Papers by Ruochen Zhang
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to self-improvement rely on external supervision signals in the form of seed data and/or assistance from third-party models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates high-quality synthetic question-answer data in a fully autonomous manner. |
Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer (2026.acl-srw)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, yet their benefits remain concentrated in English and a small number of high-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They fine-tuned large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluated zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. |
| Outcome: | The results show that models with weak baselines improve across all languages, whereas strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. |
Thank You, Stingray: Multilingual Large Language Models Can Not (Yet) Disambiguate Cross-Lingual Word Senses (2025.findings-naacl)
Copied to clipboard
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Ruochen Zhang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Holy Lovenia, Elisa Gilbert, Hiroki Nomoto, Alham Fikri Aji
| Challenge: | Existing studies on multilingual large language models have raised concerns about their reliability beyond English. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for cross-lingual sense disambiguation that uses false friends to identify the limitation of cross-linguistic sense disembarrassment in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark pinpoints the limitation of cross-lingual sense disambiguation in LLMs by using false friends in four languages. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Long Li, Weiwen Xu, Jiayan Guo, Ruochen Zhao, Xingxuan Li, Yuqian Yuan, Boqiang Zhang, Yuming Jiang, Yifei Xin, Ronghao Dang, Yu Rong, Deli Zhao, Tian Feng, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing methods for idea generation either trivially prompt LLMs or expose LLM to extensive literature without indicating useful information. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain-of-ideas agent that organizes literature in a chains structure . they propose evaluating idea-generation methods from different perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and matches human quality in idea generation. |
Paths Not Taken: Understanding and Mending the Multilingual Factual Recall Pipeline (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multilingual large language models (LLMs) exhibit factual inconsistencies across languages . authors identify two primary sources of error: insufficient engagement of reliable English-centric mechanism for factual recall, and incorrect translation from English back into the target language for the final answer. |
| Approach: | They propose two vector interventions to redirect the model toward better internal paths for higher factual consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interventions increase the recall accuracy by over 35 percent for the lowest-performing language. |
Re-Evaluating Evaluation for Multilingual Summarization (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Jessica Forde, Ruochen Zhang, Lintang Sutawika, Alham Aji, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Winata, Minghao Wu, Carsten Eickhoff, Stella Biderman, Ellie Pavlick
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that automated evaluation approaches correlate with human ratings in English, but this is unclear for other languages. |
| Approach: | They construct a small-scale pilot dataset containing article-summary pairs and human ratings in English, Chinese and Indonesian to measure the strength of summaries. |
| Outcome: | The results show that standard metrics are unreliable measures of quality in Chinese and Indonesian. |
Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are evolving rapidly and require manual evaluations. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-powered framework that automates the entire evaluation process using LLM agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows a 92.14% correlation with human preferences, surpassing all previous expert-annotated benchmarks without any manual efforts. |
Unifying Language Agent Algorithms with Graph-based Orchestration Engine for Reproducible Agent Research (2025.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Qianqian Zhang, Jiajia Liao, Heting Ying, Yibo Ma, Haozhan Shen, Jingcheng Li, Peng Liu, Lu Zhang, Chunxin Fang, Kyusong Lee, Ruochen Xu, Tiancheng Zhao
| Challenge: | Language agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and executing complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a flexible framework that addresses engineering overhead and insufficient evaluation frameworks for fair comparison. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simplifies language agent development and establishes a foundation for reproducible agent research. |
Multilingual Large Language Models Are Not (Yet) Code-Switchers (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing multilingual Large Language Models are not specifically trained with objectives for managing code-switching scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual Large Language Models to perform sentiment analysis, machine translation, summarization and word-level language identification to compare their performance to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models show that they underperform in comparison to fine-tuned models of much smaller scales. |
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding but their visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning that allows MLLMs to explore textual tokens while visual input remains fixed throughout reasoning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms strong large models such as GPT-4o on high-resolution benchmarks and improves performance on a series of elaborate high-level benchmarks. |
SOCCER: An Information-Sparse Discourse State Tracking Collection in the Sports Commentary Domain (2021.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for state tracking are limited and state changes are less densely distributed over utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose to turn to simplified, fully observable systems that show some of these properties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system shows that state changes occur infrequently while messages are "chatter" it allows for rich descriptions of state while avoiding the complexities of other settings. |
UniSumm and SummZoo: Unified Model and Diverse Benchmark for Few-Shot Summarization (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new benchmark summarization model is being developed to train few-shot summarizers . a large number of summarizing tasks are required to perform well in heterogeneous datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot summarization model pre-trained with multiple summarizing tasks . they propose 'uniSumm' to be prefix-tuned to excel at any few-shot summarisation task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models under automatic and human evaluations and achieves comparable results in human evaluation. |
CroCoSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Code-Switched Summarization (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) has attracted increasing interest due to the availability of large-scale web-mined datasets and the advancements of multilingual language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset of cross-lingual code-switched summaries in Chinese and English . they show that leveraging existing CLS resources does not improve performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method does not improve on CroCoSum, indicating the limited generalizability of existing approaches. |
Crowdsource, Crawl, or Generate? Creating SEA-VL, a Multicultural Vision-Language Dataset for Southeast Asia (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Samuel Cahyawijaya, Holy Lovenia, Joel Ruben Antony Moniz, Tack Hwa Wong, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Thant Thiri Maung, Frederikus Hudi, David Anugraha, Muhammad Ravi Shulthan Habibi, Muhammad Reza Qorib, Amit Agarwal, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Hitesh Laxmichand Patel, Vicky Feliren, Bahrul Ilmi Nasution, Manuel Antonio Rufino, Genta Indra Winata, Rian Adam Rajagede, Carlos Rafael Catalan, Mohamed Fazli Mohamed Imam, Priyaranjan Pattnayak, Salsabila Zahirah Pranida, Kevin Pratama, Yeshil Bangera, Adisai Na-Thalang, Patricia Nicole Monderin, Yueqi Song, Christian Simon, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Richardy Lobo Sapan, Taki Hasan Rafi, Bin Wang, null Supryadi, Kanyakorn Veerakanjana, Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, Matthew Theodore Roque, Karissa Vincentio, Takdanai Kreangphet, Phakphum Artkaew, Kadek Hendrawan Palgunadi, Yanzhi Yu, Rochana Prih Hastuti, William Nixon, Mithil Bangera, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim, Aye Hninn Khine, Hanif Muhammad Zhafran, Teddy Ferdinan, Audra Aurora Izzani, Ayushman Singh, Evan Evan, Jauza Akbar Krito, Michael Anugraha, Fenal Ashokbhai Ilasariya, Haochen Li, John Amadeo Daniswara, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Eryawan Presma Yulianrifat, Can Udomcharoenchaikit, Fadil Risdian Ansori, Mahardika Krisna Ihsani, Giang Nguyen, Anab Maulana Barik, Dan John Velasco, Rifo Ahmad Genadi, Saptarshi Saha, Chengwei Wei, Isaiah Edri W. Flores, Kenneth Chen Ko Han, Anjela Gail D. Santos, Wan Shen Lim, Kaung Si Phyo, Tim Santos, Meisyarah Dwiastuti, Jiayun Luo, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Ming Shan Hee, Ikhlasul Akmal Hanif, M.Alif Al Hakim, Muhammad Rizky Sya’ban, Kun Kerdthaisong, Lester James Validad Miranda, Fajri Koto, Tirana Noor Fatyanosa, Alham Fikri Aji, Jostin Jerico Rosal, Jun Kevin, Robert Wijaya, Onno P. Kampman, Ruochen Zhang, Börje F. Karlsson, Peerat Limkonchotiwat
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia is underrepresented in vision-language research . SEA-VL is an open-source initiative dedicated to developing culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use crowdsourced, automated image crawling and synthetic image generation to develop culturally relevant datasets for SEA languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets capture SEA cultural nuances and contexts better than existing datasets. |
Beyond Contrastive Learning: Synthetic Data Enables List-wise Training with Multiple Levels of Relevance (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new approach to training with binary relevance labels uses synthetic data . contrastive learning with binary correlations leaves out subtle nuances useful for ranking . |
| Approach: | They propose to use waterstein distance as a loss function for training transformer-based retrievers with graduated relevance labels instead of real documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms conventional training with InfoNCE by a large margin on MARCO and BEIR benchmarks without using real documents. |
Interpreting Positional Information in Perspective of Word Order (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Attention mechanism is a powerful and effective method utilized in natural language processing, but it is insensitive to positional information. |
| Approach: | They propose a weight concatenation operation to evaluate its efficacy in machine translation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed operation can encode positional information and confirms our hypothesis. |
LMR-BENCH: Evaluating LLM Agent’s Ability on Reproducing Language Modeling Research (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shuo Yan, Ruochen Li, Ziming Luo, Zimu Wang, Daoyang Li, Liqiang Jing, Kaiyu He, Peilin Wu, Juntong Ni, George Michalopoulos, Yue Zhang, Ziyang Zhang, Mian Zhang, Zhiyu Chen, Xinya Du
| Challenge: | Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable potential in advancing scientific discovery, but their capability in reproducing code from research papers remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate LLM agents' ability to reproduce scientific research papers by analyzing code reproduction tasks from 23 research papers published in top-tier NLP venues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the capability of large language model (LLM) agents on code reproduction from Language Modeling Research. |
MINERS: Multilingual Language Models as Semantic Retrievers (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks have evaluated language models to evaluate their performance across a range of embedding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the robustness of multilingual language models in semantic retrieval tasks including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the robustness of multilingual LMs in retrieval tasks across over 200 languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. |
SEACrowd: A Multilingual Multimodal Data Hub and Benchmark Suite for Southeast Asian Languages (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Holy Lovenia, Rahmad Mahendra, Salsabil Akbar, Lester James Miranda, Jennifer Santoso, Elyanah Aco, Akhdan Fadhilah, Jonibek Mansurov, Joseph Marvin Imperial, Onno Kampman, Joel Moniz, Muhammad Habibi, Frederikus Hudi, Jann Montalan, Ryan Hadiwijaya, Joanito Lopo, William Nixon, Börje Karlsson, James Jaya, Ryandito Diandaru, Yuze Gao, Patrick Irawan, Bin Wang, Jan Christian Blaise Cruz, Chenxi Whitehouse, Ivan Parmonangan, Maria Khelli, Wenyu Zhang, Lucky Susanto, Reynard Ryanda, Sonny Hermawan, Dan Velasco, Muhammad Kautsar, Willy Hendria, Yasmin Moslem, Noah Flynn, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Haochen Li, Johanes Lee, R. Damanhuri, Shuo Sun, Muhammad Qorib, Amirbek Djanibekov, Wei Qi Leong, Quyet V. Do, Niklas Muennighoff, Tanrada Pansuwan, Ilham Firdausi Putra, Yan Xu, Tai Chia, Ayu Purwarianti, Sebastian Ruder, William Tjhi, Peerat Limkonchotiwat, Alham Aji, Sedrick Keh, Genta Winata, Ruochen Zhang, Fajri Koto, Zheng Xin Yong, Samuel Cahyawijaya
| Challenge: | Southeast Asia (SEA) is home to over 1,300 indigenous languages and 671 million people . prevailing AI models suffer from a significant lack of representation of texts, images, and audio datasets from SEA . |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a resource center that provides standardized corpora in nearly 1,000 SEA languages across three modalities. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark assesses the quality of AI models on 36 SEA languages across 13 tasks . the results highlight the importance of SEA as a culturally diverse region . |
DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating deep research capabilities rely on static datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a fully automated evaluation framework that pushes DR agents to their capability limits through dynamic investigation. |
| Outcome: | DR-Arena achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.94 with the LMSYS Search Arena leaderboard. |