Papers by Ruochen Zhao
The Self-Improvement Paradox: Can Language Models Bootstrap Reasoning Capabilities without External Scaffolding? (2025.findings-acl)
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| 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. |
Verify-and-Edit: A Knowledge-Enhanced Chain-of-Thought Framework (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have a number of shortcomings, including lack of factual correctness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to increase prediction factuality by post-editing reasoning chains . they propose to use large language models to generate interpretable reasoning chains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leads to accuracy improvements in open-domain question-answering tasks. |
Chain of Ideas: Revolutionizing Research Via Novel Idea Development with LLM Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)
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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. |
Retrieving Multimodal Information for Augmented Generation: A Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Ruochen Zhao, Hailin Chen, Weishi Wang, Fangkai Jiao, Xuan Long Do, Chengwei Qin, Bosheng Ding, Xiaobao Guo, Minzhi Li, Xingxuan Li, Shafiq Joty
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly using multimodality to augment their generation ability, but there is no unified perception of at which stage and how to incorporate different modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multimodality to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) this will provide scholars with a deeper understanding of the methods' applications and encourage them to adapt existing techniques to the fast-growing field of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve factuality, reasoning, interpretability, and robustness of the generated content. |
Language Models can be Deductive Solvers (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to potentially exhibit reasoning capabilities, but complex logical reasoning remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel language model that internalizes and emulates the reasoning processes of logical solvers and avoids parsing errors by learning strict adherence to solver syntax and grammar. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art solver-augmented language models and few-shot prompting methods on public deductive reasoning benchmarks. |
Auto-Arena: Automating LLM Evaluations with Agent Peer Battles and Committee Discussions (2025.acl-long)
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| 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)
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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. |
Explaining Language Model Predictions with High-Impact Concepts (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to explain large language models (LLMs) are mostly correlational and lack causal features due to compositional nature of languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to provide impact-aware explanations for large language models that are robust to feature changes and influential to the model’s predictions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed explanations improve on real and synthetic tasks and are robust to feature changes and influential to the model’s predictions. |
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
Data Augmentation using LLMs: Data Perspectives, Learning Paradigms and Challenges (2024.findings-acl)
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Bosheng Ding, Chengwei Qin, Ruochen Zhao, Tianze Luo, Xinze Li, Guizhen Chen, Wenhan Xia, Junjie Hu, Anh Tuan Luu, Shafiq Joty
| Challenge: | Data augmentation (DA) is a key technique for enhancing model performance by diversifying training examples without the need for additional data collection. |
| Approach: | They examine various strategies that utilize LLMs for data augmentation, including a novel exploration of learning paradigms where LLM-generated data is used for diverse forms of further training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach addresses the primary open challenges faced by LLMs in the field of large language models and aims to serve as a comprehensive guide for researchers and practitioners. |
Randomized Smoothing with Masked Inference for Adversarially Robust Text Classifications (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models are brittle against specifically crafted adversarial examples, leading to increasing interest in probing the adversariality of NLP systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that combines randomized smoothing and masked inference to improve the adversarial robustness of NLP systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves adversarial robustness by 2 to 3 times over existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets. |
Learning to Initialize: Can Meta Learning Improve Cross-task Generalization in Prompt Tuning? (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Prompt tuning (PT) based on frozen pre-trained language models has shown remarkable performance in few-shot learning . however, it relies heavily on good initialization of the prompt embeddings. |
| Approach: | They propose to use meta prompt tuning to improve cross-task generalization by learning to initialize prompt embeddings from other relevant tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms PT on classification tasks, but not multi-task learning. |
Lifelong Event Detection with Embedding Space Separation and Compaction (2024.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event detection are prone to forgetting due to overlap between memory data and the previously learned embedding space. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that embeds feature distributions away from the previous embedding space and mitigates overfitting by a memory calibration mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods with extensive experiments. |
Can We Further Elicit Reasoning in LLMs? Critic-Guided Planning with Retrieval-Augmentation for Solving Challenging Tasks (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to problem-solving for large language models fail to provide accurate reasoning and factual accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide reasoning and retrieval processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on domain-knowledge-intensive tasks . it can be used to iterate retrieval and reasoning, and improve retrieval relevance . |
DR-Arena: an Automated Evaluation Framework for Deep Research Agents (2026.acl-long)
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| 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. |