Papers by Qiang Zhu
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel: Efficient Instruction-Following Text Embedding based on Guided Space Transformation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text embedding require re-encoding the entire corpus for each instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates dynamic text embeddings that adapt to user instructions, highlighting specific attributes of text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction-following text embedding quality over state-of-the-art methods while speeding up processing on large datasets. |
Chinese Lexical Substitution: Dataset and Method (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for lexical substitution (LS) are limited and limited in coverage . despite extensive research on Lexical Substitution in various languages, there is limited evidence for LS in Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose to use human and machine collaboration to construct a Chinese LS dataset . they combine four unsupervised LS methods to generate candidate substitutes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing benchmarks on the Chinese lexical substitution task. |
RankPrompt: Step-by-Step Comparisons Make Language Models Better Reasoners (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to reasoning tasks require extensive human annotations or fail in scenarios with inconsistent responses. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method that enables LLMs to self-rank their responses without additional resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves reasoning performance of ChatGPT and GPT-4 with 13% improvement over existing methods. |
CARL: Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Planning with LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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Qiuyi Qi, Jinjian Zhang, Mutian Bao, Tian Liang, Guocong Li, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Jie Liu, Ming Kong, Linjian Mo, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to constraint-aware planning fail to enhance the model’s intrinsic focus on constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a constraint-aware reinforcement learning framework that encourages constraint focus and penalizes neglect of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing frameworks and state-of-the-art reasoning models in a number of real-world applications. |
An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build parallel sentence simplification corpora are limited . SS is used to rephrase sentences into simpler forms for those with cognitive disabilities . |
| Approach: | They propose to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpors using a parallel approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiLarge and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
Zoom Out and Observe: News Environment Perception for Fake News Detection (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fake news detection "zoom in" to verify content with knowledge sources or check readers’ replies to posts but neglect information in the external news environment where a fake news post is created and disseminated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to capture news environment signals and a module to perceive useful signals and assist final prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve the performance of basic fake news detectors by capturing the environmental signals of news posts and analyzing the results. |
Learn over Past, Evolve for Future: Forecasting Temporal Trends for Fake News Detection (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on fake news detection does not consider the temporal shift issue caused by the rapidly-evolving nature of news data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to forecast temporal patterns of news data and guide detector to fast adapt to future distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework forecasts temporal distribution patterns and guides detector to fast adapt to future distribution. |
ParaLS: Lexical Substitution via Pretrained Paraphraser (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lexical substitution (LS) is an extremely powerful technology that can be used as a backbone of various NLP applications such as writing assistance. |
| Approach: | They propose two simple decoding strategies that focus on the variations of the target word during decoding to generate substitutes from a paraphraser. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform state-of-the-art LS methods based on pre-trained language models on three benchmarks. |
Chinese Idiom Paraphrasing (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Chinese idioms are hard to understand by children and non-native speakers due to their non-compositionality and metaphorical meaning. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to rephrase idiom-containing sentences to non-idiomatic ones under the premise of preserving the original sentence’s meaning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method has better performance than baselines based on the established dataset. |
Multi-layer Representation Fusion for Neural Machine Translation (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation systems require a number of stacked layers for deep models, but the prediction depends on the sentence representation of the top-most layer with no access to low-level representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer representation fusion approach to fusing stacked layers to learn a better representation from the stack. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach yields 0.92 and 0.56 BLEU points over the strong Transformer baseline on IWSLT German-English and NIST Chinese-English MT tasks respectively. |
Aspect and Sentiment Aware Abstractive Review Summarization (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is a task that generates short and concise summaries of user generated reviews. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive attention mechanism to learn the representations of context and aspect words within reviews, acted as an encoder. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive results compared to other strong competitors on a real-life dataset. |
Training Flexible Depth Model by Multi-Task Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multitask learning can support decoding in 24 depth configurations and is superior to individual training. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multi-task learning to train a flexible depth model that can adapt to different depth configurations during inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can support decoding in 24 depth configurations and is superior to the individual training and another flexible depth model training method——LayerDrop. |
Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to neural machine translation are limited to the topmost encoder layer’s context representation and cannot perceive the lower encoder layers. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise multi-view learning approach to solve this problem by incorporating an auxiliary view into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve stable results over multiple strong baselines and is agnostic to network architectures. |
A Simple and Effective Approach to Coverage-Aware Neural Machine Translation (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models are used to solve translation problems using long-term models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to seek a better balance between model confidence and length preference for Neural Machine Translation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese-English and English-German translation tasks. |
Chinese Morph Resolution in E-commerce Live Streaming Scenarios (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Live morph resolution task is used to detect e-commerce live streaming violations . morphs are used to evade scrutiny and engage in false advertising . |
| Approach: | They propose a task to detect morph violations in live streaming scenarios . they use large language models to generate additional training data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance and improves live streaming regulation. |
Collaborative Document Simplification Using Multi-Agent Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Document simplification requires complex factors such as technical terminology, metaphors, and overall coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework for document simplification based on large language models that emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework emulates the collaborative process of a human expert team through the roles played by multiple agents, addressing the intricate demands of document simplification. |
Post-Hoc Watermarking for Robust Detection in Text Generated by Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document simplification address complex factors such as technical terminology, metaphors, and overall coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework AgentSimp for document simplification based on large language models that simulates collaboration among agents through roles played by multiple agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces simplified documents that are more thoroughly simplified and more coherent across various articles and styles. |
UrbanGeoEval: A City-Scale Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Geospatial Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on 18 widely used LLMs uncover critical insights: (1) models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps; (2) failures in complex multi-hop tasks stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-module framework that disentangles factual recall and spatial logic from the model's real capabilities in urban environments. |
| Outcome: | Extensive tests on 18 widely used LLMs reveal that models exhibit severe geographic biases and resolution gaps, and failures in complex multi-hop tasks often stem from brittle foundational spatial skills rather than high-level logic deficits. |
Learning Deep Transformer Models for Machine Translation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation models have advanced the previous state-of-the-art by learning mappings between sequences via neural networks and attention mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They propose to use layer normalization to pass the combination of previous layers to the next layer to improve the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the shallow Transformer-Big/Base baseline model on English-German and Chinese-English tasks by 0.4-2.4 BLEU points. |
STAPO: Selective Trajectory-Aware Policy Optimization for LLM Agent Training (2026.acl-long)
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Qiuyi Qi, Tian Liang, Mutian Bao, Jinjian Zhang, Dongnan Liu, Wei Zhou, Linjian Mo, Ming Kong, Jie Liu, Feng Zhang, Qiang Zhu
| Challenge: | Prior work has explored step-level supervision using Shannon-entropy-based uncertainty signals, which conflate inherent state complexity with agent confidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical group-based RL framework that leverages normalized entropy to locate outlier steps associated with trajectory neglect and optimizes them via a mechanism of trajectory-aware reward and trajectory-independent penalty. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ALFWorld, WebShop, and Search-Augmented QA show that STAPO achieves state-of-the-art performance while substantially alleviating trajectory neglect. |
Improving Fake News Detection of Influential Domain via Domain- and Instance-Level Transfer (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Social media spreads both real news and fake news in various domains including politics, health, entertainment, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a Domain- and Instance-level Transfer Framework for Fake News Detection which could improve the performance of specific target domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of target domains by hurting other domains, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in the target domain. |
AI4Reading: Chinese Audiobook Interpretation System Based on Multi-Agent Collaboration (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Interpretative audiobooks are becoming more popular, but their manual creation process remains time-consuming and resource-intensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent collaboration system that leverages large language models and speech synthesis technology to generate podcast-like audiobook interpretations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is open source and open to the public. |
Chinese Live-Streaming E-Commerce Morph Resolution: Datasets and Methods (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Live-stream E-commerce faces significant challenges from morphs, deliberate linguistic variants used to evade real-time voice filters and amplify product claims illegally. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that resolves morphs and generates structured explanations . they propose morph-aware dual-output refinement framework that detects inconsistencies . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves morph resolution accuracy and interpretability. |