Papers by Lei Zou
LLMaAA: Making Large Language Models as Active Annotators (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised learning methods in natural language processing require large amounts of data. |
| Approach: | They propose an active learning loop that takes LLMs as annotators and puts them into an active loop to determine what to annotate efficiently. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with few-shot performance in two NLP tasks. |
LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiajie Zhang, Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Wanjun Gu, Danqing Liu, Minhao Zou, Shulin Cao, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Current long-context large language models lack citations to support their responses, making verification difficult due to potential hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf LLMs to automatically construct long-context QA instances with precise sentence-level citations and leverage this pipeline to construct a large-scale SFT dataset for LQAC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate responses with fine-grained citations on the fly, surpassing existing models including GPT-4o. |
A State-transition Framework to Answer Complex Questions over Knowledge Base (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for complex question answering have some limitations . existing methods employ predefined patterns or templates to understand complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a state transition-based approach to translate a natural language question to a semantic query graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks with two knowledge bases. |
NAMER: A Node-Based Multitasking Framework for Multi-Hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.naacl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Using a node-based framework, knowledge base question answering systems can grasp structural mappings between questions and KB queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a node-based framework that better grasps the structural mapping between questions and KB queries by aligning the nodes in a query with their corresponding mentions in question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the previous SoTA on CCKS CKBQA dataset. |
Crake: Causal-Enhanced Table-Filler for Question Answering over Large Scale Knowledge Base (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge base question answering lack causality modeling . previous work fails to model such causalities in their pipeline . |
| Approach: | They propose a causal-enhanced table-filler to overcome sequence-modelling issues . they propose an efficient beam-search algorithm to scale complex queries on large-scale KBs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LC-QuAD 1.0 show that the proposed method surpasses state-of-the-arts by a large margin while remaining time and space efficient. |
Detecting Hallucinations in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Semantic-level Internal Reasoning Graph (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting faithfulness hallucinations are coarse or do not capture the models’ internal reasoning processes, making it difficult to learn. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-level internal reasoning graph-based method for detecting faithfulness hallucination using Large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better overall performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines on RAGTruth and Dolly-15k. |
A Novel Table-to-Graph Generation Approach for Document-Level Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing document-level relation extraction methods assume entities and their mentions are given beforehand, which is inadequate for real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a table-to-graph generation model for joint extraction of entities and relations at document-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses existing methods by a large margin and achieves state-of-the-art results on a document-level relation extraction dataset. |
UnrealLLM: Towards Highly Controllable and Interactable 3D Scene Generation by LLM-powered Procedural Content Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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SongTang SongTang, Kaiyong Zhao, Lei Wang, Yuliang Li, Xuebo Liu, Junyi Zou, Qiang Wang, Xiaowen Chu
| Challenge: | UnrealLLM is a novel framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-agent framework that connects natural language descriptions with the professional PCG system (Unreal Engine 5) to automate scene generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in technical metrics and aesthetic quality, offering unique advantages in generation scale and interactivity. |
Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memory (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature on dialog memory systems is inconsistent on their effectiveness . empirical findings on graph structures are difficult to attribute to specific design choices . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes dialog memory systems into core components . they conduct stage-wise experiments on LongMemEval and HaluMeM, and compare implementation details . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework compares graph-based and non-graph memory architectures on long-term dialog memory systems. |
Towards Proactive Information Probing: Customer Service Chatbots Harvesting Value from Conversation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new technology is transforming customer service chatbots into strategic bridges for business intelligence . a recent study shows that customer service bots are increasingly being used as reactive support tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Proactive Information Probing which optimizes when to probe users for pre-specified information while minimizing conversation turns and user friction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in both information probing and service quality. |
Text2World: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Symbolic World Model Generation (2025.findings-acl)
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Mengkang Hu, Tianxing Chen, Yude Zou, Yuheng Lei, Qiguang Chen, Ming Li, Yao Mu, Hongyuan Zhang, Wenqi Shao, Ping Luo
| Challenge: | Recent studies have encountered limitations in leveraging large language models to generate symbolic world models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking framework based on planning domain definition language (PDDL) that employs multi-criteria, execution-based metrics for a more robust evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms models trained with large-scale reinforcement learning, but lacks the robustness needed to perform in world modeling. |
CLFFRD: Curriculum Learning and Fine-grained Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal rumor detection models overlook sample difficulty and order when training . Existing models overlook text-level difficulty, image-level and multimodal difficulty when training samples . |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning framework that uses fine-grained fusion to detect rumors . they propose fusion-based methods that combine text and images to enhance semantic cohesion . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on English and Chinese benchmark datasets. |
AtTGen: Attribute Tree Generation for Real-World Attribute Joint Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Attribute extraction aims to identify attribute names and the corresponding attribute values from descriptive texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified formulation for real-world attribute extraction application, where closed-world, open-world and semi-open attribute extraction tasks are modeled uniformly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on three datasets and outperformed existing methods by a large margin. |