Papers by Long Zhou
WavLLM: Towards Robust and Adaptive Speech Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Shujie Hu, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Lingwei Meng, Hongkun Hao, Jing Pan, Xunying Liu, Jinyu Li, Sunit Sivasankaran, Linquan Liu, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their scope to encompass multimodal functions. |
| Approach: | They propose a robust and adaptive speech large language model with dual encoders . they validate the model on universal speech benchmarks and apply it to specialized speech-question-answer datasets based on a CoT approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance across a range of speech tasks on the same model size. |
Autoregressive Speech Synthesis without Vector Quantization (2025.acl-long)
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Lingwei Meng, Long Zhou, Shujie Liu, Sanyuan Chen, Bing Han, Shujie Hu, Yanqing Liu, Jinyu Li, Sheng Zhao, Xixin Wu, Helen M. Meng, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | MELLE is a novel language modeling approach for text-to-speech synthesis that generates continuous tokens from text . authors demonstrate that it reduces the need for vector quantization and improves model robustness . |
| Approach: | They propose to autoregressively generate continuous mel-spectrogram frames directly from text condition, bypassing vector quantization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance across multiple metrics and is more streamlined. |
ReviewRL: Towards Automated Scientific Review with RL (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sihang Zeng, Kai Tian, Kaiyan Zhang, Yuru Wang, Junqi Gao, Runze Liu, Sa Yang, Jingxuan Li, Xinwei Long, Jiaheng Ma, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing automated review systems struggle with factual accuracy, rating consistency, and analytical depth. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating comprehensive and factually grounded scientific paper reviews using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on ICLR 2025 papers. |
CEAMC: Corpus and Empirical Study of Argument Analysis in Education via LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yupei Ren, Hongyi Wu, Zhaoguang Long, Shangqing Zhao, Xinyi Zhou, Zheqin Yin, Xinlin Zhuang, Xiaopeng Bai, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Existing argument component classifications in education are simplistic and isolated, failing to capture the complete argument information. |
| Approach: | They propose to annotate a manually annotated argument component classification dataset from authentic examination settings and to explore the performance of Large Language Models on CEAMC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can be used to analyze argumentative essays in education. |
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
A Compact and Language-Sensitive Multilingual Translation Method (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing paradigms for multilingual neural machine translation do not make full use of language commonality and parameter sharing. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual neural machine translation paradigm with one encoder-decoder model that makes full use of language commonality and parameter sharing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms strong standard multilingual translation systems on WMT and IWSLT datasets. |
An Element-aware Multi-representation Model for Law Article Prediction (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that using law articles as external knowledge can improve the performance of the Legal Judgment Prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Law Article Element-aware Multi-representation Model which makes full use of law article information and can be used for multi-label samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the accuracy of 5.84%, macro F1 of 6.42%, and micro F1 by 4.28% compared with baseline models like TopJudge. |
Towards Fine-Grained and Multi-Granular Contrastive Language-Speech Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Yang, Bing Han, Hui Wang, Wei Wang, Ziyang Ma, Long Zhou, Zengrui Jin, Guanrou Yang, Tianrui Wang, Xu Tan, Xie Chen
| Challenge: | Existing models for fine-grained speaking styles are limited in terms of accuracy, coverage, and naturalness. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that pre-trains with coarse captions and annotates with a pipeline that grounds captions in audio. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models with fine-grained style annotations . it integrates global and fine-granular supervision, enabling unified representations based on the proposed model . |
Improving Cross-modal Alignment for Text-Guided Image Inpainting (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods allocate most of computation to visual encoding, while light computation on modeling modality interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel model for text-guided image inpainting by improving cross-modal alignment knowledge by using a vision-language encoder and an image generator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with other strong competitors on two vision-language datasets. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
PaD: Program-aided Distillation Can Teach Small Models Reasoning Better than Chain-of-thought Fine-tuning (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models excel in various tasks, but their huge size and inaccessibility of parameters present challenges for practical deployment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use CoT data to distill task-specific ability from large language models to smaller models . they use reasoning programs to suppress errors in distilled data and improve distillation quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms LLMs on arithmetic reasoning, symbolic reasoning, and general ability. |
Multimodal Event Transformer for Image-guided Story Ending Generation (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on cross-modal feature fusion but overlook reasoning and mining implicit information from story plots and ending image. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal event transformer framework for image-guided story ending generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance for image-guided story ending generation. |
Friendly Topic Assistant for Transformer Based Abstractive Summarization (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive document summarization is a comprehensive task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic assistant that rearranges and learns document semantics . they propose TA that is compatible with Transformer-based models and user-friendly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compatible with Transformer-based models and user-friendly. |
LSDC: An Efficient and Effective Large-Scale Data Compression Method for Supervised Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zhaoguang Long, Yuhao Zhou, Shangqing Zhao, Yupei Ren, Li Cai, Chenghao Jia, Zhe Chen, Zhe Fang, Yuxiang Song, Man Lan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are expanding in scale and size, increasing computational costs . large-scale data compression techniques can reduce the size of training datasets while maintaining data integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale data compression method to reduce the size of training data . they use a bifurcated quantization strategy to maximize the diversity of samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces the size of training data while maximizing the submodular gain. |
Trust in Internal or External Knowledge? Generative Multi-Modal Entity Linking with Knowledge Retriever (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative approaches struggle with the knowledge gap between visual entity information and the intrinsic parametric knowledge of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge retrieval method that leverages external sources to enhance visual entity information and a prioritization scheme that handles noisy retrieval results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows improvements of 3.0% to 6.5% across all evaluation metrics compared to baselines. |
ClarET: Pre-training a Correlation-Aware Context-To-Event Transformer for Event-Centric Generation and Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on event-centric reasoning fails to model event-level correlations . Existing studies limit their scope to specific scenarios or overlook event- level correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose to pre-train a general Correlation-aware context-to-Event Transformer for event-centric reasoning by highlighting event-level correlations with effective training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is applicable to a wide range of event-centric reasoning scenarios, considering its versatility of event correlation types, application formulations, and reasoning types. |
Hierarchy-Aware Global Model for Hierarchical Text Classification (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hierarchical text classification are limited and lack holistic structural information. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchy-aware global model with two variants that learn hierarchy-based label embeddings through an encoder and conduct inductive fusion of label-alike text features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on three benchmark datasets. |
SpeechUT: Bridging Speech and Text with Hidden-Unit for Encoder-Decoder Based Speech-Text Pre-training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training text and speech are based on unlabeled audio data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal speech-unit-text pre-training model that connects speech encoders and text decoders with a shared unit encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on automatic speech recognition and speech translation tasks and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the LibriSpeech ASR and MuST-C ST tasks. |
Jointly Learning to Repair Code and Generate Commit Message (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work performs code repair and commit message generation independently. |
| Approach: | They propose a cascaded method to repair program codes and generate commit messages in a unified framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baselines on a buggy-fixed-commit dataset. |
RED: Unleashing Token-Level Rewards from Holistic Feedback via Reward Redistribution (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach to aligning large language models with human preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates and assigns specific credit to each token using an off-the-shelf reward model. |
Grammar-Based Patches Generation for Automated Program Repair (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Automated program repair (APR) aims to find an automatic solution to program language bugs without human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose a grammar-based rule-rule model which regards the repair process as the transformation of grammar rules and employs a tree-based self-attention approach to guarantee grammar correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a Java dataset in terms of generated code accuracy. |
Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations are labor-intensive and scarce training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural network to handle wrong labeling and long-tail relations by collaborating relation-augmented attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed neural network improves the state-of-the-art on the NYT dataset . |
Exclusion of Thought: Mitigating Cognitive Load in Large Language Models for Enhanced Reasoning in Multiple-Choice Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are widely used and vital assessment format for evaluating large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning prompt strategy that redirects the model's attention away from erroneous options and eliminates incorrect options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reasoning prompt reduces cognitive load by steering the model’s attention away from erroneous options, enabling the model to focus more effectively on reasonable answers. |
Synchronously Generating Two Languages with Interactive Decoding (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multilingual NMT models handle multiple language pairs in one model. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive approach to translate a source language into two different languages simultaneously and interactively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on IWSLT and WMT datasets. |
Optimizing Language Models with Fair and Stable Reward Composition in Reinforcement Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has developed algorithms for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for reinforcement learning from human feedback and AI-generated feedback that incorporates weighting, ranking, and constraining to handle disparate rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces disparity and enhances stability among rewards . empirical results show that the proposed method is efficient and straightforward . |
Tensorized Self-Attention: Efficiently Modeling Pairwise and Global Dependencies Together (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks equipped with self-attention have parallelizable computation and the ability to capture both long-range and local dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attention mechanism called "Multi-mask Tensorized Self-Attention" it captures pairwise and global dependencies by a compatibility function composed of dot-product and additive attentions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms CNN-/RNN-/attention-based models on nine NLP benchmarks with compelling memory- and time-efficiency. |
Style-Aware Contrastive Learning for Multi-Style Image Captioning (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-style image captioning methods focus on visual content and style . existing methods overlook the relationship between linguistic style and visual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a style-aware visual encoder with contrastive learning to mine potential visual content relevant to style and a triplet contrast objective to distinguish whether the image, style and caption matched. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance and an extensive analysis to verify its effectiveness. |
SemFace: Pre-training Encoder and Decoder with a Semantic Interface for Neural Machine Translation (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using pre-training methods for NMT models is difficult because of the cross-attention module . cross-linguistic embeddings are not used to pretrain a decoder . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic interface between pre-trained encoder and pre-train decoder to improve NMT performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on translation and unsupervised translation tasks. |
Retrieval-Augmented Retrieval: Large Language Models are Strong Zero-Shot Retriever (2024.findings-acl)
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Tao Shen, Guodong Long, Xiubo Geng, Chongyang Tao, Yibin Lei, Tianyi Zhou, Michael Blumenstein, Daxin Jiang
| Challenge: | Large-scale retrieval is indispensable in information-seeking tasks such as open-domain question answering and knowledgegrounded dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model (LLM) to augment a query with its potential answers by prompting LLMs with a composition of the query and the query’s in-domain candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method breaks brute-force combinations of retrievers with LLMs and lifts the performance of zero-shot retrieval to be very competitive on benchmark datasets. |
FinDABench: Benchmarking Financial Data Analysis Ability of Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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Shu Liu, Shangqing Zhao, Chenghao Jia, Xinlin Zhuang, Zhaoguang Long, Jie Zhou, Aimin Zhou, Man Lan, Yang Chong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but their proficiency and reliability in the specialized domain of financial data analysis remain uncertain. |
| Approach: | FinDABench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the financial data analysis capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) it comprises 15,200 training instances and 8,900 test instances, all meticulously crafted by human experts. |
| Outcome: | FinDABench measures the financial data analysis capabilities of large language models (LLMs) across three dimensions: 1) Core Ability; 2) Analytical Ability; 3) Technical Ability. |
Eliminating Sentiment Bias for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification with Unsupervised Opinion Extraction (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-level sentiment classification (ALSC) is a practical setting in aspect-based sentiment analysis due to no opinion term labeling needed, but it fails to interpret why a sentiment polarity is derived for the aspect. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-based anti-bias aspect representation learning framework that eliminates the sentiment bias in the aspect embedding by adversarial learning against aspects’ prior sentiment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on five benchmarks, with the capability of unsupervised opinion extraction. |
Focus-dLLM: Accelerating Long-Context Diffusion LLM Inference via Confidence-Guided Context Focusing (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for estimating attention importance for tokens are ineffective . dLLMs require bidirectional attention, which limits inference efficiency . |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free attention sparsification framework for efficient long-context inference . they propose 'sink-aware pruning strategy' to accurately estimate and remove redundant computation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach offers 29 lossless speedup under 32K context length. |
CRaSh: Clustering, Removing, and Sharing Enhance Fine-tuning without Full Large Language Model (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Instruction tuning is an effective way of aligning large language models with private instruction data. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free strategy to derive improved emulators from LLMs by using Offsite-Tuning (OFT) they propose CRaSh, which transfers transformer blocks between centralized LLM and downstream emulators . |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique boosts performance of large language models with billions of parameters. |
SpeechT5: Unified-Modal Encoder-Decoder Pre-Training for Spoken Language Processing (2022.acl-long)
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Junyi Ao, Rui Wang, Long Zhou, Chengyi Wang, Shuo Ren, Yu Wu, Shujie Liu, Tom Ko, Qing Li, Yu Zhang, Zhihua Wei, Yao Qian, Jinyu Li, Furu Wei
| Challenge: | Existing work shows that pre-trained models can improve in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified-modal encoder-decoder framework that pre-trains speech-text representations using large-scale unlabeled speech and text data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on speech-to-text processing tasks. |
Towards Robust Ranker for Text Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text retrieval are based on a 'retrieval & rerank' pipeline, which uses a fast retriever to fetch a set of top document candidates, while a robust ranker is based upon a weak negative mining during contrastive learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-adversarial training strategy that leverages multiple retrievers as generators to challenge a ranker. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing de facto ranker training paradigms on the passage retrieval benchmarks using BM25-reranking, full-ranking and retriever distillation. |
From spoken dialogue to formal summary: An utterance rewriting for dialogue summarization (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models focus more on the structure of summary, not on the personal and logical inconsistency problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to solve the problem of personal and logical inconsistency . they use an utterance rewriter to complete the ellipsis content of dialogue content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on both SAMSum and DialSum datasets. |
Enhanced Chart Understanding via Visual Language Pre-training on Plot Table Pairs (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to understand chart plots are difficult to apply to visual-language tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on the chartQA benchmark by over 8% performance gains. |