Papers by Richang Hong
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency of multi-agent systems rely on aggressive graph topology evolution . however, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution that manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling. |
Beyond Semantic Similarity: Appraisal-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning and Retrieval for Multimodal Emotional Support Conversations (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation paradigms rely on semantic similarity to retrieve historical dialogues that are surface analogous but therapeutically incongruent. |
| Approach: | They propose to use appraisal-guided reasoning chains to generate appraisal-based reasoning chains and apply a dual-signal verification mechanism to verify and correct them. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on two ESC benchmarks show that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models. |
QueueEDIT: Structural Self-Correction for Sequential Model Editing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective for correcting factual inaccuracies but can still suffer from hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a queue-based self-correction framework that addresses parameter bias during sequential model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining competitive performance in single-turn editing. |
SURE: Safety Understanding and Reasoning Enhancement for Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models incorporate visual and textual information, but introduces new and complex safety risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a safety reasoning framework that integrates visual modalities into multimodal models to help them resist jailbreak attacks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model safety while avoiding over-defense . it is based on a large-scale safety reasoning dataset . |
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AMATA outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLMs on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
Unveiling Uncertainty: A Deep Dive into Calibration and Performance of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models combine visual and textual data for tasks like image captioning and visual question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose temperature scaling and iterative prompt optimization to calibrate MLLMs and enhance model reliability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques improve MLLMs and improve model reliability. |