Papers by Jinfeng Huang
CR-GIS: Improving Conversational Recommendation via Goal-aware Interest Sequence Modeling (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine a goal item by sequentially tracking users’ interests ignore the rich goal-aware implicit interest sequence patterns in a dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose to model goal-aware implicit user interest sequence patterns in a dialog and a hierarchical Star Transformer to guide multi-turn utterances generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves more accurate recommendations with more fluent and coherent dialog utterances. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
TopKG: Target-oriented Dialog via Global Planning on Knowledge Graph (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing target-oriented dialogs take a local and greedy strategy for response generation, where global planning is absent. |
| Approach: | They propose a global planning method for target-oriented dialog on a commonsense knowledge graph to adjust local response generation towards the global target. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the target with a higher success rate, fewer turns, and more coherent responses. |
QDMR-based Planning-and-Solving Prompting for Complex Reasoning Tasks (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing Plan-and-Solve prompting methods are difficult to implement for complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plan-and-solve prompting method based on Question Decomposition Meaning Representation (QDMR) it allows LLM to generate a QDMR graph to represent problem-solving logic . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can represent and execute the problem-solving logic of complex questions more accurately than existing methods. |
CASE: Aligning Coarse-to-Fine Cognition and Affection for Empathetic Response Generation (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing empathetic dialogue models only consider the affective aspect of empathy, which limits the capability of emotional response generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that aligns the user's cognition and affection at both the coarse-grained and fine-grounded levels and then automatically and manually evaluates the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and generates more empathetic and informative responses. |
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. |
Depression Detection in Clinical Interviews with LLM-Empowered Structural Element Graph (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing depression only capture part of relevant elements . scarcity of participant data constrains interview modeling due to privacy concerns . |
| Approach: | They propose a structural element graph (SEGA) that transforms clinical interviews into an expertise-inspired directed acyclic graph for comprehensive modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline methods and powerful LLMs on two real-world clinical datasets. |
EmoBench: Evaluating the Emotional Intelligence of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Sahand Sabour, Siyang Liu, Zheyuan Zhang, June Liu, Jinfeng Zhou, Alvionna Sunaryo, Tatia Lee, Rada Mihalcea, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Emotional Intelligence (EI) focus on emotion recognition, neglecting essential EI capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that proposes a comprehensive definition for machine EI . they propose 400 hand-crafted questions in English and Chinese to evaluate EI. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks focus on emotion recognition, neglecting EI capabilities . they are constructed from existing datasets, which include frequent patterns and errors . the proposed benchmark includes questions in English and Chinese that require thorough reasoning and understanding . |
Unveiling the Implicit Toxicity in Large Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies focus on probing toxic outputs that can be easily detected with existing toxicity classifiers, but LLMs can generate diverse implicit toxic output that are difficult to detect via simply zero-shot prompting. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning based attacking method to induce the implicit toxic outputs in large language models by fine-tuning toxicity classifiers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates implicit toxic outputs that are difficult to detect via zero-shot prompting on five widely-adopted toxicity classifiers. |
HPSS: Heuristic Prompting Strategy Search for LLM Evaluators (2025.findings-acl)
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Bosi Wen, Pei Ke, Yufei Sun, Cunxiang Wang, Xiaotao Gu, Jinfeng Zhou, Jie Tang, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing efforts to optimize text evaluation prompts neglect the combinatorial impact of multiple factors, leading to insufficient optimization of the evaluation pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate 8 key factors for evaluation prompts and integrate them into an algorithm that searches for well-behaved prompting strategies for LLM evaluators. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and human-designed evaluation prompts on four evaluation tasks. |
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Zhuang Chen, Dazhen Wan, Bosi Wen, Yi Song, Jifan Yu, Yongkang Huang, Pei Ke, Guanqun Bi, Libiao Peng, JiaMing Yang, Xiyao Xiao, Sahand Sabour, Xiaohan Zhang, Wenjing Hou, Yijia Zhang, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions. |
| Approach: | They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4. |
Facilitating Multi-turn Emotional Support Conversation with Positive Emotion Elicitation: A Reinforcement Learning Approach (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to provide emotional support (ESC) ignore the effect on ES and lack explicit goals to guide emotional positive transition. |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to formalize multi-turn ESC as a process of positive emotion elicitation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in achieving positive emotion elicitation while maintaining conversational goals like coherence. |
Crisp: Cognitive Restructuring of Negative Thoughts through Multi-turn Supportive Dialogues (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Jianing Yin, Yongkang Huang, Yihan Shi, Xikun Zhang, Libiao Peng, Rongsheng Zhang, Tangjie Lv, Zhipeng Hu, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cognitive restructuring (CR) are limited by entrenched cognitive distortions, emotional resistance, and individual differences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that structures CR as theory-grounded multi-stage multi-turn dialogue and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates supportive strategies for emotional management and a multi-channel loop mechanism to account for diverse individual distortions. |
Aligning Recommendation and Conversation via Dual Imitation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing conversational recommendation systems ignore the advantage of user interest shift in connecting recommendation and conversation, leading to an ineffective loose coupling structure. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual imitation to explicitly align recommendation and conversation paths . they propose to generate high-quality responses with accurate recommendations and coherent explanations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on recommendation and conversation performance with automatic, human, and novel explainability metrics. |