Papers by Minghan Zhang
S2G-RAG: Structured Sufficiency and Gap Judging for Iterative Retrieval-Augmented QA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation grounds language models in external evidence, but multi-hop question answering remains difficult . iterative pipelines must control what to retrieve next and when evidence is adequate. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative framework with an explicit controller, S2G-Judge . they map structured gap items into the next retrieval query to produce stable retrieval trajectories . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on TriviaQA, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA show that S2G-RAG improves multi-hop QA performance and robustness under multi-turn retrieval. |
CELI: Simple yet Effective Approach to Enhance Out-of-Domain Generalization of Cross-Encoders. (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing cross-encoders do not capture all information into the [CLS] token . Xiong et al., 2021) find that the out-of-domain approach is less robust. |
| Approach: | They introduce a cross-encoder with late interaction that incorporates a late interaction layer into existing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves BEIR by 5% without compromising in-domain effectiveness or search latency. |
Capture Human Disagreement Distributions by Calibrated Networks for Natural Language Inference (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Previously, it's common to disregard it as noise or as a sign of poor-quality data, as their annotations are heavily based on personal experience and opinions. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture the human disagreement distribution from the perspective of model calibration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve competitive performance when well-calibrated, on divergence scores between predictive probability and the true human opinion distribution, and the accuracy. |
GLIER: Generative Legal Inference and Evidence Ranking for Legal Case Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing dense retrieval methods neglect the explicit legal logic that underpins legal relevance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reformulates retrieval as an inference process over latent legal variables. |
| Outcome: | GLIER outperforms strong baselines like SAILER and KELLER in a legal case-based retrieval task . the framework exhibits exceptional data efficiency even when trained with only 10% of the data . |
Execution as Verification: Fine-Grained Self-Correcting Reasoning for Complex KBQA (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering methods are limited by syntactic constraints and are prone to structural deviations that render queries unexecutable. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes semantic parsing as an iterative reasoning process driven by execution feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves significant improvements in query executability and answer accuracy on the WebQSP and CWQ datasets. |
Thinking Beyond the Local: Multi-View Instructed Adaptive Reasoning in KG-Enhanced LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models adopt query-driven iterative reasoning from a local perspective, limiting efficiency and accuracy for complex multi-hop tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view instructed adaptive reasoning of LLM on Knowledge Graphs that allows LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes the limitations of local exploration by enabling LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
Certified Error Control of Candidate Set Pruning for Two-Stage Relevance Ranking (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In information retrieval, candidate set pruning is used to speed up two-stage relevance ranking but lacks accurate error control and empirical guarantees. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that guarantees the test error after pruning is controlled under a user-specified threshold with high probability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the average set size from 1000 to 27, increasing reranking speed by about 37 times while keeping MRR@10 greater than a pre-specified value of 0.38 with about 90% empirical coverage. |