Papers by Chongyang Zhao
There Are a Thousand Hamlets in a Thousand People’s Eyes: Enhancing Knowledge-grounded Dialogue with Personal Memory (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge selection focus on relevance between knowledge and dialogue context, ignoring personal preference for knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce personal memory into knowledge selection in chatbots to address personalization issue by integrating personal memory and inverse mapping into a closed loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods significantly on automatic evaluation and human evaluation. |
Collaborative Reasoning on Multi-Modal Semantic Graphs for Video-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-grounded dialogue generation do not allow information from different modalities to complement each other. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-grounded dialogue generation model that integrates video data into pre-trained language models to allow information from different modalities to complement each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on automatic and human evaluations on two public datasets. |
Refusal-Aware Red Teaming: Exposing Inconsistency in Safety Evaluations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) require rigorous safety evaluations to be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a red teaming framework that detects internal model refusals and contrasts them with judgments from an external safety evaluator to generate test cases that expose such discrepancies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing reinforcement learning-based approaches in generating diverse test cases and achieves a substantially higher discovery rate of refusal gaps. |
Rethinking Task-Specific Knowledge Distillation: Contextualized Corpus as Better Textbook (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge distillation use a two-stage paradigm: general distillation with a task-agnostic general corpus and task-specific distillation using augmented task- specific corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a contextualized corpus that contextualizes task corpus with large-scale general corpus through relevance-based text retrieval to improve student learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the GLUE benchmark and shows that it is better than generalized corpus and augmented task-specific corpus. |
Iterative Document Representation Learning Towards Summarization with Polishing (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing summarization methods read through document only once to generate a document representation, resulting in a sub-optimal representation. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative model for supervised extractive text summarization which polishes the document representation on many passes through the document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art extractive systems on CNN/DailyMail and DUC2002 datasets. |
One Time of Interaction May Not Be Enough: Go Deep with an Interaction-over-Interaction Network for Response Selection in Dialogues (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Currently, retrieval-based dialogues are performed in shallow ways . a recent study investigated the problem of context-response matching in open-domain . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that lets utterance-response interaction go deep by stacking interaction blocks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmark data sets. |
Learning a Matching Model with Co-teaching for Multi-turn Response Selection in Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for learning a robust matching model from noisy training data are retrieval-based or generation-based. |
| Approach: | They propose a general co-teaching framework that learns matching models from noisy training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning framework can improve existing models on two public data sets. |
MMDialog: A Large-scale Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-modal Open-domain Conversation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | MMDialog is a dataset of 1.08 million real-world dialogues with 1.53 million unique images across 4,184 topics. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a curated set of 1.08 million dialogues with 1.53 million unique images to generalize the open domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can predict responses to multi-modal content with state-of-the-art techniques and measure their performance. |
Reciprocal Learning of Knowledge Retriever and Response Ranker for Knowledge-Grounded Conversations (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on grounding dialogue agents with knowledge documents has sparked increased attention . hand-labeling data to that end is time-consuming and many datasets lack knowledge annotations . |
| Approach: | They propose a reciprocal learning approach to optimize a knowledge retriever and a response ranker for knowledge-grounded response retrieval without ground-truth knowledge labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods on two public benchmarks. |
Synergistic Interplay between Search and Large Language Models for Information Retrieval (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Information retrieval (IR) is an indispensable technique for locating relevant resources from vast amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that facilitates information refinement through synergy between RMs and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large-scale retrieval benchmarks on web searches and low-resource retrieval tasks. |
Learning to Organize a Bag of Words into Sentences with Neural Networks: An Empirical Study (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to encode natural languages without orders are lacking. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of the ability of neural models to organize sentences from a bag of words under three typical scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can reorder or reconstruct sentences from a bag of words under three typical scenarios. |
Sampling Matters! An Empirical Study of Negative Sampling Strategies for Learning of Matching Models in Retrieval-based Dialogue Systems (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on constructing a matching model with sophisticated neural architectures, but do little to how to effectively learn such architectures from data. |
| Approach: | They propose to sample negative examples to automatically construct a training set for effective model learning in retrieval-based dialogue systems by using four sampling strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning method improves the performance of matching models on two benchmarks with three matching models. |
Multi-Granularity Structural Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to transfer knowledge to a small model are not enough to represent the rich semantics of a text. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill the knowledge to a student hierarchically across layers using a large teacher-student framework. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms distillation methods on GLUE benchmark. |
Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Pre-trained Language Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results indicate that pre-trained language models can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods in both automatic evaluation and human judgment. |
| Approach: | They propose to equip a pre-trained language model with a knowledge selection module to generate knowledge-grounded dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in evaluation and human judgment. |
Better Red Teaming via Searching with Large Language Model (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating large language models face challenges in managing semantic intricacies and optimizing the efficiency of the search process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reconceptualizes test case generation as a strategic planning problem, leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on a range of LLM architectures show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art attack success rates without sacrificing computational efficiency. |
Length-Adaptive Distillation: Customizing Small Language Model for Dynamic Token Pruning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to accelerate inference speed are model compression and dynamic computation (e.g., dynamic token pruning). |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation framework that produces a customized small language model for dynamic token pruning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can make the small language model more customized for dynamic token pruning and achieve better speed-performance trade-off. |
How to Represent Context Better? An Empirical Study on Context Modeling for Multi-turn Response Selection (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on building a conversational system for open domain human-machine conversation is attracting more attention . early models concatenate all utterances or independently encode each dialogue turn, which may lead to an inadequate understanding of dialogue status. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a turn-aware context modeling layer to adapt existing models . they propose to model multi-turn contexts from the perspective of sequential relationship, local relationship, and query-alike manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be adapted to several advanced response selection models. |
FAA: Fine-grained Attention Alignment for Cascade Document Ranking (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Contemporary document ranking methods focus on transforming documents into passages to handle long inputs, but intensive query-irrelevant content may lead to harmful distraction and high query latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained attention alignment approach to jointly optimize a cascade document ranking model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MS MARCO and TREC DL show that the proposed method is effective in document ranking tasks. |
Learning to Express in Knowledge-Grounded Conversation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus on synthesizing a dialogue with proper knowledge, but neglect that the same knowledge could be expressed differently even under the same context. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that ground dialogue generation by extra knowledge by analyzing the structure of the response and the content style of each part. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn the structure style defined by a few examples and generate responses in desired content style. |
Breaking Block Boundaries: Anchor-based History-stable Decoding for Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Semi-autoregressive (Semi-AR) decoding suffers from inherent block constraints . naive lookahead decoding is unreliable, token stability closely correlates with convergence trend, and historical information is isolated. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, plug-and-play dynamic decoding strategy that monitors the stability of tokens in real time through dynamic anchors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces decoding steps by 80% while improving performance by 3.67% on the BBH benchmark. |
There Is No Standard Answer: Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with Adversarial Activated Multi-Reference Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods emphasize selecting one golden knowledge given a particular dialogue context, overlooking the one-to-many phenomenon in dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-reference dataset to assess the one-to-many efficacy of existing KGC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the mapping relationship between multiple knowledge and multiple responses by optimizing the model in a wake-sleep style. |
SEAG: Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (2023.findings-acl)
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Zhengwei Tao, Zhi Jin, Xiaoying Bai, Haiyan Zhao, Chengfeng Dou, Yongqiang Zhao, Fang Wang, Chongyang Tao
| Challenge: | Current methods for extracting event causality are limited by the lack of cross-task dependencies and may cause error propagation. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for Structure-Aware Event Causality Generation (SEAG) they generate the ECG structure using a pre-trained language model and perform structural discriminative training alongside auto-regressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in extracting event causality from text. |
ProphetChat: Enhancing Dialogue Generation with Simulation of Future Conversation (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | generative dialogue models use dialogue histories to generate the response . however, generating a response based on the historical information is not easy . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes simulated dialogue futures to enhance response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate better responses over strong baselines on two open-domain dialogue datasets. |
Attend, Select and Eliminate: Accelerating Multi-turn Response Selection with Dual-attention-based Content Elimination (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can be used to perform multi-turn response selection, but they can be expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework and a strategy that progressively selects and eliminates unimportant content under context-response dual-attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can effectively speed-up SOTA models without much performance degradation and shows a better trade-off between speed and performance than previous methods. |
UniEvent: Unified Generative Model with Multi-Dimensional Prefix for Zero-Shot Event-Relational Reasoning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reasoning about events and their relations is an indispensable ability to fulfill various event-centric or common-sense reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that organizes event relational reasoning tasks into a coordinate system with multiple axes, representing inter-event relations and reasoning formulations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on zero-shot and supervised reasoning tasks. |