What's New

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• NEW [Nov 2025], will serve as Technical Program Co-Chair for ICMR 2026.
• NEW [Oct 2025], will serve as Demo Co-Chair for ACM Multimedia 2026.
• NEW [Oct 2025], invited to talk in a panel session themed "Shaping the Future of Multimedia: Women Inspiring the Next Wave of AI Innovation" in ACM Multimedia Asia 2025.
• NEW [Aug 2025], will help to organize the ICAIF 2025 Women in AI and Finance Workshop.
• NEW [Apr 2025], will serve as Workshop Co-Chair for ACM Multimedia Asia 2025.
• NEW [Feb 2025], will organize two workshops in ACM Multimedia 2025: (1) The 3rd International Workshop on Deep Multimodal Generation and Retrieval; (2) The 1st CogMAEC Workshop on Cognition-oriented Multimodal Affective and Empathetic Computing.
• NEW [Dec 2024], invited to serve as Associate Editor of TOIS.
• NEW [Nov 2024], invited to serve as Associate Editor of TOMM.
• NEW [Oct 2024], invited to give talk at Visionary Symposium on Generative AI organized by Tsinghua.

Research Highlights

CoAgent Lab

Alumni

Publications

• Reinforce Trustworthiness in Multimodal Emotional Support System
  Huy M. Le, Dat Tien Nguyen, Ngan T. T. Vo, Tuan D. Q. Nguyen, Nguyen Le Binh, Duy Minh Ho Nguyen, Daniel Sonntag, Lizi Liao, Binh T. Nguyen
  AAAI, 2026
  
• Sheetpedia: A 300K-Spreadsheet Corpus for Spreadsheet Intelligence and LLM Fine-Tuning (Spotlight)
  Zailong Tian, Zhuoheng Han, Houfeng Wang, Lizi Liao
  NeurIPs, 2025
  
• IntentionFrame: A Semi-Structured, Multi-Aspect Framework for Fine-Grained Conversational Intention Understanding
  Jinggui Liang, Dung Vo, Lizi Liao
  EMNLP, 2025
  
• One Planner To Guide Them All ! Learning Adaptive Conversational Planners for Goal-oriented Dialogues
  Huy Dao, Lizi Liao
  EMNLP, 2025
  
• Context-Aware Hierarchical Taxonomy Generation for Scientific Papers via LLM-Guided Multi-Aspect Clustering
  Kun Zhu, Lizi Liao, Yuxuan Gu, Lei Huang, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
  EMNLP, 2025
  
• DistillCaps: Enhancing Audio-Language Alignment in Captioning via Retrieval-Augmented Knowledge Distillation
  Thinh Pham, Nghiem Diep, Lizi Liao, Binh Nguyen
  CIKM, 2025
  
• MeMAD: Structured Memory of Debates for Enhanced Multi-Agent Reasoning
  Shuai Ling, Lizi Liao, Dongmei Jiang, Weili Guan
  COLM, 2025
  
• Boosting Chart-to-Code Generation in MLLM via Dual Preference-Guided Refinement
  Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao
  ACM Multimedia, 2025
  
• Colloquial Singaporean English Style Transfer with Fine-Grained Explainable Control
  Jinggui Liang, Dung Vo, Yap Hong Xian, Hai Leong Chieu, Kian Ming A. Chai, Jing Jiang, Lizi Liao
  ACL, 2025
  
• Debate, Reflect, and Distill: Multi-Agent Feedback with Tree-Structured Preference Optimization for Efficient Language Model Enhancement
  Xiaofeng Zhou, Heyan Huang, Lizi Liao
  ACL Findings, 2025
  
• XFinBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Complex Financial Problem Solving and Reasoning
  Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao
  ACL Findings, 2025
  
• Breaking the Reasoning Barrier A Survey on LLM Complex Reasoning through the Lens of Self-Evolution
  Tao He, Hao Li, Jingchang Chen, Runxuan Liu, Yixin Cao, Lizi Liao, Zihao Zheng, Zheng Chu, Jiafeng Liang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
  ACL Findings, 2025
  
• MeMoTune: A Measure and Moment-Driven Fine-Tuning Framework for Quantized Large Language Models
  Yun Zhang, Xue Geng, Lizi Liao, Jintong Sun, Minghe Yu, Ge Yu
  ACL Findings, 2025
  
• R2DQG: A Quality meets Diversity Framework for Question Generation over Knowledge Bases
  Yimeng Ren, Yanhua Yu, Lizi Liao, Yuhu Shang, Kangkang Lu, Mingliang Yan
  IJCAI, 2025
  
• Retrieval Augmented Generation for Dynamic Graph Modeling
  Yuxia Wu, Lizi Liao, Yuan Fang
  SIGIR, 2025
  
• Simulating Before Planning: Constructing Intrinsic User World Model for User-Tailored Dialogue Policy Planning
  Tao He, Lizi Liao, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
  SIGIR, 2025
  
• Towards Multimodal Empathetic Response Generation: A Rich Text-Speech-Vision Avatar-based Benchmark
  Han Zhang, Zixiang Meng, Meng Luo, Hong Han, Lizi Liao, Erik Cambria, Hao Fei
  The Web Conference, 2025
  
• Towards Multimodal Emotional Support Conversation Systems
  Yuqi Chu, Lizi Liao, Zhiyuan Zhou, Chong-Wah Ngo, Richang Hong
  TMM, 2025
  
• Proactive Conversational AI: A Comprehensive Survey of Advancements and Opportunities
  Yang Deng, Lizi Liao, Wenqiang Lei, Grace Yang, Wai Lam, Tat-Seng Chua
  TOIS, 2025
  
• Simulation-Free Hierarchical Latent Policy Planning for Proactive Dialogues (oral)
  Tao He, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Yuanxing Liu, Yiheng Sun, Zerui Chen, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
  AAAI, 2025
  
• A Survey of Ontology Expansion for Conversational Understanding
  Jinggui Liang, Yuxia Wu, Yuan Fang, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao
  EMNLP, 2024
  
• Thoughts to Target: Enhance Planning for Target-driven Conversation
  Zhonghua Zheng, Lizi Liao, Yang Deng, Ee-Peng Lim, Minlie Huang, Liqiang Nie
  EMNLP, 2024
  
• DC-Instruct: An Effective Framework for Generative Multi-intent Spoken Language Understanding
  Bowen Xing, Lizi Liao, Minlie Huang, Ivor Tsang
  EMNLP, 2024
  
• PCQPR: Proactive Conversational Question Planning with Reflection
  Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Jing Zhang, Cuiping Li, Hong Chen
  EMNLP, 2024
  
• Experience as Source for Anticipation and Planning: Experiential Policy Learning for Target-driven Recommendation Dialogues
  Huy Dao, Yang Deng, Khanh-Huyen Bui, Dung D. Le, Lizi Liao
  EMNLP Findings, 2024
  
• Balancing Visual Context Understanding in Dialogue for Image Retrieval
  Zhaohui Wei, Lizi Liao, Xiaoyu Du, Xinguang Xiang
  EMNLP Findings, 2024
  
• Revisiting Conversation Discourse for Dialogue Disentanglement
  Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Shengqiong Wu, Lizi Liao, Yinwei Wei, Tat-seng Chua, Donghong Ji
  TOIS, 2024
  
• Self-Adaptive Fine-grained Multi-modal Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised Muti-modal Coreference Resolution
  Li Zheng, Boyu Chen, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Shengqiong Wu, Lizi Liao, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng
  ACM MM, 2024
  
• EmpathyEar: An Open-source Avatar Multimodal Empathetic Chatbot
  Hao Fei, Han Zhang, Bin Wang, Lizi Liao, Qian Liu, Erik Cambria
  ACL demo, 2024
  
• Planning Like Human: A Dual-process Framework for Dialogue Planning
  Tao He, Lizi Liao, Yixin Cao, Yuanxing Liu, Ming Liu, Zerui Chen, Bing Qin
  ACL, 2024
  
• Self-chats from Large Language Models Make Small ChatPal Better
  Zhonghua Zheng, Lizi Liao, Yang Deng, Libo Qin, Liqiang Nie
  ACL, 2024
  
• Analyzing Temporal Complex Events with Large Language Models? A Benchmark towards Temporal, Long Context Understanding
  Zhihan Zhang, Yixin Cao, Chenchen Ye, Yunshan Ma, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACL, 2024
  
• Synergizing Large Language Models and Pre-Trained Smaller Models for Conversational Intent Discovery
  Jinggui Liang, Lizi Liao, Hao Fei, Jing Jiang
  ACL Findings, 2024
  
• A Survey on Neural Question Generation: Methods, Applications, and Prospects
  Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Cuiping Li, Tat-Seng Chua
  IJCAI, 2024
  
• Towards Human-centered Proactive Conversational Agents
  Yang Deng, Lizi Liao, Zhonghua Zheng, Grace Hui Yang, Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGIR, 2024
  
• Broadening the View: Demonstration-augmented Prompt Learning for Conversational Recommendation
  Huy Dao, Yang Deng, Dung Le, Lizi Liao
  SIGIR, 2024
  
• Actively Learn from LLMs with Uncertainty Propagation for Generalized Category Discovery
  Jinggui Liang, Lizi Liao, Hao Fei, Bobo Li, Jing Jiang
  NAACL, 2024
  
• Mix-Initiative Response Generation with Dynamic Prefix Tuning
  Yuxiang Nie, Heyan Huang, Xian-Ling Mao, Lizi Liao
  NAACL, 2024
  
• SGSH: Stimulate Large Language Models with Skeleton Heuristics for Knowledge Base Question Generation
  Shasha Guo, Lizi Liao, Jing Zhang, Yanling Wang, Cuiping Li, Hong Chen
  NAACL Findings, 2024
  
• On the Feasibility of Simple Transformer for Dynamic Graph Modeling
  Yuxia Wu, Yuan Fang, Lizi Liao
  The Web Conference, 2024
  
• Actively Discovering New Slots for Task-oriented Conversation
  Yuxia Wu, Tianhao Dai, Zedong Zheng, Lizi Liao
  TASLP, 2024
  
• Harnessing Holistic Discourse Features and Triadic Interaction for Sentiment Quadruple Extraction in Dialogues
  Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao, Yu Zhao, Fangfang Su, Fei Li, Donghong Ji
  AAAI, 2024
  
• Reverse Multi-Choice Dialogue Commonsense Inference with Graph-of-Thought
  Li Zheng, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Bobo Li, Lizi Liao, Donghong Ji, Chong Teng
  AAAI, 2024
  
• Reinforced Target-driven Conversational Promotion
  Huy Dao, Lizi Liao, Dung D. Le, Yuxiang Nie
  EMNLP, 2023
  
• ClusterPrompt: Cluster Semantic Enhanced Prompt Learning for New Intent Discovery
  Jinggui Liang, Lizi Liao
  EMNLP Findings, 2023
  
• Proactive Dialogue Systems in the Era of Large Language Models: Evaluating from a Prompting Perspective
  Yang Deng, Lizi Liao, Liang Chen, Hongru Wang, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua
  EMNLP Findings, 2023
  
• End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue: A Survey of Tasks, Methods, and Future Directions
  Libo Qin, Wenbo Pan, Qiguang Chen, Lizi Liao, Zhou Yu, Yue Zhang, Wanxiang Che, Min Li
  EMNLP, 2023
  
• Revisiting Disentanglement and Fusion on Modality and Context in Conversational Multimodal Emotion Recognition
  Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Lizi Liao, Yu Zhao, Chong Teng, Tat-Seng Chua, Donghong Ji, Fei Li
  ACM Multimedia, 2023
  
• Partial Annotation-based Video Moment Retrieval via Iterative Learning
  Wei Ji, Renjie Liang, Lizi Liao, Hao Fei, Fuli Feng
  ACM Multimedia, 2023
  
• REAL: A Representative Error-Driven Approach for Active Learning [code & data]
  Cheng Chen, Yong Wang, Lizi Liao, Yueguo Chen, Xiaoyong Du
  ECML/PKDD, 2023
  
• Proactive Conversational Agents in the Post-ChatGPT World
  Lizi Liao, Grace Hui Yang, Chirag Shah
  SIGIR Tutorial, 2023
  
• DiaASQ: A Benchmark of Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis [code & data]
  Bobo Li, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Yuhan Wu, Jinsong Zhang, Shengqiong Wu, Jingye Li, Yijiang Liu, Lizi Liao, Tat-Seng Chua and Donghong Ji
  ACL Findings, 2023
  
• Conversation Disentanglement with Bi-Level Contrastive Learning
  Chengyu Huang, Zheng Zhang, Hao Fei and Lizi Liao
  EMNLP Findings, 2022
  
• A Unified Dialogue User Simulator for Few-shot Data Augmentation
  Dazhen Wan, Zheng Zhang, Qi Zhu, Lizi Liao and Minlie Huang
  EMNLP Findings, 2022
  
• Semi-supervised New Slot Discovery with Incremental Clustering
  Yuxia Wu, Lizi Liao, Xueming Qian and Tat-Seng Chua
  EMNLP Findings, 2022
  
• Reflecting on Experiences for Response Generation [slides, video]
  Chenchen Ye, Lizi Liao, Suyu Liu and Tat-Seng Chua
  ACM Multimedia, 2022
  
• Structured and Natural Responses Co-generation for Conversational Search [slides, video, code & data]
  Chenchen Ye, Lizi Liao, Fuli Feng, Wei Ji and Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGIR, 2022
  
• Learning to Ask Critical Questions for Assisting Product Search [slides, video, code & data ]
  Zixuan Li, Lizi Liao and Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGIR, 2022 (eCom)
  
• State Graph Reasoning for Multimodal Conversational Recommendation
  Yuxia Wu, Lizi Liao, Gangyi Zhang, Wenqiang Lei, Guoshuai Zhao, Xueming Qian, Tat-Seng Chua
  TMM, 2022
  
• MMConv: An Environment for Multimodal Conversational Search across Multiple Domains [code & data]
  Lizi Liao, Le Hong Long, Zheng Zhang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua
  SIGIR, 2021
  
• Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking with Recursive Inference [data]
  Lizi Liao, Tongyao Zhu, Le Hong Long, Tat-Seng Chua
  WWW , 2021
  
• Towards Enriching Responses with Crowd-sourced Knowledge for Task-oriented Dialogue [code & data]
  Yingxu He, Lizi Liao, Zheng Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACM MM, 2021 (workshop)
  
• Topic-Guided Relational Conversational Recommender in Multiple Domains [code & data]
  Lizi Liao, Ryuichi Takanobu, Yunshan Ma, Xun Yang, Minlie Huang, Tat-Seng Chua
  TKDE, 2020
  
• Dialogue State Tracking with Incremental Reasoning [data]
  Lizi Liao, Le Hong Long, Yunshan Ma, Wenqiang Lei, Tat-Seng Chua
  TACL, 2020
  
• Neural Multimodal Belief Tracker with Adaptive Attention for Dialogue Systems
  Zheng Zhang, Lizi Liao, Minlie Huang, Xiaoyan Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua
  WWW, 2019
  
• Knowledge-aware Multimodal Dialogue Systems (Best Paper Final List)
  Lizi Liao, Yunshan Ma, Xiangnan He, Richang Hong, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACM Multimedia, 2018
  
• Interpretable Multimodal Retrieval for Fashion Products
  Lizi Liao, Xiangnan He, Bo Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tat-Seng Chua
  ACM Multimedia, 2018
  
• Attributed Social Network Embedding [code & data]
  Lizi Liao, Xiangnan He, Hanwang Zhang, Tat-Seng Chua
  TKDE, 2018
  
• Neural Collaborative Filtering [code & data]
  Xiangnan He, Lizi Liao, Hanwang Zhang, Liqiang Nie, Xia Hu, Tat-Seng Chua
  WWW, 2017
  

Teaching

• Visual Analytics for Business Intelligence (IS428) (undergraduate level - Autumn 2024)
• Text Analytics and Application (ISSS609) (graduate level - Autumn 2024)

• Data Management (IS112) (undergraduate level - Spring 2023)
• Visual Analytics for Business Intelligence (IS428) (undergraduate level - Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024)
• IS/SMT Project Experience (Applications) (IS483) (undergraduate level - Spring 2022)

Service

• ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING 2024, Area Chair
• SIGIR 2024, Doctoral Consortium Chair
• The Web Conference 2024 (known as WWW), Local Arrangements Chair
• WSDM 2023, Finance and Registration Chair
• NLPCC 2022, 2023, Area Chair
• ACM Multimedia 2019, Program design

• International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2021)

Miscellaneous

When I have spare time, I enjoy reading books, hiking, and dancing.