Papers by Henry Peng Zou
TestNUC: Enhancing Test-Time Computing Approaches and Scaling through Neighboring Unlabeled Data Consistency (2025.acl-long)
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Henry Peng Zou, Zhengyao Gu, Yue Zhou, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Yibo Wang, Yangning Li, Kay Liu, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Test-time computing approaches that leverage additional computational resources during inference have been proven effective in enhancing large language model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a linearly scaling approach that leverages local consistency of neighboring unlabeled data to improve test-time predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baseline methods such as prompting and self-consistency across eight datasets and performs robustly across embedding models. |
TABGEN-ICL: Residual-Aware In-Context Example Selection for Tabular Data Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to tabular data generation require fine-tuning, which is computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a new in-context learning framework to prompt a fixed LLM with in-constitut examples to enhance the in-text learning ability of LLMs for tabular data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms random selection strategies on five real-world tabular datasets and reduces error rate by 42.2% on fidelity metric. |
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Yankai Chen, Chunyu Miao, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Hanrong Zhang, Fangxin Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Langzhou He, Yangning Li, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Weizhi Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Wooseong Yang, Henry Peng Zou, Yuqing Liu, Ke Xu, Sourav Medya, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for collaborative filtering are limited by their computational demands and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate pre-trained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs. |
A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yangning Li, Weizhi Zhang, Yuyao Yang, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Junyu Luo, Yuanchen Bei, Henry Peng Zou, Xiao Luo, Yusheng Zhao, Chunkit Chan, Yankai Chen, Zhongfen Deng, Yinghui Li, Hai-Tao Zheng, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Ming Zhang, Yangqiu Song, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | a survey of RAG-based reasoning-based approaches shows that it is not effective for multi-step inferences. |
| Approach: | They map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG . they show how retrieved knowledge supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks achieve state-of-the-art across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. |
Active Generalized Category Discovery with Diverse LLM Feedback (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) is a practical and challenging open-world task that aims to recognize both known and novel categories in unlabeled data using limited labeled data from known categories. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generalized category discovery that actively learns from diverse and collaborative feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instance-level contrastive features, generates category descriptions, and aligns uncertain instances with LLM-selected category descriptions. |
Towards Data Contamination Detection for Modern Large Language Models: Limitations, Inconsistencies, and Oracle Challenges (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting data contamination in large language models have limitations and limitations . data contamination occurs when test or evaluation data is exposed to the model during its training phases . |
| Approach: | They evaluate five different methods for detecting data contamination in large language models . they find that current methods have non-trivial limitations in their assumptions and practical applications . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods have non-trivial limitations and difficulties in detecting contamination . the authors highlight the complexity of contamination detection in advanced LLMs . |
Many-Shot Scaling of In-Context Learning with Self-Generated Demonstrations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning methods that use self-generated annotations do not scale to many-shot scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework analogous to semi-supervised learning that uses self-generated annotations instead of ground truth labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms ground truth ICL under zero-shot, few-shot and many-shot settings. |
GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaofen Wu, Hanrong Zhang, Fulin Lin, Wujiang Xu, Xinran Xu, Yankai Chen, Henry Peng Zou, Shaowen Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Xue Liu, Philip S. Yu, Hongwei Wang
| Challenge: | Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to resolve conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on LoCoMo and LongDialQA. |
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Weizhi Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Jingbo Shang, Zhepei Wei, Henry Peng Zou, Zijie Huang, Zhengyang Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiaoman Pan, Lian Xiong, Jingguo Liu, Philip S. Yu, Xian Li
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications. |
The Curse of Verbalization: How Presentation Order Constrains LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2025) found that LLMs struggle when programs execute in an unaligned order. |
| Approach: | They propose to use esoteric programming languages to evaluate LLMs' reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves reasoning performance across state-of-the-art models by restructuring problems to align the presentation order with the order of utilization. |
PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Vinay Samuel, Henry Peng Zou, Yue Zhou, Shreyas Chaudhari, Ashwin Kalyan, Tanmay Rajpurohit, Ameet Deshpande, Karthik R Narasimhan, Vishvak Murahari
| Challenge: | Persona agents are LLM agents conditioned to act according to an assigned persona . evaluating how faithfully these agents adhere to their personas remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | a new study evaluates persona agents' ability to act according to an assigned persona . a persona agent's person score is a human-aligned automatic metric that can be used to evaluate a model . |
| Outcome: | a new evaluation framework and a human-aligned automatic metric show that persona agents can perform better. |
Deep Research with Open-Domain Evaluation and Multi-Stage Guardrails for Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Wei-Chieh Huang, Henry Peng Zou, Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Weizhi Zhang, Yangning Li, Angelo Zangari, Jizhou Guo, Chunyu Miao, Liancheng Fang, Langzhou He, Yinghui Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing deep research frameworks lack adequate evaluation procedures and stage-specific protections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework with open-domain evaluation and a stage-wise safety benchmark to address this oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves defense success rates by 16.53% while reducing over-refusal rates to approximately 6%. |
Multi-Agent Autonomous Driving Systems with Large Language Models: A Survey of Recent Advances, Resources, and Future Directions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yaozu Wu, Dongyuan Li, Yankai Chen, Renhe Jiang, Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yangning Li, Liancheng Fang, Zhen Wang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are used to assist with driving decisions, but they face limitations in perception and computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a survey of LLM-based multi-agent ADSs and their applications . they analyze agent-human interactions in scenarios where LLM agents engage with humans . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces human intervention and improves safety and efficiency. |