Papers by Licheng Zhang
LAFaCT: Attribution-based Localization and Focused Sequential Analysis of Fact-Critical Tokens for Hallucination Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models suffer from hallucinations, severely undermining their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that localizes fact-critical tokens and performs sequential analysis on their hidden states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework localizes fact-critical tokens using Factual Criticality . it then performs a focused sequential analysis on their hidden states . |
Feature-Adaptive and Data-Scalable In-Context Learning (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is a popular way to stimulate LLM capabilities for downstream tasks due to context length constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a feature-adaptive and data-scalable in-context learning framework which leverages task-adaptives to promote inference on the downstream task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on 10 datasets under different data settings and LLM scale. |
IDEATE: Detecting AI-Generated Text Using Internal and External Factual Structures (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect AI-generated text rely on internal evidences, but external evidences are not considered. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical graph network that utilizes internal and external factual structures to detect AI-generated text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network outperforms current state-of-the-art methods on four datasets. |
Text Style Transfer with Contrastive Transfer Pattern Mining (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text style transfer only focus on the transformation between styles, yet they do not take into account that this transformation can be achieved via different hidden transfer patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which automatically mines hidden transfer patterns to improve TST . they use a clustering module to automatically discover hidden transfer pattern from the data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to enhance other methods to further improve their performance. |
Curriculum Learning for Natural Language Understanding (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models can be fine tuned to perform NLU tasks in a straightforward manner. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrain-finetune paradigm for natural language understanding (NLU) they propose 'a cross-trainset' approach that allows users to distinguish easy from difficult examples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves significant performance improvements on a wide range of NLU tasks. |
Knowledge Context Modeling with Pre-trained Language Models for Contrastive Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-based knowledge graph completion methods neglect knowledge contexts in inferring process. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which models the knowledge context as additional prompts with pre-trained language models for knowledge graph completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on FB15k-237, WN18RR and Wikidata5M datasets. |
Towards Provably Secure Generative AI: Reliable Consensus Sampling (2026.findings-acl)
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Yu Cui, Hang Fu, Sicheng Pan, Zhuoyu Sun, Yifei Liu, Yuhong Nie, Bo Ran, Baohan Huang, Xufeng Zhang, Haibin Zhang, Cong Zuo, Licheng Wang
| Challenge: | Existing research on generative AI security is driven by mutually reinforcing attack and defense methodologies grounded in empirical experience. |
| Approach: | They propose a new algorithm that uses a random sampling algorithm to control risk. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves robustness and utility while maintaining latency comparable to existing algorithms. |
Random Entity Quantization for Parameter-Efficient Compositional Knowledge Graph Representation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to learning on Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are not critical for learning on KGs. |
| Approach: | They propose an alternative approach to represent entities by composing entity-corresponding codewords matched from predefined small-scale codebooks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves similar results to existing methods. |
Understanding and Mitigating Overrefusal in LLMs from an Unveiling Perspective of Safety Decision Boundary (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often refuse to answer legitimate queries, causing models to treat many reasonable prompts as potentially risky. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically generates and selects overrefusal prompts near the safety boundary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and curates boundary-aligned prompts, enabling more effective and targeted mitigation of overrefusal. |
WildGraphBench: Benchmarking GraphRAG with Wild-Source Corpora (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) rely on short, curated passages as external knowledge, failing to adequately evaluate systems in realistic settings involving long contexts and large-scale heterogeneous documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess GraphRAG performance in the wild using Wikipedia's unique structure where cohesive narratives are grounded in long and heterogeneous external reference documents. |
| Outcome: | Experiments with articles across 12 top-level topics show that GraphRAG performs better in the wild than existing methods. |
M-RangeDetector: Enhancing Generalization in Machine-Generated Text Detection through Multi-Range Attention Masks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised methods for text detection are overfitting within their training domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates four distinct attention masking strategies into a Multi-Range Attention module to learn various writing strategies for machine-generated text detection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization capability of existing detectors on three datasets. |
FaD-VLP: Fashion Vision-and-Language Pre-training towards Unified Retrieval and Captioning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Prior work on multimodal fashion tasks has been limited by the data in individual benchmarks or has leveraged generic vision-and-language pre-training but have not taken advantage of the characteristics of fashion data. |
| Approach: | They propose a fashion-specific pre-training framework based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on weakly-supervised triplets constructed from fashion image-text pairs and is competitive on a diverse set of fashion tasks. |
Chain-of-Question: A Progressive Question Decomposition Approach for Complex Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to answer complex questions rely on decomposition of complex questions into sub-questions . Existing approaches to decompose complex questions are limited by the original question . |
| Approach: | They propose a question decomposition approach to decompose semantically clear questions . they use the decomposed sub-questions to select relevant patterns as auxiliary information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. |
AdvancedIF: Rubric-Based Benchmarking and Reinforcement Learning for Advancing LLM Instruction Following (2026.acl-long)
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Yun He, Wenzhe Li, Hejia Zhang, Songlin Li, Karishma Mandyam, Sopan Khosla, Yuanhao Xiong, Nanshu Wang, Xiaoliang Peng, Beibin Li, Shengjie Bi, Shishir G Patil, Qi Qi, Shengyu Feng, Julian Katz-Samuels, Richard Yuanzhe Pang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hunter Lang, Yue Yu, Yundi Qian, Maryam Fazel-Zarandi, Licheng Yu, Amine Benhalloum, Hany Hassan Awadalla, Manaal Faruqui
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF) remains a significant challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that features over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs’ ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following abilities of large language models, achieving a 6.7% gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. |
Free-MAD: Consensus-Free Multi-Agent Debate (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-agent debate methods rely on multiple rounds of interaction among agents to reach consensus, and the final output is decided by majority voting in the last round. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate framework that eliminates the need for consensus among agents and reconstructs the debate phase by introducing anti-conformity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that Free-MAD significantly improves reasoning performance while requiring only a single-round debate and thus reducing token costs. |