Papers by Hainan Zhang

15 papers
An Efficient Framework for Whole-Page Reranking via Single-Modal Supervision (2026.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing whole-page reranking methods require large-scale expert annotations to achieve high-quality results.
Approach: They propose a whole-page reranking framework that converts single-modal rankers into page-level guidance by constructing budget-aware candidates for cross-modal annotations and distilling intra-modality preferences to align relevance scales across modalities.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces annotation costs by 70-90% while outperforming fully-annotated reranking baselines.
Augmenting Knowledge-grounded Conversations with Sequential Knowledge Transition (2021.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge-grounded dialogue models lack fine-grained control over knowledge selection and integration with dialogues.
Approach: They propose to explicitly model the knowledge transition in sequential multi-turn conversations by abstracting knowledge into topic tags.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on knowledge-grounded dialogue benchmarks.
Tailored Sequence to Sequence Models to Different Conversation Scenarios (P18-1)

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Challenge: Sequence to sequence (Seq2Sequeq) models fail to meet the diverse requirements for different conversation scenarios, such as customer service and chatbot.
Approach: They propose two optimized criteria for Sequence to sequence (Seq2Sequeq) to meet different conversation scenarios, i.e., maximum generated likelihood for specific-requirement scenario, and conditional value-at-risk for diverse-requrement scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed models satisfies diverse requirements for different conversation scenarios and yields better performances than existing models.
Detecting Stealthy Backdoor Samples based on Intra-class Distance for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing detectors use classifier-style probability signals or rely on rewriting, which can degrade quality and introduce new triggers.
Approach: They propose to efficiently remove poisoned examples before or during fine-tuning .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms prior detectors on two machine translation datasets and one QA dataset.
ReCoSa: Detecting the Relevant Contexts with Self-Attention for Multi-turn Dialogue Generation (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder models treat all contexts indiscriminately, which may hurt the following response generation process.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder model that treats all contexts indiscriminately and uses a word level LSTM encoder to obtain the initial representation of each context.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on Chinese customer services and English Ubuntu dialogue datasets in terms of both metric-based and human evaluations.
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.
Stable-RAG: Mitigating Retrieval-Permutation-Induced Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RAG methods focus on enhancing LLM robustness to low-quality retrieval, but neither address permutation sensitivity.
Approach: They propose a method that exploits permutation sensitivity to mitigate hallucinations in Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed model improves answer accuracy, reasoning consistency, and generalization across datasets, retrievers, and input lengths compared with strong baselines.
Beyond the Surface: A Solution-Aware Retrieval Model for Competition-level Code Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval models emphasize surface-level semantic similarity, neglecting deeper solution-level logical similarities.
Approach: They propose a solution-aware ranking model empowered by synthetic data for competitive programming tasks.
Outcome: The proposed ranking model outperforms existing retrieval models in precision and recall metrics.
Automatic Marketing Theme and Commodity Construction System for E-commerce (2023.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing recommendation system invites experts to write marketing themes and select relevant commodities, which suffer from difficulty in mass production, poor timeliness and low online indicators.
Approach: They propose to use pretrained language model to generate marketing themes and commodity consistency module to select relevant commodities for the generative theme.
Outcome: The proposed system can generate popular marketing themes and select relevant commodities automatically and improve theme online effectiveness compared with state-of-the-art methods.
Safely Learning with Private Data: A Federated Learning Framework for Large Language Model (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing large language models (LLMs) use large amounts of public data and massive parameters, but private data is often stored in isolated data silos.
Approach: They propose a Federated Learning framework for large language models which offloads most training parameters to the server while training embedding and output layers locally.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves comparable metrics to centralized chatGLM model on NLU and generation tasks.
From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing models focus more on the structure of summary, not on the personal and logical inconsistency problem.
Approach: They propose a model to solve the problem of personal and logical inconsistency . they use an utterance rewriter to complete the ellipsis content of dialogue content .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on both SAMSum and DialSum datasets.
Privacy-Preserving Reasoning with Knowledge-Distilled Parametric Retrieval Augmented Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems require uploading local documents to the cloud, resulting in inference latency and poor generalization on out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs.
Approach: They propose a generalizable knowledge-distilled parametric RAG model aligned with standard RAG in document structure and parameter activation.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines in accuracy and generalizes well on out-of-distribution (OOD) data.
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.
CoLV: A Collaborative Latent Variable Model for Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to knowledge-grounded dialogue generation perform relatively independent sub-tasks . Typical approaches tend to decompose this task into two streamlined sub- tasks .
Approach: They propose a collaborative latent variable model to integrate knowledge selection and knowledge-aware response generation simultaneously in separate but collaborative latences.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms previous methods on knowledge selection and response generation.

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