Papers by Ao Zhang
Cross-View Language Modeling: Towards Unified Cross-Lingual Cross-Modal Pre-training (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that CCLM significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art with an average absolute improvement of over 10%. |
| Approach: | They introduce a pre-training framework that unifies cross-lingual and cross-modal pre-trained models with shared architectures and objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art in two multi-lingual datasets and two multilingual image-text retrieval datasets. |
PDTrim: Targeted Pruning for Prefill-Decode Disaggregation in Inference (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods ignore prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning method that is highly integrated with prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation, enabling more precise pruning of blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong performance in both PD disaggregation and PD unified settings, and can be extended to other non-block pruning methods. |
Seq1F1B: Efficient Sequence-Level Pipeline Parallelism for Large Language Model Training (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current PP methods face severe bottlenecks, including pipeline bubbles and memory footprint. |
| Approach: | They propose a sequence-level one-forward-one-backward (1F1B) PP method for training LLMs on long sequences with high throughput and memory efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.14X training throughput with half memory footprint compared to baseline methods . it trains an LLM with 30B parameters on sequences up to 64k tokens using 64X NVIDIA A100 GPUs . |
Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models to Discern Causal Links Across Modalities (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs lack robustness in multimodal causal reasoning compared to their performance in textual settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning benchmark that leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
ToolCPT: Improving Tool Utilization in LLM Agents via Continuous Pre-training (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current approaches to enhancing tool use for LLM-based agents focus on post-training fine-tuning or test-time context extension. |
| Approach: | They propose to enhance tool knowledge for LLM-based agents during continuous pre-training . they curate 5.1 million code artifacts from large-scale, high-quality code repositories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on out-of-distribution tools on multiple benchmarks. |
Prompt Tuning for Discriminative Pre-trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yuan Yao, Bowen Dong, Ao Zhang, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Leyu Lin, Maosong Sun, Jianyong Wang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown promising results of prompt tuning in stimulating pre-trained language models (PLMs) for natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt tuning framework that reformulates NLP tasks into a discriminative language modeling problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on text classification and question answering tasks and prevents unstable tuning problems in low-resource settings. |
From Multimodal LLM to Human-level AI: Modality, Instruction, Reasoning, Efficiency and beyond (2024.lrec-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to deliver a comprehensive review of cutting-edge research in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML in learning and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | This course will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML models on learning, learning, and multimodal reasoning. |
PEVL: Position-enhanced Pre-training and Prompt Tuning for Vision-language Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances on self-supervised learning have led to powerful vision-language pre-training models that achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of cross-modal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language pre-training framework that reformulates discretized object positions and language in a unified language modeling framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on position-sensitive vision-language (VL) tasks and also improves on position insensitive tasks. |
ReLook: Vision-Grounded RL with a Multimodal LLM Critic for Agentic Web Coding (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at algorithmic code generation, but front-end development is lacking in visual fidelity and interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose an agentic, vision-grounded reinforcement learning framework that closes a loop by invoking a multimodal LLM as a tool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in front-end code generation. |
PLOG: Table-to-Logic Pretraining for Logical Table-to-Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Logical table-to-text generation requires models to derive logical-level facts from table records via logical inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrained logical form generator framework to improve generation fidelity . they use a dataset to test the logical inference accuracy of the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on LOGICNLG and CONTLOG on two benchmarks. |
Distillation with Explanations from Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have made remarkable progress in various NLP tasks while also providing explanations alongside their answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Large language models (LLMs) to generate more accurate answers and corresponding free-text explanations by combining ground truth labels and answers-explanations generated by LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves improved predictive performance and generates explanations that exhibit greater alignment with the model’s task outputs. |
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training text and speech are based on unlabeled audio data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model that connects speech encoders and text decoders with a shared unit encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. |
HSGraphAgent: Knowledge-Graph-Guided Large Language Models for Harmonized System Code Classification (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Harmonized System (HS) code classification is a hierarchically structured and regulation-constrained task, often complicated by short and noisy product descriptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-graph-guided LLM framework that formulates HS classification as a stepwise, regulation-aware reasoning process over an explicit HS knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constrains inference to legally valid paths while producing explicit and traceable reasoning trajectories. |
FR-Spec: Accelerating Large-Vocabulary Language Models via Frequency-Ranked Speculative Sampling (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Weilin Zhao, Tengyu Pan, Xu Han, Yudi Zhang, Sun Ao, Yuxiang Huang, Kaihuo Zhang, Weilun Zhao, Yuxuan Li, Jie Zhou, Hao Zhou, Jianyong Wang, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Speculative sampling is an efficient way to accelerate the auto-regressive generation process of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a frequency-ranked speculative sampling framework that optimizes draft candidate selection through vocabulary space compression. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that FR-Spec reduces LM Head computation overhead by 75% while ensuring the equivalence of the final output distribution. |
Beyond Emotion: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Human Desire Understanding (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Desire is a primitive instinct and a need for strongly expressing human desires to get or possess something. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MSED to model and understand human desire . they propose to provide a benchmark for human desire analysis . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 9,190 text-image pairs with English text. |
WebSRC: A Dataset for Web-Based Structural Reading Comprehension (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using a web page and a question, a machine can't understand the contents of web pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel dataset for web-based structural reading comprehension that consists of 400K question-answer pairs and a dataset of 6.4K web pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 400K question-answer pairs, collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. |
TrimTokenator: Towards Adaptive Visual Token Pruning for Large Multimodal Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing token pruning methods rely on costly calibration or suboptimal importance metrics, leading to redundant retained tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning strategy that preserves cross-modal alignment and informational diversity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maintains strong performance while reducing tokens by 88.9% on two models. |
DuSQL: A Large-Scale and Pragmatic Chinese Text-to-SQL Dataset (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL parsing methods mainly focus on English, but there is no labeled data available for the language . a larges-scale and pragmatic Chinese dataset is used for cross-domain text- to-Sql task . |
| Approach: | They propose a larges-scale Chinese dataset for a cross-domain text-to-SQL task . they analyze questions from several representative applications and use an effective data construction framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains 200 databases, 813 tables, and 23,797 question/SQL pairs. |
Data Augmentation with Hierarchical SQL-to-Question Generation for Cross-domain Text-to-SQL Parsing (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to parse text-to-SQL data are lacking labeled data for unseen evaluation databases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for enhancing SQL queries by automatically producing large numbers of SQL queries based on an abstract syntax tree grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can produce high-quality natural language questions over strong baselines. |
Focus-dLLM: Accelerating Long-Context Diffusion LLM Inference via Confidence-Guided Context Focusing (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating attention importance for tokens are ineffective . dLLMs require bidirectional attention, which limits inference efficiency . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention sparsification framework for efficient long-context inference . they propose 'sink-aware pruning strategy' to accurately estimate and remove redundant computation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach offers 29 lossless speedup under 32K context length. |
Layer-wise Model Pruning based on Mutual Information (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | In spite of impressive results of neural networks, the huge model size has hindered their applications in cases where computation and memory resources are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for layer-wise pruning using mutual information based feature selection in SVMs and logistic regression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning strategy offers greater speedup and higher performance than weight-based pruning methods. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Sentence Similarity Based on Contexts (2022.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure sentence similarity face limited dataset size and training-test gap . existing methods lack large-scale labeled datasets with labeles that are labor-intensive and expensive . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures sentence similarity by comparing probabilities of generating two sentences given the same context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance boosts over baselines under supervised and unsupervised settings. |
EFSA: Towards Event-Level Financial Sentiment Analysis (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a large-scale Chinese dataset contains 12,160 news articles and 13,725 quintuples . a four-hop Chain-of-Thought LLM-based approach is devised for this task . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend financial sentiment analysis to event-level since events usually serve as the subject of the sentiment in financial text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the current state-of-the-art on a large-scale Chinese dataset. |
Exploiting Unlabeled Data for Target-Oriented Opinion Words Extraction (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
Yidong Wang, Hao Wu, Ao Liu, Wenxin Hou, Zhen Wu, Jindong Wang, Takahiro Shinozaki, Manabu Okumura, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract opinion words from sentences are limited due to the expensive annotation process. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit massive unlabeled data to reduce distribution shift risk . they propose to use two filters specifically for TOWE to filter noisy data . results indicate superiority of MGCR over current state-of-the-art methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the risk of distribution shifts by increasing the exposure of the model to varying distribution shift. |
Gradient-Adaptive Policy Optimization: Towards Multi-Objective Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful technique for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel algorithm that uses multiple-gradient descent to optimize LLMs with diverse preferences to maximize trade-offs between objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach incorporates user preferences across different objectives and achieves Pareto solutions that better align with the user’s specific needs. |
Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-speech Tagging via Two-way Attentions of Auto-analyzed Knowledge (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging are important fundamental tasks in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for Chinese word segmentation and part-of-speech tagging . they incorporate context features and syntactic knowledge for each input character . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn and benefit from existing tools, but its quality may be poor. |