Papers by Ding Zou
Simple but Challenging: Natural Language Inference Models Fail on Simple Sentences (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Natural language inference (NLI) tasks are difficult to perform on large datasets . a small number of simple sentences can improve model performance, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose to use syntactically simple sentences to test the inference ability of NLI models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed set of simple sentences shows that the models fine-tuned on MNLI and SNLI perform poorly on Simple Pair. |
ExpeTrans: LLMs Are Experiential Transfer Learners (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies provide large language models with textual task-solving experiences via prompts to improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompts to provide LLMs with textual task-solving experiences during their inference stage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of large language models on 13 datasets. |
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)
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Zhiheng Xi, Yiwen Ding, Wenxiang Chen, Boyang Hong, Honglin Guo, Junzhe Wang, Xin Guo, Dingwen Yang, Chenyang Liao, Wei He, Songyang Gao, Lu Chen, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Xuanjing Huang, Zuxuan Wu, Yu-Gang Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction. |
Curr-ReFT: Overcoming Training Bottlenecks in Small-scale Vision-Language Models via Curriculum Reinforcement Finetuning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art vision-language models require massive scaling that limits practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning to train small-scale vision-language models but face out-of-domain collapse when trained with traditional supervised learning (SFT). |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that curr-reFT achieves state-of-the-art performance across visual tasks in both in- and out-of domain settings and benchmarks. |
Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved while the redundant pieces are ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose to have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history during the training phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on the semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. |
Automatic Scene-based Topic Channel Construction System for E-Commerce (2022.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent scene marketing has proved effective for offline shopping. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel product form, scene-based topic channel, which consists of a list of diverse products belonging to the same usage scenario and a topic title that describes the scenario with marketing words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can be automated and tested on a real-world e-commerce recommendation platform. |
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets. |
Adaptive Bridge between Training and Inference for Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model can achieve a significant improvement in terms of metric-based evaluation and human evaluation compared with the state-of-the-art exposure bias approaches. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel adaptive switching mechanism which automatically transits between ground-truth learning and generated learning regarding the word-level matching score. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English reddit datasets compared with state-of-the-art models on the word-level matching score. |
Bridging SFT and RL: Dynamic Policy Optimization for Robust Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing unified optimization strategies overlook the statistical conflict between these distinct gradient signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to reduce bias-variance trade-offs in Large Language Models . they propose DYPO, which leverages intrinsic group dynamics to significantly reduce RL gradient variance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional pipelines on reasoning benchmarks and out-of-distribution tasks. |
SDGO: Self-Discrimination-Guided Optimization for Consistent Safety in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various tasks but are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce harmful content generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that leverages the model’s own discrimination capabilities as a reward signal to enhance generation safety through iterative self-improvement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety by iterative self-improvement without additional annotated data or external models during training phase. |
Using Adversarial Attacks to Reveal the Statistical Bias in Machine Reading Comprehension Models (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved human-level performance on many Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks, but it remains unclear whether these models truly understand language or answer questions by exploiting statistical biases in datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to attack MRC models by exposing statistical biases in a RACE dataset and propose an augmented training method that can greatly reduce models’ statistical bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce models’ statistical biases from human-level performance to chance-level. |
Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to abstractly summarize dialogues are limited to two or more interlocutors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing document summarization models to capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |