Papers by Can Zhang
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior. |
RubricBench: Aligning Model-Generated Rubrics with Human Standards (2026.acl-long)
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Junyi Zhou, Qiyuan Zhang, Yufei Wang, Fuyuan Lyu, Yidong Ming, Can Xu, Qingfeng Sun, Kai Zheng, Peng Kang, Xue Liu, Chen Ma
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks lack discriminative complexity and ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that they support diverse domains, exhibit discriminative ability, provide high-quality annotations, and include human-authored rubrics. |
ReCreate: Reasoning and Creating Domain Agents Driven by Experience (2026.acl-long)
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Zhezheng Hao, Hong Wang, Jian Luo, Jianqing Zhang, Yuyan Zhou, Qiang Lin, Can Wang, Hande Dong, Jiawei Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents are reshaping the industrial landscape, but tasks differ widely, making them labor-intensive to build. |
| Approach: | They propose an experience-driven framework for the automatic creation of domain agents . they leverage agent interaction histories to provide rich concrete signals on success or failure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms human-designed agents and existing methods in experiments across diverse domains. |
Large-Scale Diverse Synthesis for Mid-Training (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing data synthesis methods generate simplistic and homogeneous QA pairs with limited scale and diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to synthesize large-scale, diverse, and high-quality QA data for mid-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on 500B-token BoostQA data over pre-training benchmarks. |
LinkQA: Synthesizing Diverse QA from Multiple Seeds Strongly Linked by Knowledge Points (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing training data is limited in high-quality training data, limiting the ability to produce high-performance LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a KP-graph-based synthesis framework that extracts KPs from QA seed data and constructs a graph of KP data from multiple seeds strongly linked by KP. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables flexible control over discipline and difficulty distributions while balancing KP coverage and popularity. |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
WarriorCoder: Learning from Expert Battles to Augment Code Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huawen Feng, Pu Zhao, Qingfeng Sun, Can Xu, Fangkai Yang, Lu Wang, Qianli Ma, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent code large language models have demonstrated impressive performance on code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm that learns from expert battles to address these limitations . they create an arena where leading LLMs challenge each other with evaluations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on existing models by leveraging expert battles . it achieves state-of-the-art performance even without relying on proprietary models . |
LONGAGENT: Achieving Question Answering for 128k-Token-Long Documents through Multi-Agent Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in understanding language and processing text, but their cost prohibits their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration method that breaks down lengthy documents into smaller, more manageable chunks and organizes the member agents to read their assigned chunks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 16.42% and 1.63% accuracy gains over existing models on single-hop and multi-hop QA settings. |
On Pursuit of Designing Multi-modal Transformer for Video Grounding (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video grounding are not end-to-end, i.e., they rely on time-consuming post-processing steps to refine predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end multi-modal Transformer model that uses two encoders and a cross-modal decoder for grounding prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 4.9% faster than existing models and is based on a set of encodings and decoders. |
Multimodal Dialogue Response Generation (2022.acl-long)
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Qingfeng Sun, Yujing Wang, Can Xu, Kai Zheng, Yaming Yang, Huang Hu, Fei Xu, Jessica Zhang, Xiubo Geng, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on multimodal dialogue models but neglect generation methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal dialogue response generation task which requires multimodal dialogs containing both texts and images which are difficult to obtain. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model can generate informative text and high-resolution image responses. |
ProphetNet-X: Large-Scale Pre-training Models for English, Chinese, Multi-lingual, Dialog, and Code Generation (2021.acl-demo)
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Weizhen Qi, Yeyun Gong, Yu Yan, Can Xu, Bolun Yao, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Jiusheng Chen, Ruofei Zhang, Houqiang Li, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)
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Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets. |
TIGER: Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enzyme–reaction retrieval suffer from poor generalization across tasks and distributions . TIGER is a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that bridges enzymes and biochemical reactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-informed generalized enzyme-reaction retrieval framework that leverages protein-to-text generation models to distill textual knowledge from enzyme sequences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in enzyme–reaction retrieval tasks and distributions. |
RJE: A Retrieval-Judgment-Exploration Framework for Efficient Knowledge Graph Question Answering with LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) aims to answer natural language questions using knowledge graphs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that retrieves refined reasoning paths and evaluates their sufficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing baselines while enabling small open-source LLMs to achieve competitive results without fine-tuning LLM. |
AIGT: AI Generative Table Based on Prompt (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is an essential resource for many fields, but current methods do not fully utilize the rich information available in tables. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes metadata information to generate tabular data . they propose long-token partitioning algorithms that enable AIGT to model tables of any scale . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art on 14 out of 20 public datasets and two real industry datasets within the Alipay risk control system. |
Beyond Length Scaling: Synergizing Breadth and Depth for Generative Reward Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Generative Reward Models have demonstrated that scaling the length of Chain-of-Thought reasoning enhances reliability of evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconfigures raw rationales into structured Breadth-CoT and Depth-Co T through a modular synthesis pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses open-source RMs by an average of 8.2%. |
A Framework for Effective Invocation Methods of Various LLM Services (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a fundamental tool for various natural language processing tasks due to commercial reasons, the potential risk of misuse and expensive tuning cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for constructing an effective LLM services invocation strategy that best meets task demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework classifies existing methods into four categories: input abstraction, semantic cache, solution design, and output enhancement, which can be used separately or jointly during the invocation life cycle. |
Unlocking Exploration in RLVR: Uncertainty-aware Advantage Shaping for Deeper Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has shown significant promise for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a model-free method that refines credit assignment by leveraging the model's internal uncertainty signals. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed method outperforms strong RLVR baselines on multiple model scales, including 1.5B and 7B. |
WaveCoder: Widespread And Versatile Enhancement For Code Large Language Models By Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that Code Large Language Models can address a wide range of code-related tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate widespread and versatile instruction data from open source code datasets and use it to train code-related models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in generalization ability across code-related tasks. |
RAP: Efficient Text-Video Retrieval with Sparse-and-Correlated Adapter (2024.findings-acl)
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Meng Cao, Haoran Tang, Jinfa Huang, Peng Jin, Can Zhang, Ruyang Liu, Long Chen, Xiaodan Liang, Li Yuan, Ge Li
| Challenge: | Text-Video Retrieval (TVR) aims to align relevant video content with natural language queries. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct efficient text-video Retrieval with a salient-and-correlated AdaPter . they propose a low-rank modulation module to refine per-image features from frozen CLIP backbone . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on four TVR datasets show that the proposed method performs better than other methods. |