Papers by Hua Zhu
CORD: Bridging the Audio–Text Reasoning Gap via Weighted On-policy Cross-modal Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Hu Jing, Danxiang Zhu, Xianlong Luo, Dan Zhang, Shuwei He, Yishu Lei, Shikun Feng, Hai-Tao Zheng, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) exhibit a degradation in knowledge and reasoning capabilities . empirical results show that CORD significantly bridges the audio–text performance gap . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that performs online cross-modal self-distillation to bridge the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the acoustic-semantic gap between LALMs and text-based models . it employs on-policy reverse KL divergence with importance-aware weighting . |
Disentangling Logic: The Role of Context in Large Language Model Reasoning Capabilities (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Wenyue Hua, Kaijie Zhu, Lingyao Li, Lizhou Fan, Mingyu Jin, Shuhang Lin, Haochen Xue, Zelong Li, Jindong Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, large language model models can be used to evaluate reasoning abilities in context-rich scenarios. |
| Approach: | They construct datasets for both propositional logic and abductive logic reasoning with four difficulty levels across 12 distinct domains based on Wikipedia categorization and those with purely abstract variables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to benchmark LLMs in real-world scenarios, but not in context-rich scenarios. |
Planning-Guided Tutoring with Assessment-Driven Memory for Pedagogical LLM Tutors (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to simulate tutor behaviors or preferences fail to sustain high-quality pedagogical conversations that provide explicit stepwise scaffolding and adapt to learners’ evolving cognitive states. |
| Approach: | They propose a planning-guided tutoring framework with an assessment-driven memory for multi-turn math dialogue tutoring. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-turn math tutoring benchmarks show that ScaffoldLM significantly improves pedagogical tutoring quality over strong baselines. |
FinTextQA: A Dataset for Long-form Financial Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Dynamic Prefix as Instructor for Incremental Named Entity Recognition: A Unified Seq2Seq Generation Framework (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental problem in information extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for Incremental Named Entity Recognition (INER) task aimed at updating a model to extract entities from an expanding set of entity type candidates by employing a dynamic prefix as a task instructor to guide the generative model. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method preserves task-invariant knowledge while adapting to new entities with minimal parameter updates. |
A Versatile Adaptive Curriculum Learning Framework for Task-oriented Dialogue Policy Learning (2022.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing training paradigms for dialogue policy learning with brute-force random sampling are expensive and lack reliable evaluation of difficulty scores. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible adaptive curriculum learning framework that integrates curriculum learning with a generic global curriculum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learning performance and efficiency on three public dialogue datasets. |
MoE Adapter for Large Audio Language Models: Sparsity, Disentanglement, and Gradient-Conflict-Free (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yishu Lei, Shuwei He, Hu Jing, Dan Zhang, Xianlong Luo, Danxiang Zhu, Shikun Feng, Rui Liu, Jingzhou HE, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on Large Language Models (LLMs) limited to textual input modality . acoustic information is intrinsically heterogeneous, entangling attributes such as speech, music, and environmental context. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture to decouple acoustic information by routing audio tokens to specialized experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms existing models on audio semantic and paralinguistic tasks while retaining shared experts for global context. |
A Multitask Active Learning Framework for Natural Language Understanding (2020.coling-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that relation information between intents and slots can improve the efficiency of active learning algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a multitask active learning framework that exploits relation information between sub-tasks provided by a joint model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance with less training data than baseline methods on all datasets. |
CH-SIMS: A Chinese Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Dataset with Fine-grained Annotation of Modality (2020.acl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing studies in multimodal sentiment analysis only use unified multimodal annotations, which do not reflect the independent sentiment of single modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese single- and multi-modal sentiment analysis dataset with multimodal and independent unimodal annotations that can be used to study the interaction between modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance and learn more distinctive unimodal representations. |
SQL-Trail: Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning with Interleaved Feedback for Text-to-SQL (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Harper Hua, Zhen Han, Zhengyuan Shen, Meng-Chieh Lee, Sheng Guan, Qi Zhu, Sullam Jeoung, Yueyan Chen, Yunfei Bai, Shuai Wang, Vassilis N. Ioannidis, Huzefa Rangwala
| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved Text-to-SQL generation, but a gap remains between AI systems and human experts on challenging benchmarks such as BIRD-Sql. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn reinforcement learning agentic framework for Text-to-SQL that uses execution feedback to iteratively refine its predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms proprietary systems on 7B and 14B models by **5% on average, underscoring the effectiveness of interactive, agentic workflows for robust Text-to-SQL generation. |
Propagation and Pitfalls: Reasoning-based Assessment of Knowledge Editing through Counterfactual Tasks (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods struggle to effectively propagate updates to interconnected facts, limiting the performance of reasoning tasks based on these updated facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based benchmark, ReCoE, which covers six common reasoning schemes in the real world. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning-based benchmark shows that current models struggle to propagate updated knowledge within reasoning schemes. |
DuQM: A Chinese Dataset of Linguistically Perturbed Natural Questions for Evaluating the Robustness of Question Matching Models (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a comprehensive evaluation of QM models should be conducted on natural texts, not on artificial adversarial examples . ral models are often not robust to adversarials, which means they predict unexpected outputs . |
| Approach: | They use a Chinese dataset to evaluate the robustness of QM models . they show that the effect of artificial adversarial examples does not work on natural texts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more robust than other models on natural questions with 32 linguistic perturbations. |
Cracking the Code of Hallucination in LVLMs with Vision-aware Head Divergence (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jinghan He, Kuan Zhu, Haiyun Guo, Junfeng Fang, Zhenglin Hua, Yuheng Jia, Ming Tang, Tat-Seng Chua, Jinqiao Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on alignment training or decoding refinements but address symptoms at the generation stage without probing the underlying causes. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach to mitigate hallucination by enhancing the role of vision-aware attention heads. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches in mitigating hallucinations while maintaining high efficiency with negligible additional time overhead. |