Papers by Hui Zhou

43 papers
IW-Bench: Evaluating Large Multimodal Models for Converting Image-to-Web (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models have been introduced to improve image comprehension, but there is no robust benchmark for imagetoweb conversion.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess imagetoweb conversion proficiency of large multimodal models . they propose to measure layout information of web pages by parsing the Document Object Model tree .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark measures the layout information of web pages—i.e., the positional relationships between elements—which has been overlooked by prior work.
An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge for LLM Evaluation: Fine-tuned Judge Model is not a General Substitute for GPT-4 (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have fine-tuned judge models based on open-source LLMs to evaluate the quality of other LLM.
Approach: They propose to use open-source LLMs to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) their empirical results show that the models underperform GPT-4 in several dimensions .
Outcome: The proposed models outperform GPT-4 on several dimensions including generalizability, fairness and adaptability.
Joint Intent Detection and Entity Linking on Spatial Domain Queries (2020.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Spatial domain queries have unique properties making them more challenging for language understanding than common conversational queries.
Approach: They propose a language understanding framework for spatial domain queries that jointly learns the intent detection and entity linking tasks on a voice assistant service.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods with a significant margin.
Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Modelling with Utterance ReWriter (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent research has achieved impressive results in single-turn dialogue modelling, but multi-turn models still remain challenging.
Approach: They propose to rewrite human utterances as a pre-process to help multi-turn dialgoue modelling.
Outcome: The proposed architecture achieves remarkably good performance on the utterance rewriting task.
Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness.
Approach: They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model .
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0.
Approach: They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes.
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation.
A Table-to-Text Framework with Heterogeneous Multidominance Attention and Self-Evaluated Multi-Pass Deliberation (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Table-to-text works have been widely applied in different domains, such as weather forecast and financial report generation.
Approach: They propose a table-to-text approach on top of Self-evaluated multi-pass Generation and Heterogenous Multidominance Attention to explore the hierarchical structure.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms several SOTA methods quantitatively and qualitatively on three public datasets.
Sparse Black-Box Multimodal Attack for Vision-Language Adversary Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing adversarial attacks using imperceptible perturbations are challenging to simulate . e-commerce product restrictions and hate speech monitoring are examples of such attacks .
Approach: They propose a black-box adversarial attack that leverages sparse perturbations to simulate adversarials exhibited by illegal merchants in the black- box scenario.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing attacks and unimodal attacks by treating images and text in discrete space and outperforming existing models.
Towards Table-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Model: A Table Structure Understanding and Text Deliberating Approach (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, the generalization issues hinder the applicability of neural table-to-text models due to the limited source tables.
Approach: They propose a table-structureaware text generation model with pretrained language model and propose TASD to bridge the gap between the structured table and text input.
Outcome: The proposed model bridges the gap between the structured table and text input and generates accurate and fluent descriptive texts on two public datasets.
Separation and Fusion: A Novel Multiple Token Linking Model for Event Argument Extraction (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for event argument extraction (EAE) lack cross-event information and require longer role sequences . et al. (2017): outperforms state-of-the-art methods for EE.
Approach: They propose a separation-and-fusion paradigm to separate the acquisition of cross-event information and fuse it into the argument extraction of a target event.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on four widely used datasets.
Many Heads Are Better Than One: Improved Scientific Idea Generation by A LLM-Based Multi-Agent System (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent AI methods have shown promise in tasks such as hypothesis generation and experimental design, but they fail to replicate the collaborative nature of real-world scientific practices.
Approach: They propose a virtual scientific system that mimics the collaborative nature of scientific research by organizing a team of agents to generate, evaluate, and refine research ideas.
Outcome: The proposed system outperforms the state-of-the-art method in producing new scientific ideas and offers valuable insights to guide future research.
LLMs Learn Task Heuristics from Demonstrations: A Heuristic-Driven Prompting Strategy for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging ability of large-scale labeled data for document-level event argument extraction (EAE).
Approach: They propose an explicit heuristic-driven demonstration construction approach that emphasizes task heurs in document-level event argument extraction tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning methods on document-level EAE datasets.
AudioPrivacy: Parallel Audio Dataset for Speaker Profiling with Diverse Audio Types and Rich Attributes (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Speech signals convey abundant speaker-related metadata, yet current privacy research focuses on identity-centric voiceprint protection, leaving sensitive Speaker Attribute Privacy (SAP) underexplored.
Approach: They propose a large-scale Chinese dataset to evaluate speaker-related privacy leakage . the dataset includes 227.3 hours of audio from 1,000 speakers .
Outcome: The proposed model systematically evaluates speaker-related privacy leakage in everyday scenarios.
Seeing but Not Thinking: Routing Distraction in Multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon .
Approach: They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks.
EverMemOS: A Self-Organizing Memory Operating System for Structured Long-Horizon Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing memory systems for LLMs store isolated records and retrieve fragments . Existing systems store isolated data and fragments, limiting their ability to consolidate evolving experience and resolve conflicts.
Approach: They propose an engram-inspired memory operating system that implements an 'engram'-inspired lifecycle for computational memory.
Outcome: Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval, and PersonaMeM-v2 show that EverMemeOS outperforms state-of-the-art methods on memory-augmented reasoning tasks.
MovieChats: Chat like Humans in a Closed Domain (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, open-domain chatbots are far from satisfactory.
Approach: They propose a unified, readily scalable neural approach which reconciles all subtasks like intent prediction and knowledge retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms commercial systems replying on complex rules on static and interactive tests and shows that the results are remarkably good.
Understanding the Language Model to Solve the Symbolic Multi-Step Reasoning Problem from the Perspective of Buffer Mechanism (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models struggle with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving.
Approach: They constructed a symbolic multi-step reasoning task to investigate the information propagation mechanisms in Transformer models when solving the task through direct answering and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm improves on 7 multi-step reasoning datasets, while introducing only 132 trainable parameters.
Iterative Nearest Neighbour Machine Translation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for supervised domain adaptation of machine translation focus on fine-tuning, which is non-extensible.
Approach: They propose to perform unsupervised domain adaptation in a non-parametric manner by using in-domain monolingual data and performing nearest neighbour inference on both forward and backward directions.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves the in-domain translation performance and achieves state-of-the-art results among non-parametric methods.
ChildTalk: A Multi-Dialect Chinese Child Speech Corpus with Full-Length Child–Caregiver Conversations for Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for children remains challenging due to developmental variability and the scarcity of high-quality corpora.
Approach: They propose a large-scale Chinese child speech corpus that contains 112.5 hours of speech from 498 children and 500 caregivers.
Outcome: The proposed model improves in-domain and cross-domain performance on children's speech.
Deploying Multi-task Online Server with Large Language Model (2025.coling-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: In the industry, numerous natural language processing tasks are deployed online . traditional approaches tackle each task separately by its own network and pipeline .
Approach: They propose a three-stage multi-task learning framework for large language models . it involves task filtering, fine-tuning on high-resource tasks, and finally fine- tuning on all tasks .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces up to 90% of overhead while reducing latency and resource usage.
RoCBert: Robust Chinese Bert with Multimodal Contrastive Pretraining (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large-scale pretrained language models have achieved SOTA results on NLP tasks but are vulnerable to adversarial attacks especially for logographic languages like Chinese.
Approach: They propose a pretrained Chinese Bert that is robust to various forms of adversarial attacks like word perturbation, synonyms, typos, etc.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines on 5 Chinese NLU tasks without sacrificing performance on clean testsets.
Diversifying Dialogue Generation with Non-Conversational Text (2020.acl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models suffer from low diversity in open-domain dialogue generation.
Approach: They propose a way to diversify dialogue generation by leveraging non-conversational text . they collect large-scale corpus from forum comments, idioms and book snippets .
Outcome: The proposed model produces significantly more diverse responses without sacrificing relevance with context.
InteMATs: Integrating Granularity-Specific Multilingual Adapters for Cross-Lingual Transfer (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work relies on full-model fine-tuning on large parallel datasets to enhance cross-lingual alignment of MLLMs.
Approach: They propose an approach that integrates multilingual adapters trained on texts of different levels of granularity into multilingual models.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the performance of multilingual language models on low-resource languages.
TrojanSQL: SQL Injection against Natural Language Interface to Database (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on text-to-SQL systems have not investigated its security aspects . however, how to implement such attacks remains an open question.
Approach: They propose a backdoor-based SQL injection framework for text-to-SQL systems that uses boolean-based injection and union-based injecting techniques to exploit SQL injection vulnerabilities.
Outcome: The proposed framework can produce harmful SQL statements invalidating user queries or compromise sensitive information about the database.
Dual Context-Guided Continuous Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Learning (2022.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing prompt-based paradigms have shown their competitive performance in many NLP tasks, but their effectiveness varies upon the model and training data.
Approach: They propose a dual context-guided continuous prompt tuning method that integrates contextual information into the input input.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing prompt tuning methods in the few-shot setting and can be used in many NLP tasks.
Synthesizing Text-to-SQL Data from Weak and Strong LLMs (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a capability gap exists between open-source and closed-source large language models (LLMs) . the adoption of closed-sourced LLMs introduces concerns pertaining to openness, privacy, and substantial costs.
Approach: They propose a synthetic data approach that combines strong and weak models for error information . they demonstrate the effectiveness of SENSE, a specialized text-to-SQL model .
Outcome: The proposed method enhances the domain generalization of text-to-SQL models and explores the potential of error data supervision through preference learning.
Safe-SAIL: Towards a Fine-grained Safety Landscape of Large Language Models via Sparse Autoencoder Interpretation Framework (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on how SAEs derive most fine-grained latent features for safety remain unexplored.
Approach: They propose a framework for interpreting SAE features in safety-critical domains . they train a suite of SAEs with human-readable explanations and systematic evaluations based on pornography, politics, violence, and terror .
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces interpretation cost by 55% and improves safety-critical features.
Advancing SMoE for Continuous Domain Adaptation of MLLMs: Adaptive Router and Domain-Specific Loss (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have explored Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT) in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), with a primary focus on Task-incremental CIT, where MLLM are required to continuously acquire new tasks.
Approach: They propose a Sparse Mixture of Expert (SMoE) based method for domain-incremental CIT in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) . they equip the SMoA module with a domain-specific autoregressive loss (DSAL) they establish a new benchmark to evaluate the efficacy of their method .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms all baselines and is based on a Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) module .
ClaimGen-CN: A Large-scale Chinese Dataset for Legal Claim Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Currently, legal claims are not being used by non-professionals.
Approach: They construct a dataset for Chinese legal claim generation task and then use it to evaluate the generated claims.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first for the Chinese legal claim generation task and will be made publicly available.
Persona-E²: A Human-Grounded Dataset for Personality-Shaped Emotional Responses to Textual Events (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: A critical bottleneck is the lack of ground-truth human data to link personality traits to emotional shifts.
Approach: They propose a large-scale dataset to capture reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives.
Outcome: The proposed model captures reader-based emotional variations across news, social media, and life narratives.
EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors.
Outcome: The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios.
CENTAUR: Bridging the Impossible Trinity of Privacy, Efficiency, and Performance in Privacy-Preserving Transformer Inference (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing privacy-preserving Transformer Inference frameworks suffer from high computational overhead and performance losses.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates random permutations and SMPC to address the "impossible trinity" CENTAUR resists diverse data reconstruction attacks and boosts inference speed by 5.030.4 times .
Outcome: CENTAUR achieves an unprecedented balance between privacy, efficiency, and performance.
DSMoE: Matrix-Partitioned Experts with Dynamic Routing for Computation-Efficient Dense LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing sparsification methods like pruning can lose model knowledge through parameter removal.
Approach: They propose a novel approach that achieves sparsification by partitioning pre-trained FFN layers into computational blocks.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves superior performance across language modeling and downstream tasks under equivalent computational constraints.
Exploring Dynamic Selection of Branch Expansion Orders for Code Generation (2021.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing code generation models model abstract syntax tree (AST) but not suitable for all multi-branch nodes.
Approach: They propose to equip a Seq2Tree model with a branch selector to determine optimal expansion orders for multi-branch nodes.
Outcome: The proposed model can determine optimal expansion orders of branches for multi-branch nodes.
MiLe Loss: a New Loss for Mitigating the Bias of Learning Difficulties in Generative Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing generative language models neglect an inherent challenge in text corpus during training, i.e., the imbalance between frequent tokens and infrequent ones.
Approach: They propose a function to mitigate the imbalance between frequent and infrequent tokens . authors propose 'MiLe Loss' function to assess learning difficulty of tokens during training .
Outcome: Experiments show that models with proposed model can improve on downstream benchmarks.
When KV Cache Reuse Fails in Multi-Agent Systems: Cross-Candidate Interaction is Crucial for LLM Judges (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multi-agent LLMs generate multiple candidate responses that are aggregated by an LLM judge.
Approach: They propose to advocate KV cache reuse across partially shared contexts and report substantial speedups for generation agents.
Outcome: The proposed reuse strategies weaken cross-candidate attention, especially for later candidate blocks, and highlight judge-centric inference as a distinct regime that requires dedicated, risk-aware system design.
MMAPS: End-to-End Multi-Grained Multi-Modal Attribute-Aware Product Summarization (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing product summarization methods lack end-to-end product summaries and multi-grained multi-modal modeling.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end multi-grained multi-modal attribute-aware product summarization method that jointly models product attributes and generates product summaries.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art product summarization methods on a large-scale Chinese e-commence dataset.
AgentMark: Utility-Preserving Behavioral Watermarking for Agents (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have improved text generation and reasoning.
Approach: They propose a behavioral watermarking framework that embeds multi-bit identifiers into planning decisions while preserving utility.
Outcome: The proposed framework embeds multi-bit provenance into planning decisions while preserving utility.
Ranking-Based Autoencoder for Extreme Multi-label Classification (N19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to solve label dependency and noisy labeling problems are limited . experimental results show the proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods .
Approach: They propose a deep learning XML method with word-vector-based self-attention followed by ranking-based AutoEncoder architecture to solve these problems.
Outcome: The proposed method is competitive to state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets.
Towards Robust k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: k-Nearest-Neighbor Machine Translation (kNN-MT) is a popular research paradigm in machine translation.
Approach: They propose a confidence-enhanced kNN-MT model with robust training to reduce noise . they introduce NMT confidence to refine the modeling of important components of kN-MT .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on four benchmark datasets and is robust to training.
GenTool: Enhancing Tool Generalization in Language Models through Zero-to-One and Weak-to-Strong Simulation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can expand their capabilities by integrating external tools.
Approach: They propose a training framework that prepares LLMs for diverse generalization challenges in tool utilization.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the tool-usage capabilities of LLMs by up to 8B parameters, surpassing GPT-4o.
SpeechLLM-as-Judges: Towards General and Interpretable Speech Quality Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for evaluating the perceptual quality of synthetic speech are limited due to the complexity of perceptual quality factors and the diversity of speech generation tasks.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for enabling large language models to conduct structured speech quality evaluation using a large-scale dataset.
Outcome: The proposed model performs well across tasks and languages.
Conic10K: A Challenging Math Problem Understanding and Reasoning Dataset (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks or datasets require only a few steps of reasoning, making it difficult to analyse AI’s behaviour with reference to different problems within a specific topic in detail.
Approach: They propose a conic10K math problem dataset that requires only a few steps of reasoning to be analysed.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that existing language models exhibit weak performance on complex reasoning.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations