Papers by Hongyuan Zhang
Dual Adversarial Neural Transfer for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is an important step in most natural language processing (NLP) applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-adversarial neural transfer method for addressing low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) they propose 'Generalized Resource-Adversarial Discriminator' and 'accidental training' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on low-resource Named Entity Recognition (NER) with two variants, i.e., DATNet-F and DATNET-P, and adversarial training is adopted to boost model generalization. |
Revamping Multilingual Agreement Bidirectionally via Switched Back-translation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Current multilingual agreement (MA) methods require parallel data between multiple language pairs, which is not always realistic and optimize the agreement in an ambiguous direction, which hampers the translation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multilingual agreement framework that optimizes agreement bidirectionally with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves strong baselines on the task of multilingual neural machine translation with three benchmarks: TED Talks, News, and Europarl. |
CLEAN–EVAL: Clean Evaluation on Contaminated Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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Wenhong Zhu, Hongkun Hao, Zhiwei He, Yun-Ze Song, Jiao Yueyang, Yumeng Zhang, Hanxu Hu, Yiran Wei, Rui Wang, Hongyuan Lu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to evaluate large language models are prone to data contamination. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which parses contaminated data and back-translates it into a candidate set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces data contamination and evaluates the LLMs more cleanly. |
Unveiling the Generalization Power of Fine-Tuned Large Language Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional multitasking abilities, but the comprehensive effects of fine-tuning on the LLMs’ generalization ability are not fully understood. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive experiments across five distinct language tasks on different datasets to investigate whether fine-tuning affects the generalization ability intrinsic to LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generalize to different domains and tasks by integrating the in-context learning strategy during fine-tuning on generation tasks. |
TRIP: Accelerating Document-level Multilingual Pre-training via Triangular Document-level Pre-training on Parallel Data Triplets (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyuan Lu, Haoyang Huang, Shuming Ma, Dongdong Zhang, Wai Lam, Zhaochuan Gao, Anthony Aue, Arul Menezes, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multilingual sequence-to-sequence pre-training rely on monolingual corpora and sometimes synthetic document-level bilingual corporata. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage document-level trilingual parallel corpora to improve sequence-to-sequence multilingual pre-training by using a novel method called Grafting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves strong state-of-the-art (SOTA) scores on three multilingual document-level machine translation benchmarks and one cross-lingual abstractive summarization benchmark. |
Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Xinhua Zeng, Yang Liu, Xiang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yumeng Zhang, Shan Huang, Yiran Wei, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | a new paradigm for dialogue systems is being developed to mimic human interactions . the current single-step dialogue paradigm lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step dialogue paradigm that mimics human interactions . they use a dataset to fine-tune existing language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system mimics the dynamic nature of human conversations . it is compared with existing paradigms and will be released later this year . |
LNE-Blocking: An Efficient Framework for Contamination Mitigation Evaluation on Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a problem of data contamination is now almost inevitable during the development of large language models, with the training data often integrating evaluation benchmarks even unintentionally. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to restore model performance prior to data contamination on potentially leaked datasets by using contamination detection and disruption operation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework restores model performance prior to contamination on potentially leaked datasets. |
Adam’s Law: Textual Frequency Law on Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Textual frequency is a topic of understudied research, but its relevance to Large Language Models is not well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to estimate textual data frequency using a paraphraser and a textual distillation method to refine LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to estimate sentence-level frequency with word-level frequencies. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
Self-Training with Differentiable Teacher (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for self-training are interpreted as teacher-student frameworks, where the teacher generates pseudo-labels and the student makes predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a differentiable self-training method that treats teacher-student as a Stackelberg game where a leader is always in a more advantageous position than a follower. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on semi- and weakly-supervised learning tasks on semi and weak supervised tasks. |
Chain-of-Dictionary Prompting Elicits Translation in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown surprisingly good performance in multilingual neural machine translation . yet, they struggle with translating low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that chained multilingual dictionaries to elicit translation abilities for LLMs . they show that CoD can significantly improve LLM translation by evoking more information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on ChatGPT and InstructGPT's translation abilities. |
Not All Metrics Are Guilty: Improving NLG Evaluation by Diversifying References (2024.naacl-long)
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Tianyi Tang, Hongyuan Lu, Yuchen Jiang, Haoyang Huang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Tom Kocmi, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks with limited references may not accurately reflect the quality of the model’s hypotheses. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to enrich evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of a single reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can enhance evaluation benchmarks by diversifying the expression of reference into multiple high-quality ones to cover the semantic space of the reference sentence as much as possible. |
SLoW: Select Low-frequency Words! Automatic Dictionary Selection for Translation on Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models only support hundreds of languages, and they are usually limited in English. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to automatically select which dictionary to use to enhance translation . they call it Select Low-frequency Words!, which inherits advantage of dictionary-based methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can save tokens and improve translation performance on 100 languages. |
Seeing Beyond Words: MatVQA for Challenging Visual-Scientific Reasoning in Materials Science (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) outperform existing benchmarks in both natural language and coding domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable benchmark that integrates vision and language modalities to address this gap by eliminating textual shortcuts. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in both natural language and coding domains. |