Papers by Kexin Zhang
LLM-VA: Resolving the Jailbreak-Overrefusal Trade-off via Vector Alignment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental trade-off—reducing jailbreak increases over-refusal. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which aligns va with vb through closed-form weight updates, making the model’s willingness to respond causally dependent on its safety assessment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 12 LLMs show that the proposed method achieves 11.45% higher F1 than the best baseline while preserving 95.92% utility. |
LaMP-Val: Large Language Models Empower Personalized Valuation in Auction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jie Sun, Tianyu Zhang, Houcheng Jiang, Kexin Huang, Xiang Shu, Zhibo Zhu, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Junkang Wu, Chi Luo, An Zhang, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Currently, most research focuses on the bidding algorithms used within auction mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose a personalized valuation framework that integrates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates Large Language Models to incorporate personalized semantic preference into users valuation process. |
NOVA-63: Native Omni-lingual Versatile Assessments of 63 Disciplines (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multilingual benchmarks show severe drawbacks, such as overly translated content, the absence of difficulty control, and disciplinary imbalance, making the benchmarking process unreliable and showing low convincingness. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that integrates LLM-assisted formatting, expert quality verification, and multi-level difficulty screening to provide a comprehensive, difficult multilingual assessment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark features 93,536 questions sourced from native speakers across 14 languages and 63 academic disciplines. |
LLM-as-Scheduler: Agentic Workflow Dynamic Scheduling (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that LAS cuts token usage by 43% and reduces end-to-end latency by more than 36%, while causing at most a 1.4 percentage-point drop in accuracy compared with a strong fixed workflow. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that dynamically chooses the right workflow for each query. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LAS cuts token usage by 43% and reduces end-to-end latency by more than 36% while causing at most a 1.4 percentage-point drop in accuracy compared with a strong fixed workflow. |
Sticking to the Mean: Detecting Sticky Tokens in Text Embedding Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Sticky tokens, when repeatedly inserted into sentences, pull sentence similarity toward a certain value, disrupting the normal distribution of embedding distances and degrading downstream performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to detect “sticky tokens” by sentence and token filtering and apply it to 40 checkpoints across 14 model families. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method detects 868 sticky tokens across 14 models and shows that their presence does not correlate with model size or vocabulary size. |
WESR: A Benchmark and Strong Baseline for Word-level Event-Speech Recognition (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenchen Yang, Kexin Huang, Liwei Fan, Qian Tu, Botian Jiang, Dong Zhang, Linqi Yin, Shimin Li, Zhaoye Fei, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | aaron carroll: the precise localization of non-verbal vocal events remains a critical yet under-explored challenge. carroll says current methods suffer from insufficient task definitions with limited category coverage. carrol: knowing exactly where an event occurred is not enough; knowing exactly what it happened is. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of 21 vocal events with a new categorization into discrete versus continuous types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model disentangles ASR errors from event detection while maintaining ASR quality. |
Fake Alignment: Are LLMs Really Aligned Well? (2024.naacl-long)
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Yixu Wang, Yan Teng, Kexin Huang, Chengqi Lyu, Songyang Zhang, Wenwei Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang, Yu Qiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Existing studies on large language models have shown that they are poorly aligned in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate safety in large language models . they propose two new metrics to quantify fake alignment and obtain corrected performance estimation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework and two metrics show that some models with purported safety are poorly aligned in practice. |
UKP-SQuARE v2: Explainability and Adversarial Attacks for Trustworthy QA (2022.aacl-demo)
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Rachneet Sachdeva, Haritz Puerto, Tim Baumgärtner, Sewin Tariverdian, Hao Zhang, Kexin Wang, Hossain Shaikh Saadi, Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Iryna Gurevych
| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) systems rely on deep neural networks, which are difficult to interpret by humans. |
| Approach: | They propose an interpretable model that provides an explanation infrastructure for comparing models based on saliency maps and graph-based explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can be used to compare models based on saliency maps and graph-based explanations. |
MMDEND: Dendrite-Inspired Multi-Branch Multi-Compartment Parallel Spiking Neuron for Sequence Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Kexin Wang, Yuhong Chou, Di Shang, Shijie Mei, Jiahong Zhang, Yanbin Huang, Man Yao, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li
| Challenge: | Vanilla spiking neurons are simplified from complex biological neurons with dendrites, soma, and synapses into single somatic compartments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-branch, multi-compartment parallel spiking dendritic neuron with a proportion-adjustable multi-branched structure that enables long-term temporal dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better long-sequence modeling capability with fewer parameters and lower energy consumption. |
PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | PromptSculptor automates the iterative prompt optimization process for Text-to-Image models . previous work focused on generating detailed, high-quality prompts based on user feedback . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes a task into four specialized agents . they use Chain-of-Thought reasoning to transform a short, vague user prompt into a comprehensive, refined prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves output quality and reduces iterations needed for user satisfaction. |
Test-Time Code-Switching for Cross-lingual Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a thriving research area . current code-switching methods suffer from term boundary detection issues and out-of-dictionary problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a test-time code-switching framework which bridges the gap between bilingual training and monolingual test- time prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 3.7% on four cross-lingual datasets. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Invisible Entropy: Towards Safe and Efficient Low-Entropy LLM Watermarking (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to watermark low-entropy content are expensive and risky . IE reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a logit-based watermarking paradigm that uses entropy-based features to predict whether the next token is high or low. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces parameter size by 99% while achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods. |
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Ming Zhang, Yujiong Shen, Jingyi Deng, Yuhui Wang, Huayu Sha, Kexin Tan, Qiyuan Peng, Yue Zhang, Junzhe Wang, Shichun Liu, Yueyuan Huang, Jingqi Tong, Changhao Jiang, Yilong Wu, Zhihao Zhang, Mingqi Wu, Mingxu Chai, Zhiheng Xi, Shihan Dou, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting. |
| Approach: | LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data . |
| Outcome: | LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm . |
GCPG: A General Framework for Controllable Paraphrase Generation (2022.findings-acl)
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Kexin Yang, Dayiheng Liu, Wenqiang Lei, Baosong Yang, Haibo Zhang, Xue Zhao, Wenqing Yao, Boxing Chen
| Challenge: | Existing studies highlight a special condition under two indispensable aspects of controllable paraphrase generation (CPG) individually, lacking a unified circumstance to explore and analyze their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a general controllable paraphrase generation framework that integrates lexical and syntactical conditions into a text sequence and uniformly processes them in an encoder-decoder paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can combine lexical and syntactical conditions and improve paraphrase generation. |
A Survey of Large Language Models for Text-Guided Molecular Discovery: From Molecule Generation to Optimization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are introducing a paradigm shift in molecular discovery by enabling text-guided interaction with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations. |
| Approach: | They analyze the current LLM learning paradigms to tackle four critical evaluation dimensions that have emerged as critical dimensions in recent studies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models are able to interact with chemical spaces through natural language and symbolic notations, and have emerging extensions to incorporate multi-modal inputs. |
SynthFix: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Code Vulnerability Repair (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle with complex semantic and structural correctness required for automated code repair. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural-symbolic framework that unifies code synthesis with compiler-informed symbolic feedback to improve LLM-based vulnerability repair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves code repair accuracy and efficiency over strong SFT and RFT training strategies on the FixJS and CodeFlaws benchmarks. |
Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification is proposed . male gaze refers to a phenomenon in which women are depicted as objects of aesthetic pleasure . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification . they compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework measures female objectification along two axes. |
MAS-Bench: A Unified Benchmark for Shortcut-Augmented Hybrid Mobile GUI Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Guangyi Liu, Yaozhen Liang, Weiqing He, Zhengxi Lu, WenHao Wang, Yuehao Huang, Yuxiang Chai, Zhaolu Kang, Yaxuan Guo, Hao Wang, Kexin Zhang, Liang Liu, Yong Liu
| Challenge: | Shortcuts such as APIs and deep-links have emerged as efficient complements to flexible GUI operations, but systematic evaluation of GUI–shortcut hybrid agents remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that evaluates GUI-shortcut hybrid agents with a specific focus on the mobile domain. |
| Outcome: | MAS-Bench evaluates agent's ability to generate shortcuts by discovering and creating reusable, low-cost workflows. |
HSS-Synth: Humanities and Social Sciences Data Synthesis for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Ru Peng, Tianyu Zhao, Xijun Gu, Zhiting Fan, Haokai Xu, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Yihong Zhuang, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao
| Challenge: | High-quality, diverse data are vital for large language models (LLMs) but remain scarce and costly. |
| Approach: | They define the first HSS domain system covering 14 mainstream fields and introduce HSS-Synth. |
| Outcome: | the proposed pipeline outperforms 14 leading baselines on 16 benchmarks. |
GameplayQA: A Benchmarking Framework for Decision-Dense POV-Synced Multi-Video Understanding of 3D Virtual Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Yunzhe Wang, Runhui Xu, Kexin Zheng, Tianyi Zhang, Jayavibhav Niranjan Kogundi, Soham Hans, Volkan Ustun
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models are emerging as a backbone for autonomous agents in 3D environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating agentic-centric perception and reasoning through video understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates agentic-centric perception and reasoning through video understanding. |
Measuring Social Norms of Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets that evaluate a general understanding of social science are inadequate to understand social norms. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework to improve large language models’ ability to understand social norms by comparing them to elementary students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves large language models to be on par with humans. |
UKP-SQuARE v3: A Platform for Multi-Agent QA Research (2023.acl-demo)
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Haritz Puerto, Tim Baumgärtner, Rachneet Sachdeva, Haishuo Fang, Hao Zhang, Sewin Tariverdian, Kexin Wang, Iryna Gurevych
| Challenge: | Current approaches to QA models are multi-dataset models, but combining expert agents can yield large performance gains over multi-agent models. |
| Approach: | They extend an online platform for QA research to support three families of multi-agent systems: agent selection, early-fusion of agents, and late-fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be compared with multi-dataset models and achieve high inference speed and performance. |
SpikeVoice: High-Quality Text-to-Speech Via Efficient Spiking Neural Network (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | SpikeVoice performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN . major obstacle to using SNN for such generative tasks lies in the demand for models to grasp long-term dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-inspired Spiking Neural Network (SNN) which performs high-quality Text-To-Speech (TTS) via SNN and explores the potential of SNN to "speak". |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable results to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) with only 10.5% energy consumption of ANN. |