Papers by Gui Zheng

37 papers
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM.
Approach: They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting.
A Unified Generative Framework for Various NER Subtasks (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that represent entities in sentences.
Approach: They propose to formulate NER subtasks as entity span sequence generation task . framework can be used to solve all three kinds of NER tasks without tagging schema .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) or near SoTA performance on eight English NER datasets.
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions.
Approach: They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process.
Outcome: The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences.
Governance in Motion: Co-evolution of Constitutions and AI models for Scalable Safety (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences lack flexibility . static alignment preferences lack the ability to correct misaligned behaviors as they emerge .
Approach: They propose a framework that enables dynamic and continuous alignment of large language models with human preferences.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves safety and accuracy of a 7B model with human annotations.
DARM: Distribution-Aware Reward Modeling by Alleviating Biases from Low Preference-Context Dependency Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for training reward models are vulnerable to context neglect and degraded accuracy.
Approach: They propose distribution-aware reward modeling that augments the RM objective with a conditional mutual information regularizer that maximizes context and the predicted reward conditioned on the response.
Outcome: The proposed model improves performance in RLHF and improves accuracy in other settings.
TransferTOD: A Generalizable Chinese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue System with Transfer Capabilities (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Current datasets cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots.
Approach: They propose to use a Chinese dialogue dataset to train a model that authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves a joint accuracy of 75.09% in out-of-domain evaluations . it also achieves notable abilities in slot filling and questioning .
Orthogonal Subspace Learning for Language Model Continual Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods for continual learning in language models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learning sequential tasks.
Approach: They propose an orthogonal low-rank adaptation approach for continual learning in language models that uses orthogons to learn sequentially.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on continual learning benchmarks and preserves generalization ability of LLMs on unseen tasks.
Flooding-X: Improving BERT’s Resistance to Adversarial Attacks via Loss-Restricted Fine-Tuning (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to generating adversarial perturbations scale up the cost of training computational complexity by the number of gradient steps it takes to obtain the adversarials.
Approach: They propose a flood method which aims at better generalization and a criterion to bring hyper-parameter-dependent flooding into effect with a narrowed-down search space by measuring how the gradient steps taken within one epoch affect the loss of each batch.
Outcome: The proposed method improves BERT’s resistance to textual adversarial attacks by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art robust accuracy on various text classification and GLUE tasks.
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing prompting methods have been used to enhance multistep reasoning capabilities of large language models, but they have overlooked the potential of formulating higher-quality problems.
Approach: They propose a method that starts from the problem side and refines problems to be more comprehensible and solvable for models.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models.
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs).
Enhancing Contrastive Learning with Noise-Guided Attack: Towards Continual Relation Extraction in the Wild (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for continual relation extraction (CRE) excel in preserving old knowledge but falter when confronted with contaminated data streams.
Approach: They propose a noise-resistant contrastive framework for continual relation extraction (CRE) that preserves old knowledge while learning incremental corrupted relations.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on various benchmarks with increasing noise rates.
Rescue: Ranking LLM Responses with Partial Ordering to Improve Response Generation (2024.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Customizing LLMs for a specific task involves separating high-quality responses from lower-quality ones. Obtaining a large volume of expert-annotated data is costly for most tasks.
Approach: They propose a method that trains the model to prioritize the best responses from a pool of candidates created for a task using ranking metrics.
Outcome: The proposed method is more robust, less sensitive to noise, and can be achieved with limited human annotations or through heuristic methods.
Outcome Accuracy is Not Enough: Aligning the Reasoning Process of Reward Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies observe a phenomenon where reward models achieve high accuracy on static datasets but fail to generalize effectively during RLHF.
Approach: They propose a method that combines rationale consistency with outcome accuracy to improve performance on RM-Bench and JudgeBench.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses baselines on RM-Bench and JudgeBench by an average of 5% and improves creative writing tasks by 7%.
Beyond Boundaries: Learning a Universal Entity Taxonomy across Datasets and Languages for Open Named Entity Recognition (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Current Large Language Models struggle with complex entity taxonomies in open domains and lack NER capabilities.
Approach: They propose a dataset to guide LLMs' generalization in Open NER under a universal entity taxonomy.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-4 in 3 out-of-domain benchmarks across 15 datasets and 6 languages.
Modeling the Q-Diversity in a Min-max Play Game for Robust Optimization (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for minimizing the worst-case loss of annotated groups are lacking in practice due to expensive annotations and privacy issues.
Approach: They propose a distributionally robust optimization framework that relaxes group identification into direct parameterization by using an interactive training mode.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on synthetic and real-world text classification tasks.
PlugAT: A Plug and Play Module to Defend against Textual Adversarial Attack (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that adversarial examples can be easily fooled by adversarially perturbed examples.
Approach: They propose a pluggable defense module PlugAT to provide robust predictions by adding a few trainable parameters to the model inputs while keeping the original model frozen.
Outcome: The proposed model improves robustness over several strong baselines whilst training only 9.1% parameters.
Subspace Defense: Discarding Adversarial Perturbations by Learning a Subspace for Clean Signals (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing models that extract discrete inputs into fixed-length representations are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that place perturbations on clean inputs to fool DNNs.
Approach: They propose to inspect the subspaces of sample features through spectral analysis to better understand adversarial attacks.
Outcome: The proposed strategy enables the model to inherently suppress adversaries, which boosts model robustness and motivates new directions of effective adversarial defense.
Detecting Adversarial Samples through Sharpness of Loss Landscape (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that adversarial samples are more vulnerable than normal ones to textual adversarials.
Approach: They propose a simple and effective sharpness-based detector that can distinguish adversarial samples by maximizing the loss increment within the region where the inference sample is located.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms previous detection methods by large margins on three text classification tasks.
Connectivity Patterns are Task Embeddings (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for predicting inter-task transferability are sparse and task-specific.
Approach: They propose a method that uses connectivity patterns of neurons as a unique identifier associated with a task.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines in predicting inter-task transferability across data regimes and transfer settings while keeping high efficiency in computation and storage.
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values.
Approach: They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values .
Outcome: The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets.
Characterizing the Impacts of Instances on Robustness (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing defense approaches focus on developing new model structures or training algorithms, but they do little to tap the potential of training instances.
Approach: They propose a method that can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training.
Outcome: The proposed method can distinguish between robust and non-robust instances according to the model’s sensitivity to perturbations on individual instances during training.
G-Cap: A Game Character Caption Generator (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies on Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) primarily focus on real-world scenarios, leaving surreal, highly stylized, and semantically hybrid virtual-world situations significantly underexplored.
Approach: They propose to use a manually annotated benchmark to evaluate LVLMs' ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world.
Outcome: The proposed task evaluates LVLMs’ ability to perceive and describe game character from the virtual-world.
Uncertainty-Aware Iterative Preference Optimization for Enhanced LLM Reasoning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing the performance of large language models require expensive manual annotations.
Approach: They propose an offline direct preference optimization method that collects preference pairs through iterative sampling and execution feedback to improve model confidence.
Outcome: The proposed method improves performance on three reasoning tasks and shows a 3.6% improvement over the standard method.
Robust Lottery Tickets for Pre-trained Language Models (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that pre-trained language models contain smaller matching subnetworks that are not robust to adversarial examples.
Approach: They propose a method to find robust tickets hidden in pre-trained language models by learning binary weight masks and an adversarial loss objective to guide the search.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on previous work on adversarial robustness evaluation.
ORTicket: Let One Robust BERT Ticket Transfer across Different Tasks (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Pretrained language models are susceptible to subtle perturbations and require multiple adversarial training during fine-tuning to improve their robustness.
Approach: They propose a novel adversarial defense method ORTicket that fine-tunes a model for downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves comparable robustness to other defense methods while maintaining the efficiency of fine-tuning.
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values.
Approach: They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent.
Efficient Adversarial Training with Robust Early-Bird Tickets (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve the robustness of pre-trained language models are expensive because of the need to generate adversarial examples via gradient descent.
Approach: They propose an adversarial optimization method that searches for robust tickets with structured sparsity in the early stage and fine-tunes tickets in the remaining time.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves up to 7 13 training speedups while maintaining comparable or even better robustness compared to the most competitive state-of-the-art methods.
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community .
Approach: They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction.
Outcome: The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github.
Lost in the Context: Insufficient and Distracted Attention to Contexts in Preference Modeling (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing reward models concatenate contexts and responses, but they often ignore crucial segments of the context that are important for evaluating the response quality.
Approach: They propose a reward model that evaluates the response quality based on a given context and assigns a rewards reward.
Outcome: The proposed framework significantly improves preference modeling by increasing attention to relevant information within the context and achieves better generalizability.
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.
Outcome: The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality.
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies on human-like behaviors in foundation models do not verify their faithfulness . a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-type behaviors .
Approach: They propose a framework to characterize humanoid behaviors in foundation models . they argue that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors .
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal consistency, and generalizability.
OSCR-Attack: One-Shot Character Level Attacks through Self-Optimizing Continuous Relaxation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Character-level adversarial attacks preserve semantics but are costly and inefficient . generative LLMs are gaining popularity due to their uncertainty and vulnerability to textual adversarials .
Approach: They propose an end-to-end framework that transforms discrete choices into continuous representations and a conflict resolution strategy that maps them back into discrete insertion operations.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves ASR by 21.45% points and accelerates the attack by 3.66 times compared to baselines.
Loose lips sink ships: Mitigating Length Bias in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Experimental results prove that language models can learn from human feedback better, irrespective of sequence length . emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs .
Approach: They propose to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length by using the Product-of-Experts technique.
Outcome: The proposed approach shows that language models perform better regardless of sequence length . the main expert is focused on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias.
Mitigating Object Hallucinations in MLLMs via Multi-Frequency Perturbations (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Multimodal large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in visual-language tasks, but their authenticity is often compromised by object hallucinations.
Approach: They propose a multi-frequency perturbation method that leverages both low-frequency and high-frequency features of images to perturb visual feature representations and explicitly suppress redundant frequency-domain features during inference.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly mitigates object hallucinations across various model architectures.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.

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