Papers by Kun Zhu
An Information Bottleneck Perspective for Effective Noise Filtering on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2024.acl-long)
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Kun Zhu, Xiaocheng Feng, Xiyuan Du, Yuxuan Gu, Weijiang Yu, Haotian Wang, Qianglong Chen, Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that retrieval-augmented generation improves accuracy and relevance of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce the information bottleneck theory into retrieval-augmented generation by maximizing mutual information between compression and ground output while minimizing mutual information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy and correctness of answer generation and conciseness with 2.5% compression rate. |
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. |
Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review: A Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to generate a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references by using a database of 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. |
KG-Agent: An Efficient Autonomous Agent Framework for Complex Reasoning over Knowledge Graph (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to design the interaction strategy between large language models and knowledge graphs (KGs) are not effective for large language model (LLM)s to solve complex tasks due to the large volume and structured format of KG data. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent framework that enables small LLMs to actively make decisions over knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on in-domain and out-domain datasets using 10K samples. |
Hybrid Self-evolving Structured Memory for Computer-Use Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | despite advances in vision–language models, real-world computer-use tasks remain challenging due to long-horizon workflows, diverse interfaces, and frequent intermediate errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based memory that couples discrete symbolic nodes with continuous trajectory embeddings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms closed-source models in Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Gemini2.5-Pro-Vision on desktop and mobile platforms. |
DemonAgent: Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack on LLM-based Agent (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new method for detecting advanced backdoors is proposed to bypass safety audits. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor implantation strategy that introduces dynamic encryption to bypass safety audits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an attack success rate approaching 100% while maintaining a detection rate of 0%. |
AgentThink: A Unified Framework for Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Kangan Qian, Sicong Jiang, Yang Zhong, Ziang Luo, Zilin Huang, Tianze Zhu, Kun Jiang, Mengmeng Yang, Zheng Fu, Jinyu Miao, Yining Shi, He Zhe Lim, Li Liu, Tianbao Zhou, Hongyi Wang, Huang Yu, Yifei Hu, Guang Li, Guang Chen, Hao Ye, Lijun Sun, Diange Yang
| Challenge: | Vision-Language Models struggle with hallucinations, inefficient reasoning, and limited real-world validation hinders accurate perception and robust step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | AgentThink integrates Chain-of-Thought reasoning with dynamic, agent-style tool invocation for autonomous driving tasks. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the DriveLMM-o1 benchmark show AgentThink significantly boosts overall reasoning scores by 53.91% and enhances answer accuracy by 33.54% . |
ReEvalMed: Rethinking Medical Report Evaluation by Aligning Metrics with Real-World Clinical Judgment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Automatically generated radiology reports often receive high scores from existing evaluation metrics but fail to earn clinicians’ trust. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-evaluation framework that uses criteria spanning discrimination, robustness, and monotonicity to evaluate existing metrics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers guidance for building more clinically reliable evaluation methods. |
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)
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Siheng Li, Kejiao Li, Zenan Xu, Guanhua Huang, Kun Li, Haoyuan Wu, null Wujiajia, Zihao Zheng, Chenchen Zhang, Kun Shi, Xue Gong, Qi Yi, Ruibin Xiong, Tingqiang Xu, Yuhao Jiang, Jianfeng Yan, Yuyuan Zeng, Guanghui Xu, Jinbao Xue, Zhijiang xu, Zheng Fang, Shuai LI, Qibin Liu, Xiaoxue Li, Zhuoyu Li, Yangyu Tao, Fei Gao, Cheng Jiang, Bochao Wang, Kai Liu, Jianchen Zhu, Wai Lam, Bo Zhou, Di Wang
| Challenge: | Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings. |
| Approach: | They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base. |
Context-Aware Hierarchical Taxonomy Generation for Scientific Papers via LLM-Guided Multi-Aspect Clustering (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing taxonomy construction methods lack coherence and granularity . Existing approaches rely on manual or narrowly defined schemes . |
| Approach: | They propose a context-aware hierarchical taxonomy generation framework that integrates LLMs with dynamic clustering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in taxonomy coherence, granularity, and interpretability. |
Dissecting Failure Dynamics in Large Language Model Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models achieve strong performance through extended inference-time deliberation, yet how their reasoning failures arise remains poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that probes and redirects critical transitions using uncertainty signals. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations show that GUARD improves reasoning performance . GUard probes critical transitions and redirects them using uncertainty signals . |
Selection Bias Explorations and Debias Methods for Natural Language Sentence Matching Datasets (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) is a popular NLP task. |
| Approach: | They propose to use QuoraQP to train and evaluate NLSM models using a selection bias framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve generalization ability of trained models and give more trustworthy evaluation results for real-world adoptions. |
iAgent: LLM Agent as a Shield between User and Recommender Systems (2025.findings-acl)
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Wujiang Xu, Yunxiao Shi, Zujie Liang, Xuying Ning, Kai Mei, Kun Wang, Xi Zhu, Min Xu, Yongfeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Traditional recommender systems focus on the user-platform paradigm, where users are directly exposed under the control of the platform's recommendation algorithms. |
| Approach: | They propose a user-agent-platform paradigm where agent serves as the protective shield between user and recommender system that enables indirect exposure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves 16.6% over baselines on four datasets and mitigates echo chamber effects and reduces model bias in disadvantaged users. |
WikiSeeker: Rethinking the Role of Vision-Language Models in Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering rely on images as the retrieval key, and often overlook or misplace the role of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal RAG framework that assigns VLMs two specialized agents: a Refiner and an Inspector. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on EVQA, InfoSeek, and M2KR show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements in both retrieval accuracy and answer quality. |
YuLan-Mini: Pushing the Limits of Open Data-efficient Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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Hu Yiwen, Huatong Song, Jie Chen, Jia Deng, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Zican Dong, Yang Lu, Xu Miao, Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | prevailing pre-training approaches for large language models involve several complexities. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-cost training recipe and a robust optimization approach to mitigate training instability . they also propose synthesis, curriculum, and data selection pipelines to integrate data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves top-tier performance among models with similar parameter scale . it is comparable to industry-leading models that require significantly more data . |
InspireDebate: Multi-Dimensional Subjective-Objective Evaluation-Guided Reasoning and Optimization for Debating (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs focus on responding to specific arguments while neglecting objective assessments such as authenticity and logical validity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional evaluation system and an optimized debating framework . they propose to use coT reasoning enhancement, web-based Retrieval Augmented Generation to optimize across various dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in argument quality assessment and debate process simulation by 57%. |
Question Tells You Where the Answer Is: Intention-aware Long-Context KV Cache Compression (2026.acl-long)
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Liang Zhao, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Lei Huang, Kun Zhu, Baoxin Wang, Dayong Wu, Guoping Hu, Ting Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Recent methods to reduce the KV cache size fail to identify crucial KVs for generation while excluding others accurately, resulting in severe information loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an intention-aware KV cache eviction method that identifies and retains crucial KVs according to the attention distribution of intention, which semantically reflects the user’s goal and determines which part of the context is relevant. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can maintain the model performance while reducing the KV cache size from 128K to 2K, leading to a 6.3x increase in decoding speed and 7.8x enhancement in memory efficiency compared to the default setting. |
Small Models, Big Insights: Leveraging Slim Proxy Models To Decide When and What to Retrieve for LLMs (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine the knowledge an LLM already possesses and the knowledge that requires the help of a search engine are expensive and require excessive computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a slim proxy model that detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a proxy model and use it to perform retrieval for the missing knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach detects missing knowledge in LLMs with a slim proxy model and takes its answers as heuristic answers. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Continual Pre-training of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jie Chen, Zhipeng Chen, Jiapeng Wang, Kun Zhou, Yutao Zhu, Jinhao Jiang, Yingqian Min, Xin Zhao, Zhicheng Dou, Jiaxin Mao, Yankai Lin, Ruihua Song, Jun Xu, Xu Chen, Rui Yan, Zhewei Wei, Di Hu, Wenbing Huang, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Continual pre-training (CPT) has been an important approach for adapting language models to specific domains or tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Continual pre-training method that can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can greatly improve Chinese language ability and scientific reasoning ability of LLMs. |
Length Controlled Generation for Black-box LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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Yuxuan Gu, Wenjie Wang, Xiaocheng Feng, Weihong Zhong, Kun Zhu, Lei Huang, Ting Liu, Bing Qin, Tat-Seng Chua
| Challenge: | Existing length control methods involve fine-tuning the parameters of LLMs, which is inefficient and suboptimal for practical use. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative sampling framework that regulates LLMs to generate length-constrained text without modifying the underlying parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 100% success rates on Llama3.1 tasks with minimal additional computational overhead. |
Can LLMs Really Judge? A Progressive Argumentation-Mining Framework for Distinguishing Understanding from Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models rely on dataset-based generation accuracy . however, generative correctness does not guarantee discriminative capability to verify solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a diagnostic framework that explicitly controls context and isolates discriminative behaviors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework explicitly controls context and isolates discriminative behaviors. |
Demographics Should Not Be the Reason of Toxicity: Mitigating Discrimination in Text Classifications with Instance Weighting (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has found that text classification datasets contain certain unintended biases, such as text containing demographic identity-terms that are more likely to be abusive. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic debiasing framework that recovers the non-discrimination distribution using instance weighting, which does not require extra resources or annotations apart from a pre-defined set of demographic identity-terms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates the unintended biases without hurting models’ generalization ability. |
Embracing Imperfection: Simulating Students with Diverse Cognitive Levels Using LLM-based Agents (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in education, enabling researchers to simulate students' learning patterns and learning patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework for student simulation that takes into account student cognitive diversity and realism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism. |
Few-shot Temporal Pruning Accelerates Diffusion Models for Text Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods for text generation ignore the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in slow sampling rates. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without additional training by using a Bayesian optimization approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique achieves 400x acceleration even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization yielding a competitive performance even with minimum sampling steps. |
BeamAggR: Beam Aggregation Reasoning over Multi-source Knowledge for Multi-hop Question Answering (2024.acl-long)
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Zheng Chu, Jingchang Chen, Qianglong Chen, Haotian Wang, Kun Zhu, Xiyuan Du, Weijiang Yu, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, but they still suffer from factual errors when tackling knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning framework for knowledge-intensive multi-hop QA that prioritizes promising answers at each hop of question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on four open-domain multi-hop reasoning datasets by 8.5%. |