Papers by Luan Zhang
Static Models, Dynamic World: A Unified Perspective on Temporal Perception in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Chenhao Li, Dandan Song, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Yuhang Tian, Huipeng Ma, Guangyuan Feng, Luan Zhang, Xudong Li, Ke Duan
| Challenge: | Large language models are trained on static corpora but deployed in a dynamic world . a foundational tension remains between time and the ability to understand it . |
| Approach: | They formalize temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework formalizes temporal queries in an information-theoretic framework based on parametric reachability of temporal premises and answers . the framework induces four temporal information regimes corresponding to internal reasoning, answer recency, premise anchoring, and genuine world indeterminacy . |
MAKAR: a Multi-Agent framework based Knowledge-Augmented Reasoning for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xinkui Lin, Yuhui Zhang, Yongxiu Xu, Kun Huang, Hongzhang Mu, Yubin Wang, Gaopeng Gou, Li Qian, Li Peng, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Hongbo Xu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for GMNER fail to address semantic ambiguity caused by polysemy and long-tail distribution of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition that leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model to address semantic ambiguity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms existing methods on two benchmark datasets. |
Demystifying Small Language Models for Edge Deployment (2025.acl-long)
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Zhenyan Lu, Xiang Li, Dongqi Cai, Rongjie Yi, Fangming Liu, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Xiwen Zhang, Nicholas D. Lane, Mengwei Xu
| Challenge: | Small language models (SLMs) are a promising solution for resource-constrained devices such as smartphones and the Web of Things. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SLMs to build and optimize a set of small language models that are publicly accessible. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform 7B models in general tasks, while their in-context learning capabilities remain limited and their efficiency has significant optimization potential. |
Segment, Mask, and Predict: Augmenting Chinese Word Segmentation with Self-Supervision (2021.emnlp-main)
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Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Yang Liu, Yuanhang Zheng, Gang Chen, Kaiyu Huang, Ji Zhang, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) effective neural network methods have been used in Chinese word segmentation (CWS) However, the robustness of the previous neural methods is limited by the large-scale annotated corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised Chinese word segmentation approach with a straightforward and effective architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous methods on 9 different CWS datasets with single criterion training and multiple criteria training and achieves better robustness. |
BOSE: A Systematic Evaluation Method Optimized for Base Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to provide solid conclusions for key experiments such as data ablation and scaling law. |
| Approach: | They propose a method specifically designed to optimize the evaluation of base models by incorporating two innovations: In-Context Light-instruction Prompt and Blank-ppl for multi-choice tasks with candidate options. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves stability and consistency of evaluations during pre-training and consistency between base and instruct models. |
Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing via Critic-Guided Multi-Agent Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Xudong Li, Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Shuhao Zhang, Jun Yang, Yongyu Huo, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Chenhao Li, Huipeng Ma, Luan Zhang, Yan Xu, Qian Liu
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods rely on unidirectional, feed-forward pipelines . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for closed-loop post-edit reasoning that uses a Critic agent to verify coherence and step-wise correctness. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on MQuAKE-2002 and MQuADE-hard show that CARE effectively mitigates error propagation . a minor retrieval error or logical mismatch at an early hop can become a silent failure . |
Revisiting Entropy in Reinforcement Learning for Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Renren Jin, Pengzhi Gao, Yuqi Ren, Zhuowen Han, Tongxuan Zhang, Wuwei Huang, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a positive-advantage reweighting approach that regulates model entropy by adjusting the loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach regulates model entropy by adjusting loss weights assigned to tokens with positive advantages during RLVR training while maintaining competitive performance. |
PRA-RAG: Provably Robust Aggregation in Retrieval-Augmented Generation against Retrieval Corruption (2026.findings-acl)
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Xue Tan, Yi Zheng, Chang Huo, Yunruo Zhang, Yu Liu, Hao Luan, Zhuyang Yu, Jun Dai, Xiaoyan Sun, Ping Chen
| Challenge: | Existing defense mechanisms lack theoretical robustness guarantees and perform unreliably when the LLM has limited knowledge of the retrieved content. |
| Approach: | They propose a provably robust retrieval aggregation algorithm designed to defend against poisoning attacks on retrieved texts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that PRA-RAG reduces the attack success rate to as low as 1% while maintaining an accuracy of 71%, significantly outperforming representative state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. |
Exploring All-In-One Knowledge Distillation Framework for Neural Machine Translation (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods only obtain one lightweight student each time . this could be resource-intensive and resulting in multiple students not being optimally utilized . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation framework which generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates multiple satisfactory students at once. |
STEP: Success-Rate-Aware Trajectory-Efficient Policy Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing GRPO-based methods allocate sampling uniformly across tasks regardless of difficulty, propagate misleading learning signals and incur high sample-collection costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allocates sampling based on per-task success rates and performs fine-grained step-level optimization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sample efficiency and training stability over existing GRPO variants and three ablation variants on OSWorld and AndroidWorld. |
Weaving Context Across Images: Improving Vision-Language Models through Focus-Centric Visual Chains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing vision-language models struggle to disentangle information scattered across complex visual inputs, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a focus-centric visual chain paradigm that enhances VLMs’ perception, comprehension, and reasoning abilities in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves average performance gains of 3.16% and 2.24% across two distinct model architectures, without compromising the general vision-language capabilities. |
BrainLoc: Brain Signal-Based Object Detection with Multi-modal Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiaqi Duan, Xiaoda Yang, Kaixuan Luan, Hongshun Qiu, Weicai Yan, Xueyi Zhang, Youliang Zhang, Zhaoyang Li, Donglin Huang, JunYu Lu, Ziyue Jiang, Xifeng Yang
| Challenge: | BrainLoc is a lightweight object detection model guided by fMRI signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a brain-based object detection model guided by fMRI signals . they employ a multi-modal alignment strategy that enhances fmr feature extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves fMRI-based object detection accuracy and convenience. |
SPO: Self Preference Optimization with Self Regularization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing reference-free preference optimization methods exhibit higher training efficiency but are prone to overoptimization, leading to performance degradation. |
| Approach: | They propose a reference-free preference optimization method that replaces the logsigmoid loss function with a SiLU function to improve the model's performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 7% improvement over SimPO on AlpacaEval 2 and MT-Bench. |
Self-Supervised Quality Estimation for Machine Translation (2021.emnlp-main)
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Yuanhang Zheng, Zhixing Tan, Meng Zhang, Mieradilijiang Maimaiti, Huanbo Luan, Maosong Sun, Qun Liu, Yang Liu
| Challenge: | Training QE models require massive parallel data with hand-crafted quality annotations, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to obtain. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised method to evaluate machine-translated sentences without references by recovering masked target words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous unsupervised methods on several QE tasks in different language pairs and domains. |
Subgraph-Guided Executable Logical Form Generation for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Luan Zhang, Yading Li, Xudong Li, Shenxi Liu, Jing Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented approaches focus on ignoring the structural information of the Knowledge Base (KB) and the question. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware subgraph retrieval stage that ranks candidate subgraphs by aligning them with the question’s structure, along with semantic relevance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GrailQA, WebQSP, and GraphQuestions show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance. |
On Domain-Adaptive Post-Training for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Daixuan Cheng, Shaohan Huang, Ziyu Zhu, Xintong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Zhongzhi Luan, Bo Dai, Zhenliang Zhang
| Challenge: | Adapting general multimodal large language models to specific domains is important for practical applications. |
| Approach: | They investigate domain adaptation of multimodal large language models via post-training . they develop a generate-then-filter pipeline that curates diverse visual instruction tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models in domain adaptation by combining data from open-source models with training pipelines. |
Exploring Better Text Image Translation with Multimodal Codebook (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current studies on text image translation face bottlenecks due to lack of a publicly available dataset and poor optical character recognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a text image translation model with a multimodal codebook and an OCR dataset for Chinese-English translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can associate the image with relevant texts, providing useful supplementary information for translation. |
Doc-V*: Coarse-to-Fine Interactive Visual Reasoning for Multi-Page Document VQA (2026.acl-long)
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Yuanlei Zheng, Pei Fu, Hang Li, Ziyang Wang, Yuyi Zhang, Wenyu Ruan, Xiaojin Zhang, Zhongyu Wei, Zhenbo Luo, Jian Luan, Wei Chen, Xiang Bai
| Challenge: | Existing OCR-free approaches to document visual question answering are brittle and passive. |
| Approach: | They propose an OCR-free agentic framework that casts multi-page DocVQA as sequential evidence aggregation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and proprietary models in five benchmarks and improves out-of-domain performance by 47.9% over baseline. |
Improving the Transformer Translation Model with Document-Level Context (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for document-level context translation ignore documentlevel context. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-level context encoder to represent document- level context and integrate it into the Transformer model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on NIST Chinese-English and IWSLT French-English datasets show that the proposed translation model outperforms the Transformer model significantly. |
More is not always better? Enhancing Many-Shot In-Context Learning with Differentiated and Reweighting Objectives (2025.acl-long)
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Xiaoqing Zhang, Ang Lv, Yuhan Liu, Flood Sung, Wei Liu, Jian Luan, Shuo Shang, Xiuying Chen, Rui Yan
| Challenge: | Large language models excel at few-shot in-context learning but performance plateaus as ICL demonstrations increase from a few to many. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel optimization method that optimizes the negative log-likelihood objective and reweights the model to achieve many-shot performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant performance improvements across a large-scale dataset. |
CompKBQA: Component-wise Task Decomposition for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuhang Tian, Dandan Song, Zhijing Wu, Pan Yang, Changzhi Zhou, Jun Yang, Hao Wang, Huipeng Ma, Chenhao Li, Luan Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering methods struggle with complex queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the process of fine-tuning a LLM for generating logical forms by enabling it to learn relevant sub-tasks like skeleton generation, topic entity generation, and relevant relations generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on two benchmark KBQA datasets, WebQSP and CWQ. |