Papers by Qingkai Zeng
Crossing Variational Autoencoders for Answer Retrieval (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods learned semantic representations with dual encoders or dual variational auto-encoders failed to capture the aligned semantics between question and answer. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two variational auto-encoders to generate questions with aligned answers and generating answers with align questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art answer retrieval method on SQuAD. |
ChatEL: Entity Linking with Chatbots (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity Linking (EL) is a challenging task in natural language processing . existing approaches focus on creating elaborate contextual models that are unwieldy and difficult to train . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to prompt LLMs to return accurate results for Entity Linking . they use a three-step framework to generate a set of EL models that can be open-source . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the average F1 performance across 10 datasets by more than 2%. |
Pre-trained Models Perform the Best When Token Distributions Follow Zipf’s Law (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models typically fix a vocabulary size in advance, then use Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) to construct the tokenizer. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for determining the vocabulary size by analyzing token frequency distributions through Zipf’s law and propose to use it to optimize model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves model efficiency and effectiveness across NLP, genomics, and chemistry. |
CodeTaxo: Enhancing Taxonomy Expansion with Limited Examples via Code Language Prompts (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing taxonomies are mainly constructed by experts or through crowd-sourcing, making the process time-consuming, labor-intensive, and restricted in coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages large language models to capture taxonomic structure . existing taxonomies are mainly constructed by experts or through crowd-sourcing . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on five real-world domains show that CodeTaxo outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
Instant Personalized Large Language Model Adaptation via Hypernetwork (2026.acl-long)
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Zhaoxuan Tan, Zixuan Zhang, Haoyang Wen, Zheng Li, Rongzhi Zhang, Pei Chen, Fengran Mo, Zheyuan Liu, Qingkai Zeng, Qingyu Yin, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods require training a separate adapter for each user, making them computationally expensive and impractical for real-time updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable framework that maps a user's profile directly to a full set of adapter parameters. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms prompt-based personalization and OPPU while using substantially fewer computational resources at deployment. |
Enhancing Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs by Stepwise Correction (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing Best-of-N decoding methods often lead to incorrect solutions . a novel method is proposed to help large language models identify and revise incorrect steps in their generated reasoning paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that helps large language models identify and revise incorrect steps in their generated reasoning paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art Best-ofN decoding method by +2.4 and reduces token consumption by 77.8%. |
Faceted Hierarchy: A New Graph Type to Organize Scientific Concepts and a Construction Method (D19-53)
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| Challenge: | faceted concept hierarchy is a structure of parent-child relationships . concepts are expected to be organized in a hierarchical structure for student learning . |
| Approach: | They propose a faceted concept hierarchy that aims to build facets from scientific literature. |
| Outcome: | The proposed hierarchy is more complete than "type-of" relations, and resolves conflicts by maintaining the acyclic structure of a hierarchy. |
Technical Question Answering across Tasks and Domains (2021.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for technical QA have a limited data size and question and answer overlaps . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework of deep transfer learning to address technical QA across tasks and domains using document retrieval and reading comprehension tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs better than state-of-the-art methods on the TechQA task. |
Protecting Privacy in Multimodal Large Language Models with MLLMU-Bench (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language models (MLLMs) trained on vast web corpora can memorize and disclose individuals’ confidential and private data, raising legal and ethical concerns. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess unlearning algorithms from multiple perspectives and provide a baseline for existing generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 500 fictitious profiles and 153 profiles for public celebrities, evaluated from both multimodal (image+text) and unimodal (text) perspectives. |
Auto-Instruct: Automatic Instruction Generation and Ranking for Black-Box Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Zhihan Zhang, Shuohang Wang, Wenhao Yu, Yichong Xu, Dan Iter, Qingkai Zeng, Yang Liu, Chenguang Zhu, Meng Jiang
| Challenge: | Large language models can perform a wide range of tasks by following natural language instructions without task-specific fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automatically improve the quality of LLM instructions . they leverage the generative ability of LMS to generate diverse candidate instructions based on a scoring model trained on 575 existing NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses human-written and LLM-generated instructions on 118 out-of-domain tasks. |
From Personal to Collective: On the Role of Local and Global Knowledge in LLM Personalization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are the backbone of modern AI systems supporting a wide range of applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local–Global knowledge framework that augments user-specific signals with a global knowledge encoding collective behavioral trends. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on five personalization benchmarks. |
MinT: Boosting Generalization in Mathematical Reasoning via Multi-view Fine-tuning (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely on knowledge distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view fine-tuning method that exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods that rely heavily on LLM teachers . it grants models generalization ability across views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete data. |
Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Key Condition Verification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct reasoning without external feedback have not been used in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose an iterative verify-then-correct framework to progressively identify and correct (probably) false responses, named ProCo. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the accuracy of LLMs on three reasoning tasks. |
Democratizing Large Language Models via Personalized Parameter-Efficient Fine-tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results demonstrate that OPPU significantly outperforms existing prompt-based methods across seven diverse tasks in the LaMP benchmark. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate parametric user knowledge into the personal PEFT parameters and non-parametric knowledge from retrieval and profiles, adapting LLMs to user behavior shifts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing prompt-based methods across seven diverse tasks in the LaMP benchmark. |
Enhancing Factual Consistency of Abstractive Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization models often distort or fabricate facts in articles . factual inconsistency is a common problem with abstractive summaries . |
| Approach: | They propose a fact-aware summarization model FASum to extract factual relations into the summary generation process via graph attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can produce abstractive summaries with higher factual consistency compared with existing systems and corrects factual errors via modifying only a few keywords. |
A Technical Question Answering System with Transfer Learning (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | StackOverflow and AskUbuntu are popular open forum communities for technical question-answering, but it is expensive for human experts to provide timely and helpful responses. |
| Approach: | They develop a system that automatically responds to questions from a siamese ALBERT network based on previously answered questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system responds automatically to questions based on answers from previous users. |
Tri-Train: Automatic Pre-Fine Tuning between Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning for SciNER (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-training a language model by self-supervised tasks on huge datasets and fine-tuning with small labelled data are often inadequate for scientific NER tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a "pre-fine tuning" step between pre-training and fine-tuning to construct a corpus by selecting sentences from unlabeled documents that are the most relevant with labelled training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on seven benchmarks on the performance of the proposed model on labelled datasets. |