Papers by Jiahui Zhang
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Ren Ma, Yinfan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Xingjian Wei, Qiu Jiantao, Chi Zhang, Ying Qian, Conghui He
| Challenge: | composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%. |
DetGPT: Detect What You Need via Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)
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Renjie Pi, Jiahui Gao, Shizhe Diao, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong, Jipeng Zhang, Lewei Yao, Jianhua Han, Hang Xu, Lingpeng Kong, Tong Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in the field of computer vision have enabled more effective and sophisticated interactions between humans and machines. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning-based object detection paradigm that leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal models and open-vocabulary object detectors to perform reasoning within the context of the user’s instructions and the visual scene. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method enables users to interact with the system using natural language instructions, allowing for a higher level of interactivity. |
Exploring Multimodal Relation Extraction of Hierarchical Tabular Data with Multi-task Learning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies overlook the need of mining relations among multiple columns rather than just the semantic relation between two specific columns in real-world practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chain-of-Thought distillation framework with self-correction mechanism to enhance MLLMs’ reasoning capabilities without increasing parameter scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines on wide datasets. |
SGPVT: Self-Generated Proximal Visual Tokens for Mitigating Proximal Collateral Damage in MLLM Unlearning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches focus on general utility metrics, overlooking the preservation of semantically related concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that introduces self-generated proximal visual tokens to prevent forgetting vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in preserving semantically related concepts while achieving effective target unlearning. |
Look Less, Reason More: Rollout-Guided Adaptive Pixel-Space Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown promise by incorporating pixel-level visual information into the reasoning process, enabling VLMs to access high-resolution visual details during their thought process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that dynamically determines necessary pixel-level operations based on the input query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 73.4% accuracy on HR-Bench 4K while maintaining a tool usage ratio of only 20.1%, improving accuracy and reducing tool usage by 66.5% compared to the previous methods. |
VocalRep: Structure-Aware Vocal Representations for Multimodal Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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Da Shen, Zhenqiang Weng, Tianyu Liu, Gongyu Chen, Runhua Shi, Jiahui Chen, Chaofan Ding, Wei-Qiang Zhang, Zihao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to vocal separation are optimized for signal-level reconstruction, but they overlook structural disentanglement required for downstream generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware learning framework to disentangle vocals, harmonies, and accompaniment . they combine global vocal identity conditioning with ranking-based objectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles lead vocals, harmonies, and accompaniment while enforcing role consistency across long-form audio. |
Efficient Pretraining Data Selection for Language Models via Multi-Actor Collaboration (2025.acl-long)
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Tianyi Bai, Ling Yang, Zhen Hao Wong, Fupeng Sun, Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Chi Zhang, Lijun Wu, Qiu Jiantao, Wentao Zhang, Binhang Yuan, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Efficient data selection is crucial to accelerate the pretraining of language models . limited research has addressed the inherent conflicts between data selection methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-actor collaborative data selection mechanism that prioritizes data based on its specific criterion and updates prioritization rules using the current state of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model accelerates convergence in LM pretraining and achieves an average relative performance gain of 10.5% across multiple language model benchmarks. |
Reasoning over Precedents Alongside Statutes: Case-Augmented Deliberative Alignment for LLM Safety (2026.acl-long)
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Can Jin, Rui Wu, Tong Che, Qixin Zhang, Hongwu Peng, Jiahui Zhao, Zhenting Wang, Wenqi Wei, Ligong Han, Zhao Zhang, Yuan Cao, Ruixiang Tang, Dimitris N. Metaxas
| Challenge: | OpenAI introduces deliberative alignment (DA) to enhance safety of its o-series models, but effectiveness of this approach in open-source LLMs is understudied. |
| Approach: | They propose a case-augmented deliberative alignment method for large language models . they propose to use reinforcement learning on self-generated safety reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method avoids narrowly enumerated rules and allows broader adaptability. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
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Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
MultiPL-MoE: Multi-Programming-Lingual Extension of Large Language Models through Hybrid Mixture-of-Experts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | MultiPL is a special case of multiple natural languages and requires limited computational resources to generate multilingual code. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend LLMs by combining two paired experts to optimize expert selection at token and segment levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension improves the performance of the base LLMs while retaining the most popular ones using limited computational resources. |
Think Faster Than Words: Efficient LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Dynamic Shortcut Decoding (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that prune or employ early stopping to reduce latency often compromise reasoning reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a shortcut decoding framework that integrates probes over internal hidden states with step-level entropy to detect convergence of reasoning during generation and adaptively selects between a fast-exit path and a stability-verified path to remove redundant steps while preserving answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage by approximately 35% and maintains accuracy comparable to full CoT decoding. |
Pointing to a Llama and Call it a Camel: On the Sycophancy of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models exhibit a pronounced form of visual sycophantic behavior when they process image inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique that allows multimodal large language models to engage in reflective reasoning and determine whether a user’s instruction is misleading or corrective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model resists misleading instructions but is stubborn even if it is wrong. |
Optimizing Language Models with Fair and Stable Reward Composition in Reinforcement Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has developed algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback that incorporates weighting, ranking, and constraining to handle disparate rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces disparity and enhances stability among rewards . empirical results show that the proposed method is efficient and straightforward . |
Don’t Be Misled by Style: A Style-Adaptive Reranker for Capturing Effective Knowledge in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing rerankers are mainly trained on well-edited texts, but stylistic features can be misled by reranked models. |
| Approach: | They propose a style-augmented multi-task framework that prioritizes effective knowledge over stylistic perturbations by using an LLM to derive passage-level supervision on whether a passage helps or harms answer correctness. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that SARK improves generation performance across multiple LLMs under mixed-style conditions. |
Unveiling Opinion Evolution via Prompting and Diffusion for Short Video Fake News Detection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for short video fake news detection ignore the implicit opinions and evolving nature of opinions across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a short video fake news model that mines implicit opinions within short videos and promotes the evolution of both explicit and implicit opinions across all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a publicly available dataset for short video fake news detection. |
ExeSQL: Self-Taught Text-to-SQL Models with Execution-Driven Bootstrapping for SQL Dialects (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited to SQLite due to dataset limitations . data generated through static prompting is noisy and unreliable, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-SQL framework with execution-driven, agentic bootstrapping . ExeSQl bridges the dialect gap in text- to-Sql, achieving average improvements . |
| Outcome: | ExeSQL bridges the dialect gap in text-to-SQl, with average improvements of 15.2%, 10.38%, and 4.49% over GPT-4o on PostgreSQLE, MySQL, and Oracle. |
Shaping the Safety Boundaries: Understanding and Defending Against Jailbreaks in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Understanding how jailbreaking works remains limited, hindering the development of effective defense strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a new mechanism that adaptively constrains activations within the safety boundary and propose 'Activation Boundary Defense' to enhance its effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense achieves an average Defense Success Rate (DSR) of over 98% against various jailbreak attacks, with less than 2% impact on the model’s general capabilities. |
From Discrimination to Generation: Low-Resource Intent Detection with Language Model Instruction Tuning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies fine-tune discriminative models on specific defined intent classes, preventing them from being directly adopted to new intent domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a pre-trained generative intent model to detect new intents from different domains with no parameter updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines that need further fine-tuning or domain-specific samples. |
Clear Up Confusion: Iterative Differential Generation for Fine-grained Intent Detection with Contrastive Feedback (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on fine-grained intent detection have focused on collecting large-scale and high-quality samples via crowdsourcing resulting in data scarcity. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative differential generation framework with contrastive feedback to generate high-quality pseudo samples and accurately capture the crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality pseudo samples and captures crucial nuances in target class distribution. |
Mixture of insighTful Experts (MoTE): The Synergy of Reasoning Chains and Expert Mixtures in Self-Alignment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhili Liu, Yunhao Gou, Kai Chen, Lanqing Hong, Jiahui Gao, Fei Mi, Yu Zhang, Zhenguo Li, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, James Kwok
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that reasoning abilities contribute significantly to model safety, while integrating Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures can further enhance alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically combines reasoning chains and expert mixtures to improve self-alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety, jailbreak resistance, and over-refusal capabilities, achieving performance comparable to OpenAI’s state-of-the-art o1 model. |
Awakening Latent Grounding from Pretrained Language Models for Semantic Parsing (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent years pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown their power on modeling language . however, few efforts have been made to explore grounding capabilities of PLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose to use pretrained language models to explore syntactic structures . they propose to combine their approach with an erasingthen-awakening approach . their results show that the approach can awaken latent grounding, which is understandable to humans . |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that the proposed approach can awaken latent grounding . it shows great potential to benefit downstream semantic parsing models, it says . |