Papers by Dan Meng
Parameter-free and Accessible Prompt Learning to Enhance Adversarial Robustness for Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have revolutionized downstream vision-language tasks including classification, object detection, and segmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose to search for text prompts at the word level rather than optimizing continuous textual embeddings to boost adversarial robustness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms hand-engineered prompts with average gains of +4.9% and +5.8%. |
An Evaluation Mechanism of LLM-based Agents on Manipulating APIs (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities across a variety of tasks, such as language, mathematics, coding, and etc. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose tool use capability into seven aspects and form a thorough evaluation schema for generic agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent acts like a super-APP and can manipulate API-based tools. |
From Mimesis to Metamorphosis: Evolving VLM Judges via In-Context Comparing and Knowledge Internalization (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to subjective assessment are inconsistent and inconsistent due to inconsistent scales and inherent preference biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes subjective assessment as comparative analysis and internalizes it via Language Buttons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks and is scale-steerable. |
Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Zhihan Zhang, Shuohang Wang, Wenhao Yu, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Qingkai Zeng, Yang Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models can perform a wide range of tasks by following natural language instructions without task-specific fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically improve the quality of LLM instructions . they leverage the generative ability of LMS to generate diverse candidate instructions based on a scoring model trained on 575 existing NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses human-written and LLM-generated instructions on 118 out-of-domain tasks. |
Ranking and Sampling in Open-Domain Question Answering (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on positive paragraphs which contain the answer during training, making it disturbed by similar but irrelevant paragraphs during testing. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking model leveraging the paragraph-question and the paragraph relevance to compute a confidence score for each paragraph. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed model advances the state of the art. |
Psyche-R1: Towards Reliable Psychological LLMs through Unified Empathy, Expertise, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent reasoning-augmented LLMs have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of domains owing to their exceptional text understanding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese psychological LLM that integrates empathy, psychological expertise, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model produces over 75k high-quality psychological questions paired with detailed rationales, generated through and iterative prompt-rationale optimization procedure, along with 73k empathetic dialogues. |