Papers by Chengzhi Zhang
Temporal Token Matters: Investigating and Interpreting the Consistency of Temporal Ordering in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit notable deficiencies in temporal reasoning . phrasing changes can lead LLMs to produce inconsistent outputs . |
| Approach: | They investigate the mechanistic interpretability of temporal ordering within event temporal reasoning . they identify a sparse subset of attention heads that are causally responsible for reasoning outcomes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other models in a variety of tasks and is validated by intervention-based experiments. |
MMRC: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Understanding Multimodal Large Language Model in Real-World Conversation (2025.acl-long)
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Haochen Xue, Feilong Tang, Ming Hu, Yexin Liu, Qidong Huang, Yulong Li, Chengzhi Liu, Zhongxing Xu, Chong Zhang, Chun-Mei Feng, Yutong Xie, Imran Razzak, Zongyuan Ge, Jionglong Su, Junjun He, Yu Qiao
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to memorize, recall, and reason in sustained interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal real-world conversation benchmark for evaluating open-ended abilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the models perform better in open-ended conversations. |
NovBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Academic Paper Novelty Assessment (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating novelty have been proposed, but there is no systematic evaluation of their ability to generate novelty evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate large language models’ ability to generate novelty evaluations in support of human peer review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the quality of LLM-generated novelty evaluations under different prompting strategies. |
mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent multilingual pretrained language models encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a language similarity measure that induces similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, and more accurate similarity results on low correlation languages. |
SurveyGen: Quality-Aware Scientific Survey Generation with Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Automated survey generation is a key task in scientific document processing due to lack of standardized evaluation datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey-based framework that integrates quality indicators into literature retrieval to assess higher-quality sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances the standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline and enables human-guided writing. |
Constructing Your Model’s Value Distinction: Towards LLM Alignment with Anchor Words Tuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a study of large language models (LLMs) shows that they can generate outputs that are honest, positive, harmless, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that amplifies logits difference between positive and negative tokens . they propose to use the logits gap to generate positive and positive tokens after alignment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves effective alignment, but requires fewer computational resources compared to training-time alignment methods. |
Using Human Attention to Extract Keyphrase from Microblog Post (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on keyphrase extraction neglect human reading behavior during keyphrase annotating. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human attention into keyphrase extraction models by an attention mechanism and combine it with neural network models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models improve on two Twitter datasets. |
SciNLP: A Domain-Specific Benchmark for Full-Text Scientific Entity and Relation Extraction in NLP (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets for structured information extraction focus on specific publication sections due to domain complexity and high cost of annotating scientific texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized benchmark for full-text entity and relation extraction in the natural language processing domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset comprises 60 manually annotated full-text NLP publications covering 7,072 entities and 1,826 relations. |
How Do LLMs and VLMs Understand Viewpoint Rotation Without Vision? An Interpretability Study (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Zhongbin Guo, Zuming Zhang, Chengzhi Li, Yonghong Deng, Xinyue Zhang, Wenpeng Lu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on spatial intelligence from the perspective of visual-spatial intelligence have not explored whether visual intelligence alone is sufficient to endow models with spatial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a linguistic perspective to investigate spatial intelligence from a theoretical perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs poorly on the proposed dataset while human can easily achieve 100% accuracy. |
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Shihan Dou, Jiayi Chen, Chenhao Huang, Feng Chen, Wei Chengzhi, Huiyuan Zheng, Shichun Liu, Yan Liu, Chenxiao Liu, Chao Xin, Lin Yan, Zongzhang Zhang, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability. |
Can LLMs See Without Pixels? Benchmarking Spatial Intelligence from Textual Descriptions (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhongbin Guo, Zhen Yang, Yushan Li, Xinyue Zhang, Wenyu Gao, Jiacheng Wang, Chengzhi Li, Xiangrui Liu, Ping Jian
| Challenge: | Existing advances in Spatial Intelligence rely on vision-Language Models . however, a critical question remains: does spatial understanding originate from visual encoders? |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the SI performance of Large Language Models without pixel-level input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark challenges large language models to perform symbolic reasoning rather than visual pattern matching. |
Encoding Conversation Context for Neural Keyphrase Extraction from Microblog Posts (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing keyphrase extraction methods suffer from data sparsity problem when conducted on short and informal texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural keyphrase extraction framework for microblog posts that takes conversation context into account and uses four types of neural encoders to represent conversation context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction methods on Twitter and Weibo datasets. |