Papers by Dongming Zhao
CR-GIS: Improving Conversational Recommendation via Goal-aware Interest Sequence Modeling (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a goal item by sequentially tracking users’ interests ignore the rich goal-aware implicit interest sequence patterns in a dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose to model goal-aware implicit user interest sequence patterns in a dialog and a hierarchical Star Transformer to guide multi-turn utterances generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more accurate recommendations with more fluent and coherent dialog utterances. |
MORPHEUS: Modeling Role from Personalized Dialogue History by Exploring and Utilizing Latent Space (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yihong Tang, Bo Wang, Dongming Zhao, Jinxiaojia Jinxiaojia, Zhangjijun Zhangjijun, Ruifang He, Yuexian Hou
| Challenge: | Personalized Dialogue Generation relies on external role data, which can be scarce and raise privacy concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extract role information from dialogue history . they use persona codebook to represent roles in latent space and posterior distribution of role information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generalize across roles, even for unseen roles. |
Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that clusters dense persona descriptions into sparse categories and generates personalized responses from dialogue histories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English datasets. |
TopKG: Target-oriented Dialog via Global Planning on Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing target-oriented dialogs take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a global planning method for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph to adjust local response generation towards the global target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses. |
Dynamic Personality in LLM Agents: A Framework for Evolutionary Modeling and Behavioral Analysis in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Current models rely on static personality traits but lack natural selection processes and direct psychological metrics, failing to accurately capture authentic dynamic personality variations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses game payoffs as environmental feedback to drive adaptive personality evolution and analyze correlations between personality metrics and behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals new behavioral patterns of agents and evaluates personality-behavior relationships, advancing agent-based social simulations and human-AI symbiosis research. |
REG: Retrieval via Emotion Similarity for Guiding Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empathy relies on the cognitive capacity to relate to similar past experiences. Existing methods prioritize semantic similarity over emotion characteristics, leading to unempathetic responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates four Emotion Attributes into the retrieval process to ensure explicit emotional alignment. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that REG significantly outperforms baselines, offering a robust solution for empathetic generation. |
Explicit vs. Implicit: Investigating Social Bias in Large Language Models through Self-Reflection (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to quantify and quantify social biases in Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on explicit bias, with little attention to implicit bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-reflection-based evaluation framework that measures implicit bias and evaluates explicit bias by prompting LLMs to analyze their own generated content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares explicit and implicit biases in large language models . it demonstrates that explicit bias manifests as mild stereotypes, while implicit bias exhibits strong stereotypes. |
MTGP: Multi-turn Target-oriented Dialogue Guided by Generative Global Path with Flexible Turns (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on global planning, which plans toward the target before the conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a global path as a natural language sentence instead of a sequence of nodes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has fewer turns, more coherent semantics, and higher success rate than baselines. |
ECC: Synergizing Emotion, Cause and Commonsense for Empathetic Dialogue Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Empathy improves human-machine dialogue systems by enhancing the user's experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages specialized encoders to capture the key features of emotion, cause, and commonsense and collaboratively models these through a Conditional Variational Auto-Encoder. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the framework outperforms baseline models and offers a robust solution for empathetic dialogue generation. |
RoleBreak: Character Hallucination as a Jailbreak Attack in Role-Playing Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to combat character hallucination are vulnerable to attack . large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating responses inconsistent with intended personas . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defence strategy that generates supplemental context through narration to mitigate role-query conflicts and improve query generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defence strategy outperforms refusal-based strategies in character hallucinations and query generalization. |
Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Dynamic Personality (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to ERC focus on conversational contexts, but focus on static personality. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that considers the dynamic personality of speakers during conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three benchmark conversational datasets. |
Guiding Dialogue Agents to Complex Semantic Targets by Dynamically Completing Knowledge Graph (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs are incomplete in tracking complex semantic relations of the target-oriented dialogue. |
| Approach: | They combine methods of knowledge retrieval and relationship prediction to construct a context-related dynamic KG and a metric to evaluate the tracked path automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can control the agent more logically and smoothly toward the complex target. |
Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommendation systems ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, leading to an ineffective loose coupling structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual imitation to explicitly align recommendation and conversation paths . they propose to generate high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics. |
A Comparative Study of Explicit and Implicit Gender Biases in Large Language Models via Self-evaluation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the explicit and implicit biases in large language models (LLMs) focus on either explicit or implicit bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-evaluation-based two-stage measurement of explicit and implicit biases within large language models grounded in social psychology. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on two stages of self-evaluation on state-of-the-art LLMs to measure explicit bias toward social targets, where bias is less likely to be self-recognized by the LLM. |