Papers by Sen Zhang
Alignment-Enhanced Decoding: Defending Jailbreaks via Token-Level Adaptive Refining of Probability Distributions (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses against jailbreaks focus on perturbing or inspecting inputs, but ignore competing objectives, the underlying cause of alignment failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defense that employs adaptive decoding to address the root causes of jailbreak issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense improves safety alignment while maintaining helpfulness. |
DSG-MCTS: A Dynamic Strategy-Guided Monte Carlo Tree Search for Diversified Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential in complex reasoning tasks, but their performance often degrades, resulting in hallucinations, errors, and logical inconsistencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple reasoning strategies to expand the reasoning space and a dynamic strategy selection mechanism that adapts to the task context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on a set of reasoning benchmarks. |
Cardiverse: Harnessing LLMs for Novel Card Game Prototyping (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced the possibilities for game prototyping, but they face significant challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based indexing method for generating novel game variations and an LLM-driven system for consistent game code generation validated by gameplay records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework accelerates card game prototyping, reduces human labor, and lowers barriers to entry for game developers. |
A State-transition Framework to Answer Complex Questions over Knowledge Base (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for complex question answering have some limitations . existing methods employ predefined patterns or templates to understand complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a state transition-based approach to translate a natural language question to a semantic query graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on several benchmarks with two knowledge bases. |
Self-training Reduces Flicker in Retranslation-based Simultaneous Translation (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reduce flicker in simultaneous translation have increased the latency through masking and specialised inference, thus losing the simplicity of the approach. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a machine translation system to reduce flicker by controlling monotonicity and biased beam search to achieve the same flicker-latency tradeoff. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces flicker by controlling monotonicity while maintaining similar translation quality to the original. |
Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria? (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that LLMs confuse evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical classification system for 11 common aspects with corresponding different evaluation criteria. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is based on 11 common aspects with different evaluation criteria. |
NAMER: A Node-Based Multitasking Framework for Multi-Hop Knowledge Base Question Answering (2021.naacl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Using a node-based framework, knowledge base question answering systems can grasp structural mappings between questions and KB queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a node-based framework that better grasps the structural mapping between questions and KB queries by aligning the nodes in a query with their corresponding mentions in question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the previous SoTA on CCKS CKBQA dataset. |
FinBPM: A Framework for Portfolio Management-based Financial Investor Behavior Perception Model (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | a portfolio management framework based on reinforcement learning is needed to optimize stock price movements. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that takes irrational investment into account when calculating portfolio weights . they use financial text to analyze intrinsic value information of companies and time series data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework gains 13.26% returns over state-of-the-art models while controlling for risk. |
Fine-grained Factual Consistency Assessment for Abstractive Summarization Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that around 30% of the summaries generated by abstractive summarization models contain factual errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained two-stage Fact Consistency assessment framework for summarization models that uses fine-grain consistency reasoning to find subtle clues to identify whether a model-generated summary is consistent with the original document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the state-of-the-art models and distinguishes detailed differences better. |
Investigating Non-local Features for Neural Constituency Parsing (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Constituency parsers have been able to achieve competitive performance by using local features. |
| Approach: | They propose to inject non-local features into the training process of a local span-based parser by predicting constituent n-gram non-local patterns and ensuring consistency between constituents and local constituents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the self-attentive parser in multi-lingual and zero-shot cross-domain settings. |
AdapterDistillation: Non-Destructive Task Composition with Knowledge Distillation (2023.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on learning from multiple tasks has shown that adding an extra fusion layer to implement knowledge composition is non-scalable for some applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage knowledge distillation algorithm to extract task specific knowledge by using local data to train a student adapter. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on frequently asked question retrieval in task-oriented dialog systems validate the efficiency of AdapterDistillation. |
DemonAgent: Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack on LLM-based Agent (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new method for detecting advanced backdoors is proposed to bypass safety audits. |
| Approach: | They propose a backdoor implantation strategy that introduces dynamic encryption to bypass safety audits. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an attack success rate approaching 100% while maintaining a detection rate of 0%. |
PrimeQA: The Prime Repository for State-of-the-Art Multilingual Question Answering Research and Development (2023.acl-demo)
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Avi Sil, Jaydeep Sen, Bhavani Iyer, Martin Franz, Kshitij Fadnis, Mihaela Bornea, Sara Rosenthal, Scott McCarley, Rong Zhang, Vishwajeet Kumar, Yulong Li, Md Arafat Sultan, Riyaz Bhat, Juergen Bross, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos
| Challenge: | Question Answering (QA) is a major area of research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) |
| Approach: | They propose a one-stop and open-source QA repository for question answering . it supports core QA functionalities like retrieval and reading comprehension . they say it will facilitate easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy replication of state-of-the-art (SOTA) QA methods. |
PALT: Parameter-Lite Transfer of Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained language models (LMs) are a powerful transfer learning approach for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-lite transfer learning approach for pretrained language models for knowledge graph (KG) completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on a knowledge graph completion benchmark by tuning 1% of the parameters. |
PLAWBENCH: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs in Real-World Legal Practice (2026.acl-long)
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Yuzhen Shi, Huanghai Liu, Yiran HU, Song Gaojie, Xu Xinran, Yubo Ma, Tianyi Tang, Li Zhang, Qingjing Chen, Feng Di, Wenbo Lv, Weiheng Wu, Kexin Yang, Sen Yang, Wei Wang, Rongyao Shi, Qiu Yuanyang, Yuemeng Qi, Zhang Jingwen, Sui Xiaoyu, Yifan Chen, Zhang Yi, An Yang, Bowen Yu, Dayiheng Liu, Junyang Lin, Weixing Shen, Bing Zhao, Charles L. A. Clarke, HU Wei
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are coarse, single-dimensional metrics and do not explicitly assess fine-grained legal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a Practical Law Benchmark to evaluate large language models in real-world legal practice scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 850 questions and 13 scenarios with expert-designed evaluation rubrics. |
Improving Embedding-based Large-scale Retrieval via Label Enhancement (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large-scale retrieval are trained with 0-1 hard labels that indicate whether a query is relevant to a document, ignoring rich information of the relevance degree. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce label enhancement for the first time to characterize query-document relevance degree by embedding label distribution into contextual embeddables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms existing retrieval models and its counterparts equipped with two alternative methods on English and Chinese large-scale retrieval tasks. |
Template-Based Named Entity Recognition Using BART (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fewshot NER do not make full use of knowledge transfer in NER model parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a template-based method for NER that treats NER as a language model ranking problem in a sequence-to-sequence framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 92.55% F1 score on the CoNLL03 task and significantly better than fine-tuning BERT 10.88%, 15.34%, and 11.73% F1 scores on the MIT Movie, the ATIS, and the MATLAB task. |
SEE: Signal Embedding Energy for Quantifying Noise Interference in Large Audio Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on noise lack quantitative analysis and rely on intuition and empirical observation, thus failing to understand practical robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for quantifying the impact of noise intensity on LALM inputs by using a structured activation subspace derived from the model's internal representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing denoising methods and demonstrates that noise is perceived more accurately than raw audio features. |
“Yes, My LoRD.” Guiding Language Model Extraction with Locality Reinforced Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model extraction attacks on large language models are inadequate . existing methods neglect the inconsistency between training tasks and LLM alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a model extraction algorithm that uses a policy-gradient-style training task to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces query complexity while mitigating watermark protection . it can extract various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs while minimizing query complexity . |
PD3F: A Pluggable and Dynamic DoS-Defense Framework against resource consumption attacks targeting Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work lacks mitigation strategies against resource consumption attacks . existing work does not provide mitigation strategies for real-world LLM deployments . |
| Approach: | They propose a pluggable and dynamic doS-Defense framework which employs a two-stage approach to defend against resource consumption attacks from both the input and output sides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly mitigates resource consumption attacks, improving users’ access capacity by up to 500% during adversarial load. |
Cross-domain Generalization for AMR Parsing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) parsing aims to predict an AMR graph from textual input. |
| Approach: | They evaluate five representative AMR parsers on five domains and analyze challenges to cross-domain parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the domain distribution divergence of text and AMR features on two out-of-domain sets. |
Local Interpretation of Transformer Based on Linear Decomposition (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on local explanation generation attempts to understand model dynamics on word-level or phraselevel by assigning importance scores on input features. |
| Approach: | They propose to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition by a Transformer model on a single input and a linear decomposing of the output to generate local explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves competitive performance in sentiment classification and machine translation, and fidelity of explanation. |
LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions (2025.acl-long)
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Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang, Xinting Huang, Sen Yang, Nigel Collier, Dong Yu, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate factually incorrect content, i.e., hallucinations, despite impressive performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable models to express uncertainty when unsure . they propose atomic claims to refine uncertainty and refine it using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to enhance uncertainty expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and maintains comprehensiveness of responses. |
Knowledge Graph-Driven Memory Editing with Directional Interventions (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are hampered by inaccuracies and outdated information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that constructs knowledge graphs using available information to guide the direction of knowledge editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows consistent, aligned, and stable information during large-scale editing scenarios. |
Challenges to Open-Domain Constituency Parsing (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing findings on cross-domain constituency parsing are only made on a limited number of domains. |
| Approach: | They manually annotate a high-quality constituency treebank containing five domains and analyze challenges to open-domain constituency parsing using a set of linguistic features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly improves the performance of the proposed model on the domain-variant features. |
Improving Knowledge Production Efficiency With Question Answering on Conversation (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing researches on conversation-based QA focus on document-based tasks . current researche focuses on document based tasks, but there is a lack of researche on conversation based qa . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-span extraction model on conversation-based QA and introduce continual pre-training and multi-task learning schemes to further improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline on two Chinese datasets and will be released for research purposes. |
SENTRA: Selected-Next-Token Transformer for LLM Text Detection (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | SENTRA is a general-purpose, supervised LLM text detector . it detects LLM-generated text that is not explicitly declared as such . |
| Approach: | They propose a general-purpose LLM text detector that detects unlabeled text . they use a transformer-based encoder that leverages selected-next-token sequences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifier outperforms baselines on 24 domains of text. |
CloneMem: Benchmarking Long-Term Memory for AI Clones (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing memory benchmarks rely on user–agent conversational histories, which are temporally fragmented and insufficient for capturing continuous life trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark for evaluating long-term memory in AI Clone scenarios grounded in non-conversational digital traces, including diaries, social media posts, and emails, spanning one to three years. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that existing memory benchmarks struggle in this setting, highlighting open challenges for life-grounded personalized AI. |
SeaLLMs - Large Language Models for Southeast Asia (2024.acl-demos)
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Xuan-Phi Nguyen, Wenxuan Zhang, Xin Li, Mahani Aljunied, Zhiqiang Hu, Chenhui Shen, Yew Ken Chia, Xingxuan Li, Jianyu Wang, Qingyu Tan, Liying Cheng, Guanzheng Chen, Yue Deng, Sen Yang, Chaoqun Liu, Hang Zhang, Lidong Bing
| Challenge: | Existing large language models favor high-resource languages, such as English, at the expense of low-resourced and regional languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian languages. |
| Outcome: | SeaLLM models outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages by large margins . linguistic disparity impedes access to state-of-the-art AI technologies for non-English-speaking populations . |
DecIF: Improving Instruction-Following through Decomposition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to obtain high-quality instruction-following data rely heavily on existing documents and existing methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis framework, DecIF, which automatically generates accurate and diverse instruction-following data from scratch for supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework can synthesize accurate instruction-following data for both SFT and RL paradigms compared to baselines. |
What Have We Achieved on Text Summarization? (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text summarization have been investigated, but there are still gaps between them and human professionals. |
| Approach: | They analyze 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarization models manually. |
| Outcome: | Aiming to gain more understanding of summarization systems with respect to their strengths and limitations on a fine-grained syntactic and semantic level, we use 8 major sources of errors on 10 representative summarizing models. |
RealMem: Benchmarking LLMs in Real-World Memory-Driven Interaction (2026.findings-acl)
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Haonan Bian, Zhiyuan Yao, Sen Hu, Zishan Xu, Shaolei Zhang, Yifu Guo, Ziliang Yang, Xueran Han, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on casual conversation or task-oriented dialogue, failing to capture “long-term project-oriented” interactions where agents must track evolving goals. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that simulates the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks simulate the dynamic evolution of memory in real-world projects. |
Stable Signer: Hierarchical Sign Language Generative Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Sign Language Production (SLP) is the process of converting complex input text into a real video. |
| Approach: | They propose a new sign language generative model that streamlines redundant structure and optimizes the task objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model streamlines redundant structure and optimizes objective . it generates high-quality and multi-style sign language videos with hand gestures . |
Are LLMs Rational Investors? A Study on the Financial Bias in LLMs (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhang Zhou, Yuchen Ni, Zhiheng Xi, Zhangyue Yin, Yu He, Gan Yunhui, Xiang Liu, Zhang Jian, Sen Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Existing studies on biases within specific domains, such as finance, remain limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect, detect, analyze and mitigate financial biases in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces bias by 68% for the most biased model, according to key metrics. |
Making the Best Use of Review Summary for Sentiment Analysis (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sentiment analysis of user reviews are limited to a few examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchically-refined attention model that exploits the sentimental distribution of a review and its corresponding summary. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can make better use of user-written summaries for review sentiment analysis and is more effective compared to existing methods when the user summary is replaced with summary generated by an automatic summarization system. |
Upcycling Instruction Tuning from Dense to Mixture-of-Experts via Parameter Merging (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for tuning large language models from dense to MoE face significant data requirements and require large-scale post-training. |
| Approach: | They propose an upcycling instruction tuning approach for tuning a dense pre-trained model into a MoE instruction model using genetic algorithm and parameter merging. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the performance of large language models with a small amount of seed data and improves their scaling. |
KnowMe-Bench: Benchmarking Person Understanding for Lifelong Digital Companions (2026.acl-long)
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Tingyu Wu, Zhisheng Chen, Ziyan Weng, Shuhe Wang, Shuo Zhang, Sen Hu, Silin Wu, Qizhen Lan, Huacan Wang, Ronghao Chen
| Challenge: | Existing long-horizon memory benchmarks use multi-turn dialogues or synthetic user histories . despite rapid progress on long-term memory evaluation, there are gaps in existing benchmarks . |
| Approach: | They propose a long-form autobiographical narrative benchmark that reconstructs each narrative into a flashback-aware, time-anchored stream and evaluates models with evidence-linked questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks build from long-form autobiographical narratives . they show that retrieval-augmented systems improve factual accuracy while errors persist on temporally grounded explanations and higher-level inferences. |
QuadrupletBERT: An Efficient Model For Embedding-Based Large-Scale Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large-scale query-document retrieval are expensive and require sparse handcrafted features. |
| Approach: | They propose a quadrupletBERT model for effective and efficient retrieval using pre-trained language models like BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves retrieval phase and leverages distances between simple negative and hard negative instances to obtain better embeddings. |
Crabs: Consuming Resource via Auto-generation for LLM-DoS Attack under Black-box Settings (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on white-box attacks focus on black-box LLMs, leaving black- box scenarios underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated algorithm designed for black-box LLMs that constructs the DoS Attack Tree and expands the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black- box conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can be used to build a DoS Attack Tree and expand the node coverage to achieve effectiveness under black-box conditions. |