Papers by Haobo Zhang
ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shiqi Zhang, Xinbei Ma, Yunqing Xu, Zouying Cao, Pengrui Lu, Haobo Yuan, Tiancheng Shen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Ming-Hsuan Yang
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Lirong Gao, Zewei Yu, Zhongrui Yin, Qi Zhang, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Sheng Guo
| Challenge: | Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. |
RECOST: External Knowledge Guided Data-efficient Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Considering the high computing power overhead, data-efficient instruction tuning is proposed to reduce the training data size. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to improve instruction tuning by integrating external knowledge into a single pipeline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better results with only 1% of the full dataset. |
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Xiaomeng Hu, Yixuan Tang, Haoze Li, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Yiming Zhang, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines. |
JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have improved Text-to-SQL methods . however, they still face challenges such as complex multi-stage pipelines and poor robustness to noisy schema information. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-stage SFT framework that optimizes schema linking and SQL generation via a unified loss. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks show that JOLT-SQL achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy among comparable-size open-source models. |
Unraveling LoRA Interference: Orthogonal Subspaces for Robust Model Merging (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models fail due to performance degradation . existing methods fail for models fine- tuned with low-rank adaptation . |
| Approach: | They propose to constrain the LoRA subspace prior to fine-tuning to ensure that updates relevant to one task do not adversely shift outputs for others. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can integrate with most existing merging algorithms, reducing unintended interference among tasks. |
Everyone is unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems for Debt Collection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that assume users to be static, rational agents with fixed preferences fail to capture rich behavioral heterogeneity in real-world debt collection scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a public persona-enriched debt collection benchmark that highlights behavioral heterogeneity in negotiation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing models in realistic scenarios using 16 state-of-the-art LLMs. |
Revisiting the Knowledge Injection Frameworks (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Injecting unaligned knowledge tuple into large language models achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than aligned knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to inject random knowledge into large language models to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique overcomes the sanity problem and pushes the performance limit. |
Enhancing Reranking for Recommendation with LLMs through User Preference Retrieval (2025.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) generate redundant output, which generates irrelevant information about the user’s preferences on candidate items from user behavior sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances reranking for recommendation with large language models through user preference retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves reranking for recommendation with large language models through user preference retrieval on three real-world public datasets. |
FinMRAGBench: A Realistic and Complex Benchmark for Multi-Modal RAG in Financial Document Analysis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shouqing Yang, Qi Zhang, Yuhang Yang, Ruikang Xu, Yuwei Hou, Zhulin Jia, Lirong Gao, Haobo Wang, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Gang Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for realistic financial analysis fail to capture realistic financial situations involving cross-document retrieval, multi-page evidence integration, and diverse analytical tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal financial RAG benchmark that evaluates large language models in realistic financial analysis settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the strongest overall performance across all models. |
Fast Adaptation via Prompted Data: An Efficient Cross-Domain Fine-tuning Method for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been successful in a variety of natural language understanding tasks, but domain discrepancies between the downstream task and the pre-training corpora may have hindered LLMs to excel further in the vertical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fast Adaptation method for LLMs via Prompted Data that integrates downstream text corpora, gold labels and external knowledge sources into a highly controllable prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the gap between the downstream task and the pre-training corpora and integrates downstream text corpors, gold labels and external knowledge sources into a highly controllable prompt. |
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL). |
| Approach: | They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation. |
Towards Reverse Engineering of Language Models: A Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Due to the vast amounts of data and computational resources required for model development, protecting the model’s parameters and training data has become an urgent and crucial concern. |
| Approach: | They define "reverse engineering" techniques as attacks on large language models and provide an in-depth analysis of them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks are described as “reverse engineering” techniques on LMs and provide an introduction to existing protective strategies. |