Papers by Di Zhao
Curriculum-RLAIF: Curriculum Alignment with Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are limited in generalizability due to distribution shift, preference label noise, and mismatch of challenging samples with model capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs preference pairs with varying difficulty levels and then produces a specific curriculum for reward model training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generalizability of reward models by a significant margin without incurring additional inference costs compared to existing non-curriculum baselines. |
Know-MRI: A Knowledge Mechanisms Revealer&Interpreter for Large Language Models (2025.acl-demo)
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Jiaxiang Liu, Boxuan Xing, Chenhao Yuan, ChenxiangZhang ChenxiangZhang, Di Wu, Xiusheng Huang, Haida Yu, Chuhan Lang, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods only support tasks with specific inputs, limiting their practical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an extensible module that matches different input data with interpretation methods and consolidates the interpreting outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module can match different input data with interpretation methods and consolidate the interpreting outputs. |
ConKI: Contrastive Knowledge Injection for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Yakun Yu, Mingjun Zhao, Shi-ang Qi, Feiran Sun, Baoxun Wang, Weidong Guo, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Yang, Di Niu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis focus on general knowledge, which is inadequate to identify specific sentiments across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on three popular benchmarks on multimodal sentiment analysis metrics. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
TMFN: A Target-oriented Multi-grained Fusion Network for End-to-end Aspect-based Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis focus on fusing image regional information and textual words. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis method that integrates regional and global image information with global image data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Predicting Depression in Screening Interviews from Interactive Multi-Theme Collaboration (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for depression detection do not capture intra-theme and inter-themes correlation and do not allow clinicians to focus on themes of interest. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive depression detection framework that leverages in-context learning techniques to identify themes in clinical interviews and then models both intra-theme and inter-themes correlation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 12% on Recall and 35% on F1-dep. metrics compared to the previous state-of-the-art model on the depression detection dataset DAIC-WOZ. |
MARS-RA: Rank Aggregation for Credit Assignment via Multimodal Comparisons in Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation (2026.acl-long)
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Dawei Wang, Di Zhao, Xinyuan Liu, Marci Chi Ma, Xiaoyang Liu, Chengming Zhou, Gary Ushaw, Richard Davison
| Challenge: | Embodied AI systems are open, where agents may leave or enter mid-task due to hardware failures or task-related errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates credit assignment as a rank aggregation problem using contribution-based pairwise comparisons among agents generated by large multimodal models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can guide agents toward effective cooperation in complex tasks of different types. |
Neural Relation Classification with Text Descriptions (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art methods for relation classification suffer from data sparsity issue greatly. |
| Approach: | They propose a new neural relation classification method which integrates entities’ text descriptions into deep neural networks models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves much better experimental results than other state-of-the-art methods on the SemEval 2010 dataset. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
CPsyExam: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Psychology using Examinations (2025.coling-main)
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Jiahao Zhao, Jingwei Zhu, Minghuan Tan, Min Yang, Renhao Li, Yang Di, Chenhao Zhang, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | CPsyExam prioritizes psychological knowledge and case analysis separately, recognizing the significance of applying psychological knowledge to real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a psychological benchmark, CPsyExam, constructed from questions from Chinese examination systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark prioritizes psychological knowledge and case analysis separately, recognizing the significance of applying psychological knowledge to real-world scenarios. |
Finding the Dominant Winning Ticket in Pre-Trained Language Models (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on pre-trained language models show that they can fine-tune parameters but achieve good downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They find that a dominant winning ticket takes up 0.05% of the parameters and is transferable across different tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve comparable performance with the full-parameter model, the authors show . the dominant winning ticket takes up 0.05% of the parameters, and the model is transferable across tasks, they show - the authors conclude . |
COLA: Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework with Dynamic Task Scheduling for GUI Automation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implementing LLMs are limited by their complexity and lack fault tolerance mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a scenario-aware agent Task Scheduler that decomposes task requirements into atomic capability units and dynamically selects the optimal agent from a decision agent pool. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance among GUI Agent methods with an average accuracy of 31.89% on the GAIA dataset. |
Eliminating Biased Length Reliance of Direct Preference Optimization via Down-Sampled KL Divergence (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies attributed verbosity to biased labels, but new research shows that DPO can be effective in mitigating verboses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a method to reduce the amount of verbosity in LLMs by using a downsampling approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes the problem of verbosity by reducing the length reliance of the proposed algorithm. |
Separate the Wheat from the Chaff: A Post-Hoc Approach to Safety Re-Alignment for Fine-Tuned Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, but fine-tuning often compromises safety mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that performs safety realignment for large language models . they identify unsafe delta parameters from the fine-tuned models and recalibrate the retained parameters . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety performance on safety benchmarks and jailbreak attacks while maintaining their performance on downstream tasks. |
CPsyCoun: A Report-based Multi-turn Dialogue Reconstruction and Evaluation Framework for Chinese Psychological Counseling (2024.findings-acl)
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Chenhao Zhang, Renhao Li, Minghuan Tan, Min Yang, Jingwei Zhu, Di Yang, Jiahao Zhao, Guancheng Ye, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets lack consulting knowledge, resulting in LLMs lacking professional consulting competence. |
| Approach: | They propose a report-based multi-turn dialogue reconstruction framework for Chinese psychological counseling that uses large language models to assist counseling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is open-source and can be used in future research. |
Let’s Be Self-generated via Step by Step: A Curriculum Learning Approach to Automated Reasoning with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to improve CoT prompting have limitations that require extensive human effort or performance needs to be improved. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt approach for automatic reasoning called LBS3 inspired by curriculum learning which better reflects human learning habits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves strongly competitive performance compared to baselines in reasoning-intensive tasks with varying open- and closed-source LLMs. |
Personalizing LLMs with Binary Feedback: A Preference-Calibrated Optimization Framework (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on isolated user histories, neglecting the essential role of inter-user differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that personalizes Large Language Models via preference-calibrated binary signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in a variety of personalization tasks and backbone LLMs. |
LICHEE: Improving Language Model Pre-training with Multi-grained Tokenization (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are trained based on single-grained tokenization, making it hard to learn the precise meaning of coarse-grain words and phrases. |
| Approach: | They propose a language model pretraining method that incorporates multi-grained information of input text into pre-trained language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on CLUE and SuperGLUE in Chinese and English with little extra inference cost. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
Improving Translation Quality Estimation with Bias Mitigation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art translation Quality Estimation models are biased, relying on monolingual features while ignoring the bilingual semantic alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to mitigate the bias of translation quality estimation models by contrastive learning between clean and noisy sentence pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the estimation performance while mitigating the bias. |
Concept-Based Label Embedding via Dynamic Routing for Hierarchical Text Classification (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification focus on modeling the text, but the concept of sharing among classes has been ignored in previous work. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-based method that explicitly represents the concept and model the sharing mechanism among classes for the hierarchical text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two widely used datasets. |
KMatrix: A Flexible Heterogeneous Knowledge Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-demo)
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| Challenge: | Existing Knowledge-Enhanced Large Language Models (K-LLMs) toolkits focus on free-textual knowledge and lack robust datasets, models, and user-friendly experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) using external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | KMatrix: a flexible heterogeneous knowledge enhancement toolkit for LLMs includes verbalizing-retrieval and parsing-query methods. |
KMatrix-2: A Comprehensive Heterogeneous Knowledge Collaborative Enhancement Toolkit for Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Shun Wu, Di Wu, Wangtao Sun, Ziyang Huang, Xiaowei Yuan, Kun Luo, XueYou Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on K-LLMs systems focus on declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (rules) . |
| Approach: | They propose to build a toolkit that supports comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit provides unified knowledge integration and joint knowledge retrieval methods to achieve more comprehensive heterogeneous knowledge collaborative enhancement. |
Chameleon: A Language Model Adaptation Toolkit for Automatic Speech Recognition of Conversational Speech (D19-3)
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| Challenge: | Language model adaptation (LMA) is a promising solution for conversational speech recognition systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language model adaptation techniques to adapt language models to conversational speech recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares state-of-the-art language model adaptation techniques in conversational speech recognition tasks. |
Improving Large Language Models via Fine-grained Reinforcement Learning with Minimum Editing Constraint (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing reinforcement learning methods do not provide fine-grained supervision for complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning method that incorporates a generative model as the reward model and a token-level supervision model for RL training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 8 tasks show the proposed method is effective . |
Small Agent Can Also Rock! Empowering Small Language Models as Hallucination Detector (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on hallucination detection rely heavily on closed-source LLMs such as GPT-4. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework called HaluAgent that integrates LLMs, multi-functional toolbox and a memory mechanism for hallucination detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates the LLM, multi-functional toolbox, and can detect hallucinations on Chinese and English datasets. |
MAC-SQL: A Multi-Agent Collaborative Framework for Text-to-SQL (2025.coling-main)
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Bing Wang, Changyu Ren, Jian Yang, Xinnian Liang, Jiaqi Bai, LinZheng Chai, Zhao Yan, Qian-Wen Zhang, Di Yin, Xing Sun, Zhoujun Li
| Challenge: | Recent LLM-based Text-to-SQL methods suffer from performance degradation on “huge” databases and complex user questions that require multi-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a decomposer agent and auxiliary agents to generate SQL queries from natural language text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves comparable execution accuracy on SQL-Llama tasks compared to the baseline model. |
Parrot: Enhancing Multi-Turn Instruction Following for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuchong Sun, Che Liu, Kun Zhou, Jinwen Huang, Ruihua Song, Xin Zhao, Fuzheng Zhang, Di Zhang, Kun Gai
| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the multi-turn instruction following ability of large language models (LLMs) Extensive experiments show that Parrot improves current LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi- turn instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for collecting multi-turn instructions that feature human-like queries, such as anaphora and ellipsis, and a context-aware preference optimization strategy to further enhance LLMs for complex queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves existing LLMs by up to 7.2% in multi-turn instruction following. |