Papers by Pengfei Zhou
GroupToM-Bench: Benchmarking Group Theory of Mind and Nonlinear Social Emergence in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Weidong Tang, Jierui Li, Yueling Hou, Zihan Mei, Can Zhang, Xinyan Wan, Zhiyuan Liang, Pengfei Zhou, Yang You, Wangbo Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing models for general intelligence fail to model how mental states interact and crystallize into group-level outcomes. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal benchmark for group-level Theory of Mind (ToM) to probe nonlinear collective behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs significantly below human levels, exposing blind spots in modeling social structures and nonlinear collective behavior. |
MARS2: Scaling Multi-Agent Tree Search via Reinforcement Learning for Code Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Pengfei Li, Shijie Wang, Fangyuan Li, Yikun Fu, Kaifeng Liu, Kaiyan Zhang, Dazhi Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Biqing Qi, Bowen Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reinforcement learning are decoupled from structured search due to limited trajectory diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified RL framework that integrates multiple agents within a shared tree-structured search environment. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MARS2 improves performance across diverse model combinations and training settings. |
CogKTR: A Knowledge-Enhanced Text Representation Toolkit for Natural Language Understanding (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Zhuoran Jin, Tianyi Men, Hongbang Yuan, Yuyang Zhou, Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Zhipeng Xue, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge-enhanced methods are limited to knowledge-intensive tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced text representation toolkit for natural language understanding . it combines knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection and knowledge application . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, knowledge injection, and knowledge application. |
LLM-Based Human-Agent Collaboration and Interaction Systems: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)
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Henry Peng Zou, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yaozu Wu, Jizhou Guo, Yankai Chen, Chunyu Miao, Hoang H Nguyen, Yue Zhou, Weizhi Zhang, Liancheng Fang, Hanrong Zhang, Fangxin Wang, Pengfei Zhang, Langzhou He, Yangning Li, Dongyuan Li, Renhe Jiang, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have sparked growing interest in building fully autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system to enhance system performance, reliability, and safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed systems improve system performance, reliability, and safety by integrating human-provided information, feedback, or control into the agent system. |
Dissecting Human and LLM Preferences (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that human and Large Language Model preferences are important for model fine-tuning and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They dissect the preferences of human and 32 different Large Language Models to understand their quantitative composition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is compared with 32 different large language models using real-world user-model conversations. |
LongCLI-Bench: A Preliminary Benchmark and Study for Long-horizon Agentic Programming in Command-Line Interfaces (2026.findings-acl)
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Yukang Feng, Jianwen Sun, Zelai Yang, Jiaxin Ai, Chuanhao Li, Zizhen Li, Fanrui Zhang, Kang He, Rui Ma, Jifan Lin, Jie Sun, Yang Xiao, Sizhuo Zhou, Wenxiao Wu, Yiming Liu, Pengfei Liu, Shenglin Zhang, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for agentic programming in long-horizon command-line interface tasks are limited by short task horizons, data contamination from GitHub scraping, and a lack of fine-grained evaluation metrics. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic capabilities across long-horizon command-line interface tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks cover four engineering categories: from scratch, feature addition, bug fixing, and refactoring. |
Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Text Summarization with In-Context Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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Sameer Jain, Vaishakh Keshava, Swarnashree Mysore Sathyendra, Patrick Fernandes, Pengfei Liu, Graham Neubig, Chunting Zhou
| Challenge: | In-context learning-based evaluators are competitive with learned evaluation frameworks for text summarization tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models as multi-dimensional evaluators using in-context learning to evaluate text summarization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed frameworks are competitive with existing frameworks on relevance and factual consistency, the authors show . |
RESIN-11: Schema-guided Event Prediction for 11 Newsworthy Scenarios (2022.naacl-demo)
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Xinya Du, Zixuan Zhang, Sha Li, Pengfei Yu, Hongwei Wang, Tuan Lai, Xudong Lin, Ziqi Wang, Iris Liu, Ben Zhou, Haoyang Wen, Manling Li, Darryl Hannan, Jie Lei, Hyounghun Kim, Rotem Dror, Haoyu Wang, Michael Regan, Qi Zeng, Qing Lyu, Charles Yu, Carl Edwards, Xiaomeng Jin, Yizhu Jiao, Ghazaleh Kazeminejad, Zhenhailong Wang, Chris Callison-Burch, Mohit Bansal, Carl Vondrick, Jiawei Han, Dan Roth, Shih-Fu Chang, Martha Palmer, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods for event prediction are incomplete and noisy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-related event schemas to extract newsworthy events . they build a demo website and include a video demonstrating the framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to a wide variety of newsworthy scenarios. |
Diversity-oriented Data Augmentation with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing data augmentation methods focus on increasing sample numbers while neglecting sample distribution diversity, which can lead to model overfitting. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework that focuses on sample distribution diversity and trains a large language model as a diverse paraphraser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average performance gain of 10.52% surpassing the runner-up baseline with more than three percentage points. |
AscendKernelGen: LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for NPUs (2026.findings-acl)
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Xinzi Cao, Jianyang Zhai, Pengfei Li, Zhiheng Hu, Cen Yan, null Mubingxu, Guanghuan Fang, Bin She, Jiayu Li, Yihan Su, Dongyang Tao, Feidiao Yang, Chang-Dong Wang, Yutong Lu, Weicheng Xue, Bin Zhou, Yonghong Tian
| Challenge: | Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are critical for AI infrastructure, but their development remains a bottleneck due to vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for NPU kernel development that bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding . compiler success on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5%, they say . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding, showing a near-zero success rate on complex kernels. |
MPBench: A Comprehensive Multimodal Reasoning Benchmark for Process Errors Identification (2025.findings-acl)
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xu Zhao Pan, Pengfei Zhou, Jiaxin Ai, Wangbo Zhao, Kai Wang, Xiaojiang Peng, Wenqi Shao, Hongxun Yao, Kaipeng Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks of large language models focus on error detection, neglecting other scenarios like reasoning search. |
| Approach: | et al. propose a multi-task, multimodal benchmark to assess effectiveness of PRMs . step correctness, answers aggregation and reasoning process search are evaluated . ethical principles of MPBench are based on a set of evaluation paradigms based in a text-based benchmark . |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios . it uses three evaluation paradigms to assess the effectiveness and compares them with existing models . a the proposed model improves reasoning accuracy by providing stepwise feedback for multi-step reasoning results . |
Retrieval Heads are Dynamic (2026.acl-long)
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Yuping Lin, Zitao Li, Yue Xing, Pengfei He, Yingqian Cui, Yaliang Li, Bolin Ding, Jingren Zhou, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have identified "retrieval heads" in Large Language Models responsible for extracting information from input contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose to examine retrieval heads from a dynamic perspective . they establish that retrieval head activation is highly dynamic and functionally irreplaceable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model's hidden state encodes a predictive signal for future retrieval head patterns, indicating an internal planning mechanism. |
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
Automatic ICD Coding via Interactive Shared Representation Networks with Self-distillation Mechanism (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for ICD coding ignore the long-tail of code frequency or noisy clinical notes. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an interactive shared representation network to model code co-occurrences while focusing on the clinical note's noteworthy part and extract valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism to solve the long-tail problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the long-tail of code frequency and noise in clinical notes and extracts valuable information through a self-distillation learning mechanism. |
DTELS: Towards Dynamic Granularity of Timeline Summarization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing timeline summarizations lack flexibility to meet diverse granularity needs . a fine-grained timeline showing the technical details is preferred for news topics . |
| Approach: | They propose a new paradigm to construct adaptive timelines based on user instructions or requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed timelines are informative and granularly consistent, but they struggle to generate consistent timelines. |
From Signal Degradation to Computation Collapse: Uncovering the Two Failure Modes of LLM Quantization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on PTQ spans three primary directions. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic analysis of post-training quantization failures using PTQ . they show that targeted repair can mitigate Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates Signal Degradation but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. |
When KV Cache Reuse Fails in Multi-Agent Systems: Cross-Candidate Interaction is Crucial for LLM Judges (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multi-agent LLMs generate multiple candidate responses that are aggregated by an LLM judge. |
| Approach: | They propose to advocate KV cache reuse across partially shared contexts and report substantial speedups for generation agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reuse strategies weaken cross-candidate attention, especially for later candidate blocks, and highlight judge-centric inference as a distinct regime that requires dedicated, risk-aware system design. |
Task-Stratified Knowledge Scaling Laws for Post-Training Quantized Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing scaling laws focus on general performance, overlooking crucial fine-grained factors and how quantization differentially impacts diverse knowledge capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies model size, bit-width, and fine-grained factors into memorization, application, and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows strong fit and cross-architecture consistency on 293 different PTQ configurations. |
Lightweight Haar Wavelet Subband Pruning for LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have impressive performance but require computational and memory resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training framework that uses a Haar wavelet transform to prune weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework reduces pruning time and computational costs by removing less important weights while preserving model architecture. |
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yujie Feng, Jian Li, Xiaoyu Dong, Pengfei Xu, Xiaohui Zhou, Yujia Zhang, Zexin Lu, Yasha Wang, Alan Zhao, Xu Chu, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Recent model merging-based methods struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing catastrophic forgetting. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model’s training status. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B). |
M2Edit: Locate and Edit Multi-Granularity Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods for MLLMs lack multi-granularity knowledge . existing knowledge editing approaches lack multimodality knowledge and generalize to multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal knowledge editing method which integrates key knowledge layers within MLLMs and collaboratively edits them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves visual generality performance on knowledge data of different granularities. |
LASS: A Novel and Economical Data Augmentation Framework Based on Language Models for Debiasing Opinion Summarization (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate negative summaries are expensive and lack the capacity to generate large data sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation framework based on LArge and Small language models for debiaSing opinion summarization that generates a small number of synthesized negative reviews by rewriting the positive text via a large language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate large numbers of negative reviews by rewriting the positive text using a large language model and training a disentangle reconstruction model based on the generated data. |
SepSeq: A Training-Free Framework for Long Numerical Sequence Processing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Jie Sun, Yu Liu, Lu Han, Qiwen Deng, Xiang Shu, Yang Xiao, Lintao Ma, Xingyu Lu, Jun Zhou, Pengfei Liu, Jiancan Wu, Xiang Wang
| Challenge: | Existing large-scale large-context models suffer from performance degradation when processing long numerical sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to mitigate attention dispersion by strategically inserting separator tokens into the model to recalibrat attention to local segments while preserving global context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves accuracy and reduces inference token consumption by 16.4% on 9 widely-adopted LLMs. |
DavIR: Data Selection via Implicit Reward for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haotian Zhou, Tingkai Liu, Qianli Ma, Yufeng Zhang, Jianbo Yuan, Pengfei Liu, Yang You, Hongxia Yang
| Challenge: | 6% of Alpaca dataset selected with DavIR can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to produce superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-based data selection method for post-training Large Language Models . they generalize Reducible Holdout Loss to core-set selection problem of causal language modeling . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can steer both LLaMA and Gemma models to superior performance compared to the same models trained on the full 52K dataset. |
Opinions Are Not Always Positive: Debiasing Opinion Summarization with Model-Specific and Model-Agnostic Methods (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing opinion summarization frameworks are reluctant to generate negative summaries given input of negative opinions. |
| Approach: | They propose to disentangle input into sentiment-relevant and sentiment-irrelevant components through adversarial loss. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches reduce sentiment bias in the existing opinion summarization dataset . the proposed approaches generate better summaries with a more balanced emotional polarity distribution . |
Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning and Alignment Across Chinese Dynasties (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing temporal reasoning benchmarks rely on rule-based construction and lack contextual depth . a recent study found existing LLMs struggle with nuanced temporal understanding . |
| Approach: | a benchmark is designed to evaluate LLMs on temporal reasoning in Chinese dynasties. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark evaluates LLMs on temporal reasoning across Chinese dynasties . it emphasizes cross-entity relationships, pairwise temporal alignment, contextualized and culturally-grounded reasoning . results show existing LLM benchmarks struggle with nuanced temporal understanding . |