Papers by Mengdi Zhang
Do Large Language Models excel in Complex Logical Reasoning with Formal Language? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on LLMs have focused on formal language, but evaluations of their performance are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a formal language to evaluate LLMs across logical reasoning problems using formal languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Instruct models in three dimensions, taxonomy of tasks, and format of trajectories, and achieves the best generalization performance across other languages. |
SCoder: Progressive Self-Distillation for Bootstrapping Small-Scale Data Synthesizers to Empower Code LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Xinyu Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Linmei Hu, Luhao Zhang, Xiancai Chen, Haomin Fu, Yang Yang, Mengdi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing code large language models rely on large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLMs for fine-tuning, which typically incurs high costs. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative self-distillation approach to bootstrap small-scale LLMs . they use large-scale instruction data distilled from proprietary LLM for fine-tuning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reliance on proprietary LLMs and minimizes costs. |
The Role of Visual Modality in Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning: Challenges and Insights (2025.acl-long)
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Yufang Liu, Yao Du, Tao Ji, Jianing Wang, Yang Liu, Yuanbin Wu, Aimin Zhou, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing models that leverage visual information do not improve math reasoning performance . authors suggest that visual information is important for multimodal reasoning . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset to require image reliance for problem-solving and challenge models with similar, yet distinct, images that change the correct answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is unaffected by changes to or removal of images in the dataset. |
LogicPro: Improving Complex Logical Reasoning via Program-Guided Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Jin Jiang, Yuchen Yan, Yang Liu, Jianing Wang, Shuai Peng, Xunliang Cai, Yixin Cao, Mengdi Zhang, Liangcai Gao
| Challenge: | LogicPro is a data synthesis method that uses LeetCode-style algorithm problems and their corresponding Program solutions to generate complex logic data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method which leverages LeetCode-style algorithm Problems and their corresponding Program solutions to synthesize complex logic data in text format. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models for BBH27, LogicBench, DROP, AR-LSAT, and GSM8K, and a wide range of reasoning datasets. |
How Do Your Code LLMs perform? Empowering Code Instruction Tuning with Really Good Data (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yejie Wang, Keqing He, Dayuan Fu, Zhuoma GongQue, Heyang Xu, Yanxu Chen, Zhexu Wang, Yujia Fu, Guanting Dong, Muxi Diao, Jingang Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Weiran Xu
| Challenge: | Recent research has shown that code pre-trained models improve coding capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a code data pruning strategy to identify which datasets are high-quality code instruction data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data. |
DolphCoder: Echo-Locating Code Large Language Models with Diverse and Multi-Objective Instruction Tuning (2024.acl-long)
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Yejie Wang, Keqing He, Guanting Dong, Pei Wang, Weihao Zeng, Muxi Diao, Weiran Xu, Jingang Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Numerous code large language models (LLMs) have been proposed to enhance code generation performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a diverse instruction model DolphCoder with self-evaluating for code generation that learns diverse instruction targets and combines a code evaluation objective to enhance its code generation ability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves superior performance on the HumanEval and MBPP benchmarks, demonstrating new insights for future code instruction tuning work. |
Revisit Self-Debugging with Self-Generated Tests for Code Generation (2025.acl-long)
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Xiancai Chen, Zhengwei Tao, Kechi Zhang, Changzhi Zhou, Xinyu Zhang, Wanli Gu, Yuanpeng He, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Haiyan Zhao, Zhi Jin
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation, but they still face challenges when tackling complex programming tasks beyond their basic capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate self-generated tests into the code generation process . they propose to use post-execution and in-exection self-debugging to mitigate test bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models in code generation tasks by leveraging execution feedback from tests. |
Incorporating Dynamic Semantics into Pre-Trained Language Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) predicts sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in a sentence. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a dynamic aspect-oriented semantics-based method to learn ABSA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn dynamic aspect-oriented semantics for ABSA on three benchmark datasets. |
SWE-Mutation: Can LLMs Generate Reliable Test Suites in Software Engineering? (2026.findings-acl)
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Yuxuan Sun, Yuze Zhao, Yufeng Wang, Yao Du, Zhiyuan Ma, Jinbo Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Kai Zhang, Zhenya Huang
| Challenge: | Evaluating software engineering capabilities is a core component of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLM-generated test suites that introduces mutated solutions that attempt to "fool" them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test suites are based on 2,636 mutated variants derived from 800 original instances and include a multilingual subset spanning nine programming languages. |
Prejudge-Before-Think: Enhancing Large Language Models at Test-Time by Process Prejudge Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results from competition-level complex reasoning demonstrate that bootstrapping with process prejudge can significantly enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a new process prejudge strategy for LLM reasoning that bootstraps with process prejudgment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be bootstrapped with process prejudge in LLM reasoning . it allows the model to anticipate errors rather than relying on trial and error. |
Contrastive Multi-document Question Generation (2021.eacl-main)
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Woon Sang Cho, Yizhe Zhang, Sudha Rao, Asli Celikyilmaz, Chenyan Xiong, Jianfeng Gao, Mengdi Wang, Bill Dolan
| Challenge: | Multi-document question generation focuses on generating a question that covers the common aspect of multiple documents, but a naive model trained only using the targeted document set may generate too generic questions that cover a larger scope than delineated by the document set. |
| Approach: | They propose a contrastive learning strategy where given ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ sets of documents, generate a question that is closely related to the ‘positive' set but far away from the ‘negative' set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms several strong baselines, as measured by automatic metrics and human evaluation. |