Papers by Linfeng Zhang
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Vision tokens in multimodal large language models often dominate computational overhead due to excessive length compared to linguistic modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a token pruning method which defines an importance criterion for vision tokens and prunes the unimportant vision token during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can prune 88.9% of vision tokens while maintaining comparable performance. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models have shown remarkable performance for cross-modal understanding and generation, yet suffer from severe inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to prune redundant tokens in MLLMs to reduce computation and storage costs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational and storage costs of MLLMs by identifying redundant tokens and pruning them. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | LSTMs have been shown to suffer from various limitations due to their sequential nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to model hidden states of all words simultaneously at each recurrent step rather than one word at a time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has strong representation power, giving competitive performances compared to stacked BiLSTM models with similar parameter numbers. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Current self-training methods focus on improving model performance on a single task. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-task self-training framework where models trained to do different tasks are used in iterative training, pseudo-labeling, and retraining processes to help each other for better selection of pseudo-labeled labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the best performance compared to baselines on two dialogue understanding tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for medical relation extraction use dependency syntax as a source of features. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to extract relational information from medical literature by using dependency forests. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the standard tree-based methods in the medical domain. |
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Using fine-tuning on task-specific data is essential for large language models to be effective in specialized tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages few-shot in-context learning with the model to be fine-tuned. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods with a 3.1-point improvement and a 7.4 speedup on the Llama-3-8B-Instruct model using just 10% of the dataset. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat systems have been shown difficult to detect. |
| Approach: | They propose to use annotators to write dialogue responses and recovery utterances to assess and bolster utteration consistency of chat systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset significantly improves the detection and resolution of inconsistencies in chat conversations. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models for specialized tasks are costly and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that locates task-specific neurons via gradient-based attribution and dynamically Elects critical neurons through multi-model importance fusion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful response rates while preserving 95% of utility performance. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing attentive models attend to all words without prior focus, which results in inaccurate concentration on some dispensable words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use semantic role labeling to provide additional guidance for multi-turn dialogue rewriting models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on multi-turn dialogue rewriting tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to addressing factual inaccuracies require high-quality human factuality annotations to mitigate these hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the self-evaluation capability of an LLM to provide training signals that steer the model towards factuality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves factual accuracy over LLMs across three key knowledge-intensive tasks on TruthfulQA and BioGEN. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Document images are characterized by higher resolutions, denser content, and more complex structural layouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a 1.2B-parameter document parsing vision-language model that decouples layout analysis from local content recognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses general-purpose and domain-specific models on multiple benchmarks while maintaining significantly lower computational overhead. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to reduce sequence length rely on heuristics that break compatibility with hardware-efficient kernels like FlashAttention. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that selectively halts stabilized tokens by monitoring layer-wise update dynamics of the self-attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reduce prefill complexity while preserving model accuracy and hardware efficiency. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve contextual faithfulness treat the LLM as a black box, generating responses that are inconsistent with the provided context. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for faithful RAG that operates in three stages: (i) fine-grained knowledge pruning to filter irrelevant context, (ii) latent conflict probing to identify hard conflicts in the model’s latent space, and (iv) conflict-aware attention to modulate attention heads toward faithful context integration. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that ProbeRAG significantly improves both accuracy and contextual faithfulness. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on structured tasks, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a bottleneck. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models up to 10x their size and can be scalable and effective. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work on AMR focuses on individual sentences, but there is a need for multi-sentence AMRs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an end-to-end AMR coreference resolution model to generate multi-sentence AMRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces error propagation and is more robust for both in- and out-domain situations. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | StreamMeCo is an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework for video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient Stream Agent Memory Compression framework that evicts redundant memory nodes and introduces a time-decay memory retrieval mechanism to mitigate performance degradation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 1.87 speedup in memory retrieval while delivering an average accuracy improvement of 1.0% on three challenging benchmark datasets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) is a new approach to document retrieval, but it is not suitable for legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for reliable legal reasoning that structures knowledge as relational graphs and uses a multi-agent system to verify validity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing GraphRAG models in accurate and trustworthy legal analysis. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Efficient Key-Value (KV) cache management is essential for processing long text sequences in large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based framework that redefines token selection for KV cache compression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used in existing KV cache eviction methods such as SnapKV and PyramidKV in a plug-and-play manner. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing OIE systems organize knowledge into subject-relation-object (SRO) triplets, and they use templates to extract such knowledge triplet. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to handle expressiveness and groundedness in OpenFact . they propose to use templates, extra constraints, and adopt human efforts to ensure that most triplets contain enough details. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves expressiveness and groundedness of OpenFact . it is more accurate and denser than OPIEC-Linked, which is grounded to Wikidata . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing datasets do not provide enough annotation to explain unsafe behavior . current chatbots generate toxic and offensive responses, which can be dangerous . |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset called SafeConv that provides comprehensive annotations for chatbots . they compare safe alternatives to rewrite unsafe responses . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can explain unsafe behavior and detoxify chatbots, the authors show . the proposed model is able to detect unsafe utterances, extract unsafe spans, and convert unsafe responses to safe versions. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic formalism that encodes the meaning of a sentence as a rooted, directed graph. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural graph-to-sequence model that leverages LSTM to encode a linearized AMR structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on a benchmark. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) language models are a dominant paradigm in the field of parallelism and non-causal modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a blockwise discrete diffusion model that preserves AR-compatible serving while enabling parallel intra-block generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves theoretical speedups over 5 and wall-clock speedup of 2.3 on H200 GPUs in latency-critical regimes. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input. |
| Approach: | They evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features on two out-of-domain sets. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models that mess up or drop the core structural information of input graphs are lacking in graph-to-text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage richer training signals to guide a graph-to-text generation model by focusing on autoencoding losses and back-propagating the losses to better calibrate the model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two benchmarks show the proposed model over a state-of-the-art model . two types of autoencoding losses are used to back-propagate the model based on multitask training . |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing offline alternatives to Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) are available at https://github.com/AIR-hl/MWPO. |
| Approach: | They propose an offline method to optimize preference pairs based on implicit reward margins and response length margins by reweighting them using a geometric mixture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four different scales and reduces generation length by 9.4%. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing block-wise discrete diffusion models lack robust autoregressive (AR) decoders. |
| Approach: | They propose a block-wise discrete diffusion framework for large-scale vision-language understanding with a progressive beta noise curriculum. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves training efficiency, convergence stability, and task performance over conventional block diffusion. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are weak in understanding the main semantic meaning of a dialogue context. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic-based framework that leverages explicit semantic knowledge to capture the core semantic information in dialogues during pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to existing models on chit-chats and task-oriented dialogues. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Abstract meaning representation (AMR) is a semantic graph representation that abstracts meaning away from a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoder that back predicts projected AMR graphs on target sentences . their results show superiority over previous state-of-the-art decoded graph Transformer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on two AMR benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | aims to find more accurate syntactic grammars for accompanying text using video data. |
| Approach: | They build a video-aided grammar induction model that can learn video-span correlation without manual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn video-span correlation without manual features adopted by previous systems. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Structured representations have long been pivotal in computational linguistics, but their role remains ambiguous in the Large Language Models (LLMs) era. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates structured representations into LLMs from training-free and training-dependent perspectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates structured representations through natural language descriptions in LLM prompts while augmenting the model’s inference capability through fine-tuning on linguistically described structured representation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing work for natural question generation ignores the input passage or hard-codes answer positions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that matches the answer with the passage before generating a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model using rich features. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Video Large Language Models (Vide-oLLMs) are efficient at video understanding but lack the quadratic complexity of visual tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play inference acceleration framework for VideoLLM token compression that quantifies each frame’s uniqueness and adaptively adjusts compression intensity across frames. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on video large language models and benchmarks show that the proposed framework can preserve essential information while reducing redundancy in video sequences. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Zero pronoun recovery and resolution aim at recovering the dropped pronounce and pointing out its anaphoric mentions. |
| Approach: | They propose to solve two tasks together to recover the dropped pronoun and point out its anaphoric mentions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms previous state of the arts benchmarks on two benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Automated expansion methods often result in bloated structures with redundant agents, leading to excessive token consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play compression framework for graph-structured multi-agent workflows . they estimate the importance score of each agent and remove redundant agents . |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that AgentSlimming reduces average token cost by 78.9% with negligible performance degradation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue modeling lack ability to represent core semantics, such as ignoring important entities. |
| Approach: | They develop an algorithm to construct dialogue-level AMR graphs from sentence-level data and explore two ways to incorporate AMRs into dialogue modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is superior to existing models on dialogue understanding and response generation tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing cache eviction strategies for autoregressive language models fail to account for the role of mask tokens and specific characteristics in dLLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free cache eviction framework tailored to dLLMs that denies a fully masked sequence and allows parallel decoding at the expense of memory and computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the cost of memory and cache eviction and improves efficiency by reducing allocation in intermediate layers and concentrating resources on prompt-preferring heads. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Unlike image or text classification, speech classification tasks are particularly challenging due to the difficulty in capturing the acoustic, semantic, and contextual representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset pruning method that coarsely filters redundant samples using DBSCAN clustering on Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 49.5% improvement in WA on the MEAD dataset and 41.9% reduction in EER on speaker identification tasks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in pretraining methods have achieved promising results on NLP tasks . however, it is unclear which pretraining objective is the most effective for each downstream task . |
| Approach: | They evaluate the effectiveness of domain-adaptive pretraining objectives on downstream tasks . they use open-domain data to pretrain language models like BERT and SpanBERT . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on two dialogue understanding tasks with domain-adaptive pretraining objectives. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack datasets and biased training tasks to follow speech instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a query rewriting framework that uses multiple agents to annotate and validate the synthesized speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can transform text instructions into distributions more suitable for TTS models for speech synthesis without human annotation. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent deep generative models have already shown encouraging * Equal contribution. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generic instruction-tuned LLMs as direct text-to-sequence generators to achieve this goal. |
| Outcome: | Recent studies show that reflection improves sequence quality and alignment while maintaining competitive foldability. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models exhibit strong implicit personalization ability, but most approaches treat this behavior as a black box. |
| Approach: | They propose a mechanistic interpretation perspective and propose 'sparse' set of Preference Heads . they compute a Preference Contribution Score for each attention head and compare their predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework computes a Preference Contribution Score (PCS) for each attention head and measures its causal impact on user aligned outputs. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods of multi-modal grammar induction focus on grammar inducing from text-image pairs, but videos provide even richer information, such as static objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a video-aided grammar induction model which learns a constituency parser from unlabeled text and its corresponding video. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing systems on three benchmarks. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new benchmark for biomedical language understanding is being developed in Chinese . most benchmarks are limited to English, which makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese biomedical language understanding evaluation benchmarks to evaluate Chinese models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the current models perform worse than the human ceiling. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for cross-sentence relation extraction split the input graph into two DAGs, but important information can be lost in the splitting procedure. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-state LSTM model which uses a parallel state to model each word, recurrently enriching state values via message passing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model keeps the original graph structure, and speeds up computation by allowing more parallelization. |
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new self-supervised learning method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised learning method to empower language models with boolean logic . they augment training data with nested booles and program training from simpler to harder ones . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method allows language models to generalize to much harder and longer-hop logic, which can hardly be learned through naive training. |