explainable multi-hop reasoning is accepted.
• [Aug. 2024]   We attend ACL 2024 (Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics) in Bangkok, Thailand.
• [May. 2024]   One conference paper on self-explaining rationalization is accepted.
• [Apr. 2023]   One journal paper on Linguistic knowledge is accepted.
• [Oct. 2022]   🏆 We won the First Prize (1st place) - CMRC2022@CCL2022, Chinese Information Processing Society (CIPS), China!
• [May. 2022]   Two journal papers on machine reading comprehension are accepted.
• [May. 2021]   One conference paper on explainable evaluation is accepted.

📝 Selected Publications

(* = equal contribution)

TKDE2025

Learnable Game-theoretic Policy Optimization for Data-centric Self-explanation Rationalization

Yunxiao Zhao, Zhiqiang Wang, Xingtong Yu, Xiaoli Li, Jiye Liang, Ru Li.

• In this paper, we systematically revisit cooperative rationalization from a novel game-theoretic perspective and identify the fundamental cause of rationale collapse. We then propose a novel approach, Game-theoretic Policy Optimization oriented RATionalization (PoRAT), which progressively introduces policy interventions to address the game equilibrium in the cooperative game process, thereby guiding the model toward a more optimal solution state.

DASFAA2025

Explaining Black-box Language Models with Knowledge Probing Systems: A Post-hoc Explanation Perspective

Yunxiao Zhao, Hao Xu, Zhiqiang Wang, Xiaoli Li, Jiye Liang, Ru Li.

• Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on large amounts of unlabeled data, and they exhibit remarkable reasoning skills. However, the trustworthiness challenges have become increasingly evident. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel knowledge-guided probing approach called KnowProb in a post-hoc explanation way, which aims to probe whether black-box PLMs understand implicit knowledge beyond the given text, rather than focusing only on the surface-level content of the text.

COLING2025

LOG: A Local-to-Global Optimization Approach for Retrieval-based Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering

Hao Xu*, Yunxiao Zhao*, Jiayang Zhang, Zhiqiang Wang, Ru Li.

• Explainable multi-hop question answering aims to utilize multi-source intensive documents retrieved to derive the answer. However, it is challenging to model the importance of knowledge retrieved. In this paper, we propose LOG, a novel optimized retrieval method to discover more beneficial knowledge from a local-to-global perspective, facilitating multi-hop reasoning, notably for long-chain reasoning.

ACL2024

AGR: Reinforced Causal Agent Guided Self-explaining Rationalization

Yunxiao Zhao, Zhiqiang Wang, Xiaoli Li, Jiye Liang, Ru Li.

• We propose a novel approach AGR (Agent-Guided Rationalization), guiding the next action of the model based on its current training state. We introduce causal intervention calculus to quantify the causal effects inherent during rationale training, and utilize the reinforcement learning process to refine their learning bias.

MIR2024

A comprehensive Overview of CFN From a Commonsense Perspective

Ru Li, Yunxiao Zhao, Zhiqiang Wang, Xuefeng Su, Shaoru Guo, Yong Guan, Xiaoqi Han, Hongyan Zhao.

• We conduct a comprehensive overview of Chinese FrameNet from a commonsense perspective, covering topics such as scenario commonsense representation, Chinese FrameNet resources, and its applications. We also summarize recent breakthroughs and identify future research directions.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• [Jun. 2025] The Outstanding Graduate Student (PhD Research Student).
• [Jun. 2025] The Second Class Award Scholarship of the Graduate School, Shanxi University, in 2025.
• [Jul. 2024] Chinese Government Scholarship-High Level Graduate Programs in Shanxi Province, in 2024.
• [Jun. 2024] The First Class Award Scholarship of the Graduate School, Shanxi University, in 2024.
• [Jun. 2023] The First Class Award Scholarship of the Graduate School, Shanxi University, in 2023.
• [Oct. 2022] The Champion Award on CCL2022@CMRC, Chinese Information Processing Society of China (CIPS), in 2022.
• [Jun. 2022] The First Class Award Scholarship of the Graduate School, Shanxi University, in 2022.
• [Jun. 2021] The First Class Award Scholarship of the Graduate School, Shanxi University, in 2021.
• [Jun. 2021] The Outstanding Graduate Student (Master Research Student).

📝 Services

• Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2024-2026 Reviewer.
• ACM Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) 2025-2026 Reviewer.
• The Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025 Reviewer.
• The International Conference on Database Systems for Advanced Applications (DASFAA) 2025 Volunteer.
• International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN) 2025 Reviewer.

📖 Educations

• *2024.12 - *, School of Computer and Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Visiting Research Scholar.
• *2022.09 - *, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University. Ph.D. Student.
• 2020.09 - 2022.06, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University. Master Student.
• 2016.09 - 2020.06, School of Computer and Information Technology, Shanxi University. Undergraduate.

💬 Presentation

• [May. 2025], we share our work by an oral presentation on DASFAA2025. | [video] | [slide]
• [Aug. 2024], we present our paper on ACL2024. | [video] | [slide]
• [Oct. 2022], we share our tutorial by an oral presentation on CMRC2022@CCL2022. | [video] | [slide]

💻 Internships

• 2019.12 - 2020.06, Taiyuan, China.