Papers by Lizhen Xu
ViLPAct: A Benchmark for Compositional Generalization on Multimodal Human Activities (2023.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
Terry Yue Zhuo, Yaqing Liao, Yuecheng Lei, Lizhen Qu, Gerard de Melo, Xiaojun Chang, Yazhou Ren, Zenglin Xu
| Challenge: | a vision-language benchmark for human activity planning is designed for humans . the task is easy for humans, but challenging for SOTA deep learning models . |
| Approach: | They propose a vision-language benchmark for human activity planning that extends Charades with intents and builds on a multi-choice question test set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates the ability of systems to anticipate and plan human actions in a multimodal visionlanguage setting. |
NAP2: A Benchmark for Naturalness and Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting by Learning from Human (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Huang, William Maclean, Xiaoxi Kang, Qiongkai Xu, Zhuang Li, Xingliang Yuan, Gholamreza Haffari, Lizhen Qu
| Challenge: | a large number of large language models are being used to protect user privacy . sanitizing sensitive text using two common strategies is the answer . |
| Approach: | They propose sanitizing sensitive text using deleting expressions and abstracting them . they propose a tool for text rewriting that uses crowdsourcing and large language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach protects privacy before sending sensitive data to large language models . it combines crowdsourcing and large language modeling to create a text rewrite tool . |
ALTER: Auxiliary Text Rewriting Tool for Natural Language Generation (D19-3)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Generative modeling of editing text with respect to control attributes has seen increasing progress over the past few years. |
| Approach: | They propose an auxiliary text rewriting tool that facilitates the rewrite process for natural language generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool facilitates the rewriting process for natural language generation tasks, such as paraphrasing, text simplification, fairness-aware text rewrite, and text style transfer. |
Revisiting Data Reconstruction Attacks on Real-world Dataset for Federated Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
Zhuo Zhang, Jintao Huang, Xiangjing Hu, Jingyuan Zhang, Yating Zhang, Hui Wang, Yue Yu, Qifan Wang, Lizhen Qu, Zenglin Xu
| Challenge: | Existing DRA methods fail to accurately recover the original text of real-world privacy data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a real-world privacy dataset to examine the performance of federated learning (FL) methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on a real-world privacy dataset and shows that the tokens within a recovery sentence are disordered and intertwined with tokens from other sentences in the same training batch. |
Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs (2022.coling-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing MLaaS models are vulnerable to imitation attacks, but none of the stolen models can outperform the original black-box APIs. |
| Approach: | They conduct unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-victim ensemble to show attackers could surpass victims. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the original black-box models on transferred domains. |
Variational Autoencoder with Disentanglement Priors for Low-Resource Task-Specific Natural Language Generation (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models for task-specific natural language generation do not contain any labeled examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a variational autoencoder with disentanglement priors for task-specific natural language generation with none or a handful of task-related labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in terms of data augmentation and text style transfer in the few-shot setting. |
CoTEvol: Self-Evolving Chain-of-Thoughts for Data Synthesis in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead. |
| Approach: | They propose a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity with markedly improved efficiency. |
FedPETuning: When Federated Learning Meets the Parameter-Efficient Tuning Methods of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing research on federated learning (FL) for pre-trained language models (PLMs) with increasing concerns about data privacy, enterprises or institutions are not allowed to collect data from end devices or local clients to a centralized server for fine-tuning PLMs. |
| Approach: | They investigate the parameter-efficient tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and develop a federated benchmark for four representative PETuning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can defend against privacy attacks and maintain acceptable performance with reducing heavy resource consumption. |
Federated Model Decomposition with Private Vocabulary for Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to train federated learning (FL) for natural language processing require sensitive data to leave local devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a fedrated model decomposition method that protects the privacy of vocabularies . they propose an adaptive updating technique to improve the performance of local models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method protects the privacy of vocabularies in federated learning tasks . it maintains competitive performance and provides better privacy-preserving capacity compared to status quo methods. |
GraphDx: A Cost-Aware Knowledge-Enhanced Multi-Agent Framework for Sequential Diagnosis (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Shaoting Tan, Ning Liu, Yuntao Du, Shuyue Wei, Wu Shuai, Qian Li, Yanyu Xu, Wei Zhang, Lizhen Cui, Haitao Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Models struggle to reason systematically under cost constraints . Existing approaches lack the knowledge-reasoning capability to reason under cost . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced framework that leverages large language models to construct MDKGs . they propose three collaborative agents that handle language understanding and generation . |
| Outcome: | GraphDx improves diagnostic success rates from 50β68% to 79β93% while reducing test costs by 20β54%. |
FEDLEGAL: The First Real-World Federated Learning Benchmark for Legal NLP (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | federated learning (FL) is a promising technique for preserving data privacy . however, there is no work on applying FL to legal NLP . |
| Approach: | They propose to use federated learning to train models in a collaborative way without sharing data . they propose to test the FL benchmark on real-world legal data from Chinese courts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark combines five legal NLP tasks and one privacy task on Chinese courts. |
R-Judge: Benchmarking Safety Risk Awareness for LLM Agents (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Tongxin Yuan, Zhiwei He, Lingzhong Dong, Yiming Wang, Ruijie Zhao, Tian Xia, Lizhen Xu, Binglin Zhou, Fangqi Li, Zhuosheng Zhang, Rui Wang, Gongshen Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
Personal Information Leakage Detection in Conversations (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | 4.5 billion dollars will be invested in conversational assistants (chatbots) by 2021, according to Opus Research 2 . Among diverse types of chatbots, Google Duplex represents the kind of AI personal assistants that act on behalf of people to perform simple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to protect personal information by warning users of detected suspicious sentences . they propose to use a constrained alignment problem to perform an alignment optimization problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform baseline models on the behavior of personalized chit-chat dialogue systems. |