Papers by Linfeng Zhou

10 papers
Friend-training: Learning from Models of Different but Related Tasks (2023.eacl-main)

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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.
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)

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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.
Self-Alignment for Factuality: Mitigating Hallucinations in LLMs via Self-Evaluation (2024.acl-long)

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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.
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle.
Approach: They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience.
Outcome: The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models.
SDAR: A Synergistic Diffusion-AutoRegression Paradigm for Scalable Sequence Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
MWPO: Enhancing LLMs Performance through Multi-Weight Preference Strength and Length Optimization (2025.findings-acl)

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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%.
SDAR-VL: Stable and Efficient Block-wise Diffusion for Vision-Language Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Getting the Most out of Simile Recognition (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent work ignores features other than surface strings and suffers from data hunger issue.
Approach: They propose to use simile sentence classification and simile component extraction to find simile components.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms current state-of-the-art systems and baselines.
Unlocking Speech Instruction Data Potential with Query Rewriting (2025.findings-acl)

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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.

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