Papers by Hua Zhou
CoGenesis: A Framework Collaborating Large and Small Language Models for Secure Context-Aware Instruction Following (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale language models (LLMs) are increasingly exposed to private data and are becoming more and more prevalent. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative generation framework that integrates large and small language models to address privacy concerns logically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework combines large and small models to address privacy concerns logically. |
Multi-Turn Response Selection for Chatbots with Deep Attention Matching Network (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for matching dialogue responses rely on semantic and functional dependencies . a recent study only uses the last utterance in context for matching a reply . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches a response with its multi-turn context using attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two large-scale multi-turn response selection tasks. |
LLM-Guided Semantic Relational Reasoning for Multimodal Intent Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for understanding intents from multimodal signals exhibit limitations in their modality-level reliance, constraining relational reasoning over fine-grained semantics for complex intent understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that harnesses the expansive knowledge of large language models to establish semantic foundations that boost smaller models’ relational reasoning performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on multimodal intent and dialogue act recognition tasks and shows consistent performance gains across diverse semantic understanding scenarios. |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing financial question answering datasets lack scope diversity and question complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dataset for long-form question answering in finance to evaluate QA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 1,262 high-quality, source-attributed QA pairs extracted and selected from finance textbooks and government agency websites. |
Proactive Human-Machine Conversation with Explicit Conversation Goal (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Typical human-machine conversation systems only use utterances and responses as training data, which results in uninformative and inappropriate responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset where one acts as a conversation leader and the other as 'follower' they establish baseline results on a 270K utterances and 30k dialogues dataset using state-of-the-art models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate diverse multi-turn conversations using knowledge from a new dataset . |
Intuitive Fine-Tuning: Towards Simplifying Alignment into a Single Process (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Preference Optimization (PO) are key processes for aligning Language Models with human preferences post pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine Supervised Fine-Tuning and Preference Optimization (PO) with two sub-processes defined at token level within the Markov Decision Process (MDP) |
| Outcome: | The proposed process performs comparably or even superiorly to SFT and some typical PO methods across several tasks, particularly those requires generation, reasoning, and fact-following abilities. |
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense (2025.naacl-long)
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Yang Ouyang, Hengrui Gu, Shuhang Lin, Wenyue Hua, Jie Peng, Bhavya Kailkhura, Meijun Gao, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing methods to defend against jailbreak attacks exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to defend against jailbreak attacks by patching specific layers within large language models through self-augmented datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to previous methods. |
CMD: a framework for Context-aware Model self-Detoxification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of text detoxification fail to achieve a decent balance between effectiveness and generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a text detoxification framework that pays attention to both context and detoxification process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various LLMs show that the proposed framework can yield the best performance compared to baselines. |
Scalable Efficient Training of Large Language Models with Low-dimensional Projected Attention (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have found that low-rank pre-training often compromises effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to apply low-dimensional module only to the attention layer to improve both effectiveness and efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model saves 12.4% time while improving test perplexity and on downstream tasks compared with vanilla Transformer. |
CDConv: A Benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations (2022.emnlp-main)
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Chujie Zheng, Jinfeng Zhou, Yinhe Zheng, Libiao Peng, Zhen Guo, Wenquan Wu, Zheng-Yu Niu, Hua Wu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting dialogue contradictions are difficult due to contextualization nature of conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for Contradiction Detection in Chinese Conversations . they use automatic conversation generation to simulate common user behaviors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark simulated the user behaviors that trigger chatbots to make contradictions . the results show that the current state-of-the-art chatbot can be easily goaded into making contradictions. |
You Never Know a Person, You Only Know Their Defenses: Detecting Levels of Psychological Defense Mechanisms in Supportive Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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Hongbin Na, Zimu Wang, Zhaoming Chen, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Grace Ziqi Zhou, Haiyang Zhang, Tao Shen, Wei Wang, John Torous, Shaoxiong Ji, Ling Chen
| Challenge: | Psychological defenses are strategies people use to manage distress. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue corpus with help seeker utterances labeled for defense level and a DMRS Co-Pilot pipeline that provides evidence-based pre-annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces annotation time by 24.0% in a counterbalanced study. |
DeKeyNLU: Enhancing Natural Language to SQL Generation through Task Decomposition and Keyword Extraction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jian Chen, Zhenyan Chen, Xuming Hu, Peilin Zhou, Yining Hua, Han Fang, Cissy Hing Yee Choy, Xinmei Ke, Jingfeng Luo, Zixuan Yuan
| Challenge: | NL2SQL provides a model-centric paradigm that simplifies database access for non-technical users . challenges such as inaccurate task decomposition and keyword extraction remain major bottlenecks . |
| Approach: | They propose a RAG-based NL2SQL pipeline that employs three modules for query understanding, entity retrieval, and generation to improve SQL generation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline improves the accuracy of query generation on BIRD and Spider datasets. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in Multi-modal Large Language Models: Task-specific Vulnerabilities and Mitigation Challenges (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Privacy risks in text-only Large Language Models are well-documented, especially their tendency to memorize and leak sensitive information. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to assess privacy risks across multi-modal tasks and scenarios . they demonstrate how models leak sensitive data across various tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can leak sensitive data embedded in images or stored in memory, exposing privacy risks. |
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark (2024.emnlp-main)
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Fenglin Liu, Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David Clifton
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on evaluating large language models in close-ended QA tasks, but many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to better understand large language models in the clinic . they use existing datasets to evaluate LLMs in clinical situations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms human experts in multiple medical tasks. |
Vision Language Model Helps Private Information De-Identification in Vision Data (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Visual Language Models (VLMs) have gained popularity due to their ability to solve imagerelated tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enhance privacy awareness of visual language models . they use a specialized instruction-tuning dataset and a tailored training methodology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches in handling private information. |
D-NET: A Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning Framework for Improving the Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension (D19-58)
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Hongyu Li, Xiyuan Zhang, Yibing Liu, Yiming Zhang, Quan Wang, Xiangyang Zhou, Jing Liu, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | MRC requires machines to understand text and answer questions about the text. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple system Baidu submitted for MRQA 2019 Shared Task that focused on generalization of machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is ranked at top 1 of all participants in terms of averaged F1 score. |
Graders Should Cheat: Privileged Information Enables Expert-Level Automated Evaluations (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a lack of trust in graders on graduate-level physics and Olympiad-level math makes them unreliable grader. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a grader LM to evaluate the candidate LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms human graders on *RewardBench* and human expert grader on Olympiad-level math problems. |
RuleArena: A Benchmark for Rule-Guided Reasoning with LLMs in Real-World Scenarios (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | RuleArena assesses the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow complex, real-world rules in reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers airline baggage fees, NBA transactions, and tax regulations. |
MoSLD: An Extremely Parameter-Efficient Mixture-of-Shared LoRAs for Multi-Task Learning (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | LoRA is a key technique for fine-tuning large pre-trained models, yet its performance in multi-task learning scenarios often falls short. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixture-of-shared-LoRAs model with a dropout strategy . they propose to share the upper projection matrix among different experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits excellent performance in both single-task and multi-task scenarios with robust out-of-domain generalization capabilities. |
Nirvana: A Specialized Generalist Model With Task-Aware Memory Mechanism (2026.acl-long)
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Yuhua Jiang, Shuang Cheng, Yihao Liu, Ermo Hua, Che Jiang, Weigao Sun, Yu Cheng, Feifei Gao, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing models lack task-guided specialized memory mechanisms . specialized generalist models excel at general language tasks but struggle in specialized domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized generalist model with specialized memory and updater that can optimize for specialized domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines on general benchmarks and achieves lowest perplexity across specialized domains. |
Exploring Contextual Word-level Style Relevance for Unsupervised Style Transfer (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unsupervised style transfer lack fine-grained control of the influence from the target style. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that exploits the relevance of each output word to the target style . they pretrain a style classifier and train an attentional Seq2seq model to reconstruct input sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of transfer accuracy and content preservation. |
One-Dimensional Object Detection for Streaming Text Segmentation of Meeting Dialogue (2025.findings-acl)
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Rui He, Zhongqing Wang, Minjie Qiang, Hongling Wang, Yifan.zhang Yifan.zhang, Hua Xu, Shuai Fan, Guodong Zhou
| Challenge: | Current text segmentation models exhibit numerous limitations, such as imbalances in labels that affect the stability of model training and discrepancies between the model’s training tasks (sentence classification) and the actual text segmenting. |
| Approach: | They implement a sliding window-based segmentation method and employ two different levels of sliding window based balanced label strategies to stabilize the training process of the streaming segmentation model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is robust, controllable, and achieves state-of-the-art performance. |