Papers by Liwen Zhang
SHARP: Search-Based Adversarial Attack for Structured Prediction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | SHARP is a new attack method for structured prediction models that solves several challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box adversarial attack method that uses a search-based optimization problem to attack adversarials. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs more potent attack than pioneer arts on two structured prediction tasks. |
Gaussian Mixture Latent Vector Grammars (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of latent variable grammars are not observable in treebanks, so latent variables are learned using expectation-maximization. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that extends latent variable grammars such that each nonterminal symbol is associated with a continuous vector space representing the set of (infinitely many) subtypes of the nonterminals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve competitive accuracies in part-of-speech tagging and constituency parsing. |
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging (2025.emnlp-main)
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Bowen Wang, Haiyuan Wan, Liwen Shi, Chen Yang, Peng He, Yue Ma, Haochen Han, Wenhao Li, Tiao Tan, Yongjian Li, Fangming Liu, Gong Yifan, Sheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models that require task labels or performance trade-offs are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines in knowledge retention and generalization across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios. |
EDDA: An Encoder-Decoder Data Augmentation Framework for Zero-Shot Stance Detection (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing text or data are limited by lack of logical connections between generated texts and training data. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder data augmentation framework that combines large language models and chain-of-thought prompting to summarize texts into target-specific if-then rationales, establishing logical relationships. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves over state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets while enabling interpretable rationale-based learning. |
AISFG: Abundant Information Slot Filling Generator (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero/few-shot slot filling focus on slot descriptions and examples . AISFG model is based on domain-specific labels, which is not capable of transferring to new domains with little or no data. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a query template that incorporates domain descriptions, slot descriptions, and examples with context. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in zero/few-shot slot filling task. |
FinSafetyBench: Evaluating LLM Safety in Real-World Financial Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models (LLMs) are prone to misuse and misinformation, posing serious compliance risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a bilingual red-teaming benchmark to test an LLM’s refusal of requests that violate financial compliance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on real-world financial crime cases and ethical violations and includes 14 subcategories covering financial crimes and ethical breaches. |
EvolveSearch: An Iterative Self-Evolving Search Agent (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ding-Chu Zhang, Yida Zhao, Jialong Wu, Liwen Zhang, Baixuan Li, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Yu-Feng Li, Kewei Tu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enabling LLM web search proficiency struggle with data production in open-search domains, while supervised fine-tuning struggles with data utilization efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative self-evolution framework that combines SFT and RL to enhance agentic web search capabilities without external human-annotated reasoning data. |
| Outcome: | EvolveSearch achieves 4.7% improvement over current state-of-the-art in seven benchmarks . supervised fine-tuning struggles with data production in open-search domains compared with RL . |
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)
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Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Zhengwei Tao, Liwen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Yong Jiang, Wentao Zhang, Zhiqiang Gao
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
Latent Variable Sentiment Grammar (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural models do not explicitly model sentiment composition, which requires to encode sentiment class labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentiment grammar that captures sentiment subtype expressions by latent variables and Gaussian mixture vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla neural encoders on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank benchmark. |
Generalized Supervised Attention for Text Generation (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised attention methods that use human knowledge to learn better alignments are costly or infeasible. |
| Approach: | They propose a generalized supervised attention method based on quasi alignments that are easier to obtain than ideal alignments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves generation performance and is robust against errors in attention supervision. |
WebAnchor: Anchoring Agent Planning to Stabilize Long-Horizon Web Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for reinforcement learning (RL)-based agents struggle with long-horizon planning and strategy coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework that decouples planning and execution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline and first-step RL frameworks on four benchmarks. |
VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhaowei Liu, Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Lingfeng Zeng, Fangqi Lou, Jinyi Niu, Mengping Li, Qi Qi, Jiahuan Li, Wei Zhang, Yinglong Wang, Weige Cai, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on text comprehension, but MLLMs lack the ability to integrate visual data over financial visuals. |
| Approach: | They evaluate 21 state-of-the-art multimodal large language models in a zero-shot setting . they use an annotated question–answer pair from eight common financial image modalities . |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark outperforms existing models but trailed financial experts by 14 percentage points. |
Learning Multilingual Sentence Representations with Cross-lingual Consistency Regularization (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results on multilingual similarity search and bitext mining tasks show the effectiveness of our approach. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual sentence representation model that aligns different languages in a shared representation space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than LASER3 on similarity searches and bitext mining tasks. |
Evidence Retrieval is almost All You Need for Fact Verification (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evidence retrieval methods adopt a trivial retrieval strategy, resulting in task-irrelevant evidence and undesirable performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evidence retrieval and joint fact verification that integrates two modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves evidence retrieval and claims verification on a FEVER dataset. |
Adapting Unsupervised Syntactic Parsing Methodology for Discourse Dependency Parsing (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Discourse dependency parsing is a task that requires a large amount of training data, but there is little research on it. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt unsupervised syntactic dependency parsing methods for unsupervised discourse dependency parses using unlabeled training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform existing methods in semi-supervised and supervised settings and outperformed existing methods. |
Improving Zero-shot Multilingual Neural Machine Translation by Leveraging Cross-lingual Consistency Regularization (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve zero-shot translation performance by learning language-agnostic representations and maximizing cross-lingual transfer have been proposed. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual consistency regularization to bridge the representation gap between different languages and boost zero-shot translation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves translation performance on low-resource and high-res benchmarks and closes the sentence representation gap and aligns the representation space. |
Adversarial Attack and Defense of Structured Prediction Models (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building effective adversarial attackers focus on classification problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns to attack a structured prediction model with feedbacks from multiple reference models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to attack state-of-the-art models and boost them with training . it is based on a sequence-to-sequence model with feedbacks from multiple reference models . |
Sentiment Interpretable Logic Tensor Network for Aspect-Term Sentiment Analysis (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) is a fine-grained task that aims to infer the sentiment towards the given aspect-terms. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel ATSA method that is interpretable and has high accuracy . they propose SILTN, which is a neurosymbolic formalism, to improve the accuracy based on syntax knowledge distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is interpretable because it is a neurosymbolic formalism and a computational model that supports learning and reasoning about data with a differentiable first-order logic language. |
BrowseConf: Confidence-Guided Test-Time Scaling for Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Litu Ou, Kuan Li, Huifeng Yin, Liwen Zhang, Zhongwang Zhang, Xixi Wu, Rui Ye, Zile Qiao, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing work on confidence in LLMs is limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use confidence scores to determine model answer quality and encourage model to try again until it reaches satisfactory confidence level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods significantly reduce token consumption while demonstrating competitive performance compared to baseline fixed budget methods. |
FinEval: A Chinese Financial Domain Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Zhaowei Liu, Hanyang Cao, Zhi Yang, Zhiqiang Liu, Sizhe Wang, Jinyi Niu, Chuqi Wang, Yanhui Wang, Xiaolong Liang, Xiaoming Huang, Bing Zhu, Zhongyu Wei, Yun Chen, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning methods focus on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to predict query performance and cost required to accomplish a given task . they then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher performance at lower cost compared to baseline approaches. |