Papers by Kang Zhu
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition (2025.acl-long)
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Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
| Challenge: | Existing studies on vision-language models aligned with general human objectives have not been successful because people with diversified backgrounds have different cognition even in the same situation. |
| Approach: | They propose to characterize individuals based on the sociological concept of Role-Set and then evaluate their actions to see whether personalized alignment is achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework constructs a cognition-aware and action-based reward model for personalized alignment. |
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process. |
ZipVoice-Dialog: Non-Autoregressive Spoken Dialogue Generation with Flow Matching (2026.findings-acl)
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Han Zhu, Wei Kang, Liyong Guo, Zengwei Yao, Fangjun Kuang, Weiji Zhuang, Zhaoqing Li, Zhifeng Han, Dong Zhang, Xin Zhang, Xingchen Song, Lingxuan Ye, Long Lin, Daniel Povey
| Challenge: | Existing autoregressive models for dialogue generation suffer from high latency and stability issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a non-autoregressive (NAR) zero-shot spoken dialogue generation model based on flow-matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in speech generation due to poor speech intelligibility and turn-taking precision. |
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)
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Lemao Liu, Haisong Zhang, Haiyun Jiang, Yangming Li, Enbo Zhao, Kun Xu, Linfeng Song, Suncong Zheng, Botong Zhou, Dick Zhu, Xiao Feng, Tao Chen, Tao Yang, Dong Yu, Feng Zhang, ZhanHui Kang, Shuming Shi
| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
UTBoost: Rigorous Evaluation of Coding Agents on SWE-Bench (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models have enabled the development of coding agents for real-world code generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-driven test case generator that analyzes codebases and dependencies to generate test cases for real-world Python projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of SWE-Bench by analyzing codebases and dependencies. |
Chinese Lexical Substitution: Dataset and Method (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for lexical substitution (LS) are limited and limited in coverage . despite extensive research on Lexical Substitution in various languages, there is limited evidence for LS in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and machine collaboration to construct a Chinese LS dataset . they combine four unsupervised LS methods to generate candidate substitutes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks on the Chinese lexical substitution task. |
INSPIRED: Toward Sociable Recommendation Dialog Systems (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on recommendation dialog systems lack a study on communication strategies used by human speakers for making successful and persuasive recommendations. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a dataset of human-human movie recommendation dialogs with sociable recommendation strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline model in automatic and human evaluation. |
BigVideo: A Large-scale Video Subtitle Translation Dataset for Multimodal Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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Liyan Kang, Luyang Huang, Ningxin Peng, Peihao Zhu, Zewei Sun, Shanbo Cheng, Mingxuan Wang, Degen Huang, Jinsong Su
| Challenge: | Existing datasets focus on captions describing images or videos, which are not large and diverse enough. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale video subtitle translation dataset to facilitate multi-modality machine translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is 10 times larger than the widely used *How2* and *VaTeX* datasets. |
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)
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Zhe Zhao, Yudong Li, Cheng Hou, Jing Zhao, Rong Tian, Weijie Liu, Yiren Chen, Ningyuan Sun, Haoyan Liu, Weiquan Mao, Han Guo, Weigang Gou, Taiqiang Wu, Tao Zhu, Wenhang Shi, Chen Chen, Shan Huang, Sihong Chen, Liqun Liu, Feifei Li, Xiaoshuai Chen, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Xiaoyong Du, Linlin Shen, Kimmo Yan
| Challenge: | Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks. |
Self-Specialization: Uncovering Latent Expertise within Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Junmo Kang, Hongyin Luo, Yada Zhu, Jacob Hansen, James Glass, David Cox, Alan Ritter, Rogerio Feris, Leonid Karlinsky
| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of self-alignment in which a large language model is aligned to follow general instructions using instructional data generated from the model itself. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human-written seeds to align large language models to follow general instructions to achieve cross-task generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms base models and models that are generally instruction-tuned or have been adapted to the target domain by a large margin. |
I²B-LPO: Latent Policy Optimization via Iterative Information Bottleneck (2026.acl-long)
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Huilin Deng, Hongchen Luo, Yue Zhu, Long Li, Zhuoyue Chen, Xinghao Zhao, Ming LI, Chuyang Zhao, Jihai Zhang, MengChang Wang, Yang Cao, Yu Kang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language model reasoning suffer from exploration collapse due to the semantic homogeneity of random rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use latent policy optimization via iterative information bottleneck to optimize reasoning trajectories by diversifying reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance with margins of up to 5.3% in accuracy and 7.4% in diversity metrics. |
FoE: Forest of Errors Makes the First Solution the Best in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-guided efficient reasoning framework that reduces FoE by pruning subs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms eight competitive baselines while reducing token consumption by 37.7% 70.4%. |
Guiding Medical Vision-Language Models with Diverse Visual Prompts: Framework Design and Comprehensive Exploration of Prompt Variations (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current vision-language models lack the ability to focus on specific areas designated by humans . a new framework that integrates medical entity extraction, visual prompt generation, and dataset adaptation is proposed to improve visual prompt-guided fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use visual prompts to guide and enhance formation of region-specific attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art large vision-language models on medical datasets. |
Leveraging Explicit Lexico-logical Alignments in Text-to-SQL Parsing (2022.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Text-to-SQL parsing aims to parse natural language questions into SQL queries . current attention-based approaches can only model alignments at the token level . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to leverage explicit lexico-logical alignments by identifying possible phrase-level alignments and injecting them as additional contexts into the parsing procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance by 3.4% on Squall. |
ParaLS: Lexical Substitution via Pretrained Paraphraser (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lexical substitution (LS) is an extremely powerful technology that can be used as a backbone of various NLP applications such as writing assistance. |
| Approach: | They propose two simple decoding strategies that focus on the variations of the target word during decoding to generate substitutes from a paraphraser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art LS methods based on pre-trained language models on three benchmarks. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
NeuReasoner: Towards Explainable, Controllable, and Unified Reasoning via Mixture-of-Neurons (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) lack explainability and controllability . Existing models target isolated levels without unification, while relying on RL . |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable, controllable, and unified reasoning framework driven by MoN. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves performance gains of 27.0% while reducing token consumption by 19.6% 63.3%. |
Towards Graph-hop Retrieval and Reasoning in Complex Question Answering over Textual Database (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for textual question answering only focus on single-chain or single-hop retrieval . Existing approaches to answer complex questions have limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct Graph-Hop, a novel multi-chains and multi-hops retrieval paradigm in complex question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model provides explicit and fine-grained evidence graphs for complex question to support comprehensive and detailed reasoning. |
JurisBench: A Deep Benchmark for Assessing Large Language Models in Professional Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Ziang Chen, Guannan Li, Fanlin Ji, Yipeng Kang, Jiaqi Li, Muhan Zhang, Yangtao Zhang, Li Tianjiao, Jiannan Wang, Xin Guo, Song-Chun Zhu, Bin Ling
| Challenge: | Existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated tasks or exam-style questions, failing to capture the procedural interdependencies and adjudicative rigor inherent in professional practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a vertical, depth-oriented, domain-specific benchmark to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) in Chinese civil litigation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that large language models exhibit an "illusion of competence" the results highlight a critical gap between fluent linguistic output and judicial reliability . |
STINMatch: Semi-Supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network for Financial Risk Detection via News Label Diffusion (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xurui Li, Yue Qin, Rui Zhu, Tianqianjin Lin, Yongming Fan, Yangyang Kang, Kaisong Song, Fubang Zhao, Changlong Sun, Haixu Tang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Commercial news provides rich semantics and timely information for automated financial risk detection. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised Semantic-Topological Iteration Network, STINMatch, along with a news-enterprise knowledge graph to endorse the risk detection enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in terms of generalization and semantics and annotation. |
FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection (2026.acl-long)
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Fuyuan Liu, Dianyu Yu, He Ren, Nayu Liu, Xiaomian Kang, Delai Qiu, Fa Zhang, Genpeng Zhen, Shengping Liu, Liang Jiaen, null Weihuang, Yining Wang, Junnan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document comprehension rely on uniform supervision, resulting in a performance degradation in the intermediate sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework driven by Focal Preference Optimization to detect reading order in document layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing baselines and surpasses large-scale general VLMs. |
LLaSE-G1: Incentivizing Generalization Capability for LLaMA-based Speech Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
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Boyi Kang, Xinfa Zhu, Zihan Zhang, Zhen Ye, Mingshuai Liu, Ziqian Wang, Yike Zhu, Guobin Ma, Jun Chen, Longshuai Xiao, Chao Weng, Wei Xue, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLaMA-based language model that incentivizes generalization capabilities for speech enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model outperforms prior task-specific discriminative and generative models in acoustic enhancement tasks. |
Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for LLM agents fail to exploit real-world zero-day vulnerabilities . prior work has shown that simple agents can hack mock "capture-the-flag" websites . |
| Approach: | They propose a system of agents with a planning agent that can launch subagents to exploit real-world vulnerabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over previous frameworks by up to 4.3 on 14 real-world vulnerabilities. |
SciMMIR: Benchmarking Scientific Multi-modal Information Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)
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Siwei Wu, Yizhi Li, Kang Zhu, Ge Zhang, Yiming Liang, Kaijing Ma, Chenghao Xiao, Haoran Zhang, Bohao Yang, Wenhu Chen, Wenhao Huang, Noura Al Moubayed, Jie Fu, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Multi-modal information retrieval (MMIR) is a rapidly evolving field . current benchmarks for image-text pairings overlook the scientific domain . |
| Approach: | They develop a scientific domain-specific MMIR benchmark to evaluate image-text pairings using open-access research paper corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks are based on 530K image-text pairs extracted from scientific documents with detailed captions. |
EasyQuant: An Efficient Data-free Quantization Algorithm for LLMs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has shown that large language models are superior to conventional methods in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-independent quantization algorithm that leaves outliers in the weight and quantization ranges . they find the algorithm runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method runs over 10 times faster than the data-dependent methods. |
MeasHalu: Mitigation of Scientific Measurement Hallucinations for Large Language Models with Enhanced Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Ruijun Huang, Zhiqiao Kang, Yuxuan Zhu, Junxiong Li, Jiahao Zhao, Minghuan Tan, Feng Jiang, Min Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit severe hallucinations, which undermine reliability of automated scientific document understanding systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for mitigating scientific measurement hallucinations through enhanced reasoning and targeted optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces hallucination rates and improves overall accuracy on the MeasEval benchmark. |
From Past To Path: Masked History Learning for Next-Item Prediction in Generative Recommendation (2026.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Kejun he, Xiaomian Kang, Jie Zhang, null Ymyang, Li Jin, Zhenyang Li, Jiang Zhong, Richard He Bai, Junnan Zhu
| Challenge: | Generative recommendation models inherently bias towards local contexts, failing to capture deeper historical dependencies necessary for understanding complex user intents. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that shifts the objective from simple next-step prediction to deep comprehension of history by entropy-guided masking policy and a curriculum learning scheduler to enhance the framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art generative models on three public datasets and shows that it is more accurate than current models. |
Threads of Subtlety: Detecting Machine-Generated Texts Through Discourse Motifs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Empirical findings show that although both LLMs and humans generate distinct discourse patterns influenced by specific domains, human-written texts exhibit more structural variability, reflecting the nuanced nature of human writing in different domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to leverage hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to uncover distinctive discourse patterns in texts written by humans and LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method combines hierarchical parse trees and recursive hypergraphs to uncover distinctive discourse patterns in texts produced by both LLMs and humans. |
FCDS: Fusing Constituency and Dependency Syntax into Document-Level Relation Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to identify relation labels between entities within a document. |
| Approach: | They propose to fuse constituency and dependency syntax into DocRE to exploit the rich syntax information in the document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to identify relation labels between entities within a document and is scalable. |
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to solve complex natural language processing tasks require multiple steps to verify the answers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use chain of thought prompting to solve reasoning tasks with large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve reasoning performance on arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. |