Papers by Jun Zheng
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| Challenge: | Context faithfulness is essential for reliable reasoning in context-dependent scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that identifies and fine-tunes context-faithful experts . they propose 'context-faither fine- tuning' which selectively fine- tunes them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method identifies experts with specialization in context utilization and improves context grounding. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets are too challenging for direct model learning or suffer from misalignment between text and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and GPT4V to generate geometry problems with aligned text and images, facilitating model learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline generates 4.9K geometry problems with aligned text and images, facilitating model learning. |
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| Challenge: | generative models struggle with logic-intensive instruction following, exposing a persistent reasoning–execution gap. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic reasoning architecture for general image generation . they propose pixel-level feedback to ground the Thinker's policy in pixel feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system significantly improves image reasoning and generation quality. |
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| Challenge: | GUI agents have demonstrated remarkable progress in automating complex user interface interactions . training such agents for long-horizon tasks remains challenging due to limited rewards and prohibitive costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages expert trajectories as environment experiences for on-policy multi-turn training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant gains over the base model with 1K public trajectories as RL experiences . it achieves competitive performance against strong baselines such as UI-TARS-7B and GPT-4o . |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training, but proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a new instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation that instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol can be integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model’s reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn from unlabeled data are difficult for zero-shot text classification tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training based method to efficiently leverage unlabeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods in zero-shot text classification tasks on benchmarks and a real-world e-commerce dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models . |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance . |
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| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets only contain unconditional and parallel answers . conditional question answering with hierarchical multi-span answers is challenging for the community to solve . |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional question answering task with hierarchical multi-span answers . they propose CMQA, which contains conditional and hierarchic samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to build more reliable and sophisticated QA systems. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on developing models that exploit the unification of multiple modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to maintain modality independence by using a multi-modal transformer model that fuses all modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in multi-modal emotion recognition. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled mobile agents to perceive and interact with real-world mobile environments based on human instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language model that actively seeks human confirmation at critical decision points and a model inspired by reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an improvement of 46.8% in inquiry success rate and the best overall success rate among existing baselines on InquireBench. |
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| Challenge: | Current datasets cater to user-led systems and are limited to predefined specific scenarios and slots. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Chinese dialogue dataset to train a model that authentically simulates human-computer dialogues in 30 popular life service scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a joint accuracy of 75.09% in out-of-domain evaluations . it also achieves notable abilities in slot filling and questioning . |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for long-form novel generation lack scale, diversity, or objective measures. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that assesses long-form novel generation using an LLM-as-Judge approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework differentiates between human-written masterpieces, popular web novels, and LLM-generated content. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting hallucinations suffer from two drawbacks: Lack of scalable token-level rewards and Neglect of visual-anchored tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a Token Preference Optimization model with self-calibrated rewards . they propose based on visual-anchored tokens and visual-aware training objective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves hallucination performance by focusing on visual-anchored tokens without fine-grained annotations. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on large language models lacks a realistic environment and parallelized framework to support complex interactions between agents and environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates realistic societal environments and parallelized interactions to support simulations of large-scale agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can support simulations of 30,000 agents faster than the wall-clock time with 24 NVIDIA A800 GPUs and the performance increases linearly with the increase of LLM computational resources. |
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| Challenge: | Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) can modulate responses based on human instructions, but they can be maliciously steered to impact society in subtle but persistent ways. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor attack setting that allows an attacker to inject a virtual prompt into an LLM to steer it without any explicit injection at its input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to poison the model's instruction tuning data and show that it is highly effective in steering the model. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for ambiguous and incomplete queries are limited by manual construction and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits the mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions by removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for large vision language models do not fully reflect their knowledge capacity and reliability, resulting in erroneous outputs that do not align with the image content or provide answers lacking knowledge evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based benchmark for visual factuality across 8 major topics and 56 subtopics and a multi-hop question construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model decouples visual factuality into two parts: seeing the world and discovering knowledge. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models lack the capacity to formulate global strategies due to latency and availability constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance by synthesizing a query-conditioned Latent Guide. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on mathematical and coding benchmarks with negligible inference latency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for floor plan generation rely on statistical metrics like FID, GED, and PSNR, which fail to evaluate using domain knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a first floor plan dataset to train a floor plan generation model based on a multi-dimensional preference score and a textual analysis to integrate architects’ professional expertise and preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in text-conditional and class-condition tasks and is more rational and aligns better with human preferences. |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge embedding methods have limited performance on knowledge graph reasoning tasks . eureka is empowered to learn seen relations with sufficient training triples . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural insight learning framework called Eureka to bridge the “seen” to “unsea” gap . Eureca is empowered to learn seen relations with sufficient training triples while providing flexibility to learn unseen relations given only one trigger . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on seen and unseen relations . it can learn seen and unseen relationships with sufficient training triples . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval augmentation work with chunked contexts, which leads to poor quality of semantic representation and incomplete retrieval of useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for retrieval augmentation of long-context language modeling using landmark embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing retrieval methods with a notable advantage. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate hallucinations, producing outputs that are contextually inaccurate or factually incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that selects attention heads crucial to the model's prediction as inducing heads and induces hallucinations by dispersing attention of these inducers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance on tasks requiring contextual faithfulness, reading comprehension, and question answering. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents extend the utility of LLMs by interacting with dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter fusion framework based on directional consensus evaluation that disentangles knowledge updates through a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles knowledge updates through a two-stage process with minimal computational overhead and parameter updates. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) fail in unseen relation representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use three kinds of graphs to obtain unseen relation representations . they propose to decouple mixture-of-graph experts (DMoG) for unseened relations learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on unseen relation representations. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various vision reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified formal language that integrates plane and solid geometry, comprehensively covering geometric structures and semantic relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language achieves state-of-the-art parsing performance and significantly boosts MLLMs’ capabilities for downstream geometry reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing parallel tokenization methods suffer from inconsistent results due to boundary artifacts that occur after merging. |
| Approach: | They propose a Lossless Parallel Tokenization framework that ensures output identical to standard sequential tokenization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant speedup while guaranteeing lossless tokenization. |
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a promising approach for enhancing agentic search, but its performance is often hindered by reward sparsity . |
| Approach: | They propose a new research problem to improve the reward obtained per unit of exploration cost by using a system that decomposes long-horizon tasks into intermediate objectives and assigns process-level rewards to provide denser learning signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines on several agentic search benchmarks and achieves comparable performance to that of advanced proprietary models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research on reinforcement learning for LLMs under data scarcity has not been unified. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-up hierarchical framework built around three complementary perspectives: data-centric, training-centric and framework-centric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a clear conceptual foundation for understanding the design space of data-efficient RL for large language models and to guide researchers working in this emerging area. |
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| Challenge: | Existing document understanding benchmarks only handle a small number of pages . existing models are limited to handling only a limited number of documents . |
| Approach: | They propose a long document understanding benchmark that integrates three primary tasks and 20 sub-tasks based on different primary tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on open-source and closed-source models . the model outpersforms other models on more than 33,000 pages of documents . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced mathematical reasoning, but they still struggle with out-of-distribution (OOD) issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate the logical validity of reasoning steps . they retrieves semantically similar questions and steps for PRM as a warmup . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models on multiple real-world datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Contextualized embeddings are expensive and resource-demanding, hence environmentally unfriendly. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to convert contextualized embeddings from pre-trained models into static embeddables using synonym knowledge and weighted vector distribution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline embeddings by a large margin through extrinsic and intrinsic tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results prove that language models can learn from human feedback better, irrespective of sequence length . emergence of length bias often induces the model to favor longer outputs . |
| Approach: | They propose to separate reward modeling from the influence of sequence length by using the Product-of-Experts technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach shows that language models perform better regardless of sequence length . the main expert is focused on understanding human intents, while the biased expert targets the identification and capture of length bias. |
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have limited generalization capabilities and performance challenges. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 15 different backbone LLMs and non-LLMs to evaluate their performance . larger models and extensive pre-training consistently enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency . |
| Outcome: | The results show that larger models and extensive pre-training enhance in-domain accuracy and data efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Current studies personalize emotion analysis by focusing on the author but neglect the impact of the intended reader on implicit emotional feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which incorporates reader feedback into implicit emotion analysis (IEA) they use large language models to create reader agents to simulate reader feedback . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in a text-centric environment. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval of information excel at textual and semantic matching but struggle in reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of small-scale language models for query reasoning and rewriting in reasoning-intensive retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on a BRIGHT benchmark with BM25 retrievers. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that Large Language Models perform at a level comparable to humans with advantages of speed and cost-effectiveness in different fields. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce four unexplored factors and a new dimension of question difficulty to provide a more comprehensive understanding of LLMs’ judgments across varying question intricacies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dimensions of question difficulty and answer quantity provide valuable insights into optimizing LLMs’ performance as judges. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
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| Challenge: | Modern industrial applications increasingly demand language models capable of multi-step reasoning and tool use in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a model family that trains via multi-round reinforcement learning on synthetic data and open-source data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model train on synthetic and open-source data achieves strong performance on multiple agentic benchmarks and in an industrial agent system. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT is a non-parametric method that uses nearest neighbor retrieval to translate out-of-domain sentences, rare words, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences to build an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. |