Papers by Chuan Zhou
Text Embedding as Treatment: A Meta Causal Approach for Robust Sentiment Classification (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Fengxiang Cheng, Chuan Zhou, Xiang Li, Haoxuan Li, Wen-li Wang, Jinkun Chen, Mingming Gong, Kun Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment classification use binary treatment of words . Existing approaches limit generalizability to novel words and low-frequency words if there is a word in a sentence that is not treated . |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-causal approach that uses a single training task to identify causal words for arbitrary words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the spurious correlation between word treatment and sentiment classification by removing words with low treatment effects from a pre-trained language model. |
TLSA: LLM-Guided Text-Label Space Alignment with Contrastive Learning for Generalized Category Discovery (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generalized category discovery suffer from weak text–label alignment, inconsistent objectives across known and novel categories, and poor discrimination of semantically similar clusters. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that enforces contrastive alignment between text and label representations within a shared semantic space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmark datasets. |
PRESTO: A Multilingual Dataset for Parsing Realistic Task-Oriented Dialogs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Rahul Goel, Waleed Ammar, Aditya Gupta, Siddharth Vashishtha, Motoki Sano, Faiz Surani, Max Chang, HyunJeong Choe, David Greene, Chuan He, Rattima Nitisaroj, Anna Trukhina, Shachi Paul, Pararth Shah, Rushin Shah, Zhou Yu
| Challenge: | PRESTO dataset contains 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset of 550K contextual multilingual conversations between humans and virtual assistants to study some of the more challenging aspects of parsing realistic conversations. |
| Outcome: | The dataset contains 550K contextual conversations between humans and virtual assistants. |
ProReason: Multi-Modal Proactive Reasoning with Decoupled Eyesight and Wisdom (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jingqi Zhou, Sheng Wang, Jingwei Dong, Kai Liu, Lei Li, Jiahui Gao, Jiyue Jiang, Lingpeng Kong, Chuan Wu
| Challenge: | Large vision-language models often prioritize language knowledge over image information on visual reasoning tasks, incurring performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual reasoning framework that decouples vision-reasoning capabilities and multi-run proactive perception. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on benchmarks for open-source and closed-source models with 13.2% performance gain. |
Mitigating Spurious Correlations via Counterfactual Contrastive Learning (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Fengxiang Cheng, Chuan Zhou, Xiang Li, Alina Leidinger, Haoxuan Li, Mingming Gong, Fenrong Liu, Robert Van Rooij
| Challenge: | Existing methods to distinguish causally related words from spurious correlations are limited by the number of causally correlated words in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use probabilistic probability of necessity and probability of sufficiency to identify causal relationships rather than spurious correlations between words and class labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a contrastive learning approach name CPNS and is validated on public datasets. |
Phased Instruction Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance pre-trained language models' ability to follow instructions are limited due to the simultaneous handling of varying instruction complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a phased instruction fine-tuning method that posits that the transition of a pre-trained language model from simple next-word prediction to sophisticated instruction following is a gradual learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses the one-off instruction fine-tuning method in win rate and validates the hypothesis of progressive alignment. |
CIA: Inferring the Communication Topology from LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a communication inference attack that constructs new adversarial queries to induce intermediate agents’ reasoning outputs and models their semantic correlations through the global bias disentanglement and LLM-guided weak supervision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack achieves an average AUC of 0.87 and a peak AUC up to 0.99, revealing the privacy risk in MAS. |
Compare to The Knowledge: Graph Neural Fake News Detection with External Knowledge (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection rely on linguistic and semantic features from news content and do not exploit external knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph neural model which compares news to knowledge base through entities for fake news detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Graph Neural News Recommendation with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative user and news representations fail to consider high-order connectivity underlying the user-news interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel Graph Neural News Recommendation model with Unsupervised Preference Disentanglement which can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can encode high-order relationships into user and news representations by information propagation along the graph and disentangle latent preference factors by a neighborhood routing algorithm. |