Papers by Dan Zhao
How LLMs React to Industrial Spatio-Temporal Data? Assessing Hallucination with a Novel Traffic Incident Benchmark Dataset (2025.naacl-industry)
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Qiang Li, Mingkun Tan, Xun Zhao, Dan Zhang, Daoan Zhang, Shengzhao Lei, Anderson S. Chu, Lujun Li, Porawit Kamnoedboon
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a high potential to digitize and enhance the health & public services industry. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a cross-lingual benchmark dataset to assess the robustness of state-of-the-art LLMs in the spatio vs temporal domain for traffic incident classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well in the spatio-temporal domain and in the non-English context. |
MiLoRA: Efficient Mixture of Low-Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models Fine-tuning (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation and its mixture-of-experts (MOE) methods are highly effective but introduce significant latency in multi-tenant settings due to the LoRA modules and MOE routers added to multiple linear modules. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank adaptation variant that considers each LoRA module as an expert and employs a prompt-aware routing mechanism. |
| Outcome: | Extensive analysis on commonsense reasoning tasks and math reasoning tasks show that MiLoRA outperforms strong PEFT baselines with comparable tunable parameter budgets. |
Telling Speculative Stories to Help Humans Imagine the Harms of Healthcare AI (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming healthcare but can also introduce risks, including bias, privacy violations, and unequal access. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates speculative user stories and supports multi-agent discussions to help people reflect on potential benefits and harms of healthcare AI before deployment. |
| Outcome: | The framework generates speculative user stories and supports multi-agent discussions to help people reflect on potential benefits and harms of healthcare AI before deployment. |
VisCGEC: Benchmarking the Visual Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Chinese grammatical error correction ignore multi-modality and faked errors, which pushes techniques far away from real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to benchmark Chinese grammatical error correction for Chinese as a foreign language learner (CFL) using a dataset, they propose to use two CGEC frameworks to conduct experiments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves an F 0.5 score of only 28.9%. |
Suggest-Verify-Revise: A Three-Stage Document-Level Event Causality Identification with Narrative Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document-level Event Causality Identification rely on local semantic similarity for independent event-pair discrimination . Existing approaches ignore the influence of the overall narrative backbone in the propagation of causal dependencies and the role differentiation of events within multi-cause/multi-effect structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a suggest-verify-revise approach for document-level Event Causality Identification with narrative consistency (SVRECI) they integrate heuristic causal suggestions generated by an LLM with structural suggestions derived from hypergraph modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on event-storylines and Causal-TimeBank datasets. |
Design Challenges in Low-resource Cross-lingual Entity Linking (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing techniques for grounding mentions of entities in a foreign language do not rise to the challenges introduced by text in low-resource languages (LRL) and fail to generalize to text not taken from Wikipedia, on which they are usually trained. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual XEL technique that uses search engines to locate and search for foreign language entries in Wikipedia. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system shows an increase of 25% in gold candidate recall and 13% in end-to-end linking accuracy over state-of-the-art baselines. |
A Label-Aware Autoregressive Framework for Cross-Domain NER (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to named entity recognition (NER) focus on reducing discrepancy between tokens and tokens, but transfer of valuable label information is often not considered or ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that borrows entity information from the source domain to enhance NER in the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over the state-of-the-art model on several datasets. |
Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yue Zhao, Xiaoyu Wang, Dan Wang, Zhonglin Jiang, Qingqing Gu, Teng Chen, Ningyuan Xi, Jinxian Qu, Yong Chen, Luo Ji
| Challenge: | a framework for constructing dialogue world models for natural language tasks is currently lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be used to train a dialogue world model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict future utterances and user beliefs . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on emotion classification and sentiment identification . |
GSM-Noise: Exploring and Enhancing Large Language Models’ Reasoning under Noisy Inputs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle when dealing with complex, ill-formed, or noisy inputs . open-source models are less robust, while closed-source ones are more robust . |
| Approach: | They propose to use GSM-Noise to refine inputs before engaging in in-depth analysis to improve LLM robustness under noisy conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve consistent performance gains under noisy conditions with prompt engineering, supervised finetuning, and reinforcement learning. |
WinSpot: GUI Grounding Benchmark with Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing GUI grounding data focuses on web-based elements, leaving a gap in real-world GUI interaction data for non-web applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Large Language Models to generate large-scale GUI grounding data. |
| Outcome: | The framework validates and refines 5,000 GUI coordinate-instruction pairs and provides high-quality data for training and evaluating visual GUI agents. |
Charting the Future: Using Chart Question-Answering for Scalable Evaluation of LLM-Driven Data Visualizations (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on human judgment to assess data accuracy and visual communication, which is costly and unscalable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages Visual Question Answering (VQA) models to automate the evaluation of LLM-generated data visualizations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses data representation quality and communicative clarity of charts using two leading VQA benchmark datasets, ChartQA and PlotQA, with visualizations generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo and Meta’s Llama 3.1 70B-Instruct models. |
Quantized Side Tuning: Fast and Memory-Efficient Tuning of Quantized Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Zhengxin Zhang, Dan Zhao, Xupeng Miao, Gabriele Oliaro, Zhihao Zhang, Qing Li, Yong Jiang, Zhihao Jia
| Challenge: | Existing methods to finetun large language models (LLMs) only update a small number of trainable parameters, or attempt to reduce the memory footprint during the training phase of the finetune process. |
| Approach: | They propose quantized side tuing (QST) which quantizes an LLM’s model weights into 4-bit to reduce the memory footprint of the original weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the memory footprint of the model weights, optimizer states, and intermediate activations while reducing the memory requirements. |
Question Generation Based on Grammar Knowledge and Fine-grained Classification (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Recent research on question generation has achieved great success, but some question types and answers did not match. |
| Approach: | They construct a question type classifier and a query generator to solve the problem of question types not matching with other questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy of interrogative words in generated questions. |
SpecCoT: Accelerating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Speculative Exploration (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models suffer from high inference latency due to lengthy reasoning chains. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework that combines large and small models for effective reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces inference latency by 1.7-4.1 while maintaining comparable accuracy to standard large model inference. |