Papers by Shujian Zhang
Getting More from Less: Large Language Models are Good Spontaneous Multilingual Learners (2024.emnlp-main)
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Shimao Zhang, Changjiang Gao, Wenhao Zhu, Jiajun Chen, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive language capabilities, but most of them have very unbalanced performance across different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use question translation data to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities by using mechanistic interpretability methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual alignment even with unannotated answers in English and a wide range of languages even with instruction-tuned LLMs. |
LanguageFlow: Advancing Diffusion Language Generation with Probabilistic Flows (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated success in controlling sentence attributes and structure based on diffusion language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-rectified flow method that reformulates standard probabilistic flow models to learn ordinary differential equations to transport between the source and target distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on three fine-grained control tasks and multiple high-quality text editing tasks. |
IMTLab: An Open-Source Platform for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Interactive Machine Translation Systems (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xu Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Ruize Gao, Yichao Du, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | Existing systems that use a left-to-right completion paradigm are inefficient and expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation system platform . they propose to use a prefix-constrained decoding approach to achieve end- to-end evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can guarantee high-quality, error-free translations . it uses prefix-constrained decoding and improves on previous systems . |
Adaptive Nearest Neighbor Machine Translation (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT uses pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines a pre-trained NMT model with token-level k-nearest-neighbor retrieval to improve translation accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the existing model on four benchmark datasets and is open-source. |
Lost in the Source Language: How Large Language Models Evaluate the Quality of Machine Translation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be used as translation evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose to use both coarse-grained and fine-grounded prompts to discern the utility of source versus reference data in machine translation evaluation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to evaluate translations in multiple languages. |
Exploring Multimodal Challenges in Toxic Chinese Detection: Taxonomy, Benchmark, and Findings (2025.findings-acl)
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Shujian Yang, Shiyao Cui, Chuanrui Hu, Haicheng Wang, Tianwei Zhang, Minlie Huang, Jialiang Lu, Han Qiu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that character substitutions in toxic Chinese text can confuse state-of-the-art LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of 3 perturbation strategies and 8 specific approaches in Chinese text to assess if they can detect perturbed Chinese toxic contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can detect perturbed Chinese text with 8 different approaches . the proposed model is compared with 9 other LLMs from the US and China . |
Improved Pseudo Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Constrained Beam Search (2023.emnlp-main)
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Xiang Geng, Yu Zhang, Zhejian Lai, Shuaijie She, Wei Zou, Shimin Tao, Hao Yang, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang
| Challenge: | evaluating the quality of machine translation outputs becomes increasingly essential with the rapid development of machine language (MT). |
| Approach: | They propose to generate pseudo data using the MT model with constrained beam search (CBSQE) they propose to preserve the reference parts with high MT probabilities as correct translations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in both supervised and unsupervised settings. |
FGraDA: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Domain Adaptation in Machine Translation (2022.lrec-1)
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Wenhao Zhu, Shujian Huang, Tong Pu, Pingxuan Huang, Xu Zhang, Jian Yu, Wei Chen, Yanfeng Wang, Jiajun Chen
| Challenge: | Recent research on domain adaptation neglects diversity in translation within a domain . current research on NMT models considers very broad target domains . |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-grained domain adaptation task for autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is compared with a dataset of Chinese-English translation tasks for four sub-domains of information technology: autonomous vehicles, AI education, real-time networks, and smart phone. |
Learning with Different Amounts of Annotation: From Zero to Many Labels (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a lack of annotator agreement can hinder training of NLP systems . we propose a learning algorithm that can learn from training examples with zero, one, or multiple labels. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation distribution scheme that assigns multiple labels to training examples . they propose a learning algorithm that can learn from training examples with different amount of annotation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent gains in two tasks, suggesting distributing labels unevenly among training examples can be beneficial for many NLP tasks. |
Understanding New-Knowledge-Induced Factual Hallucinations in LLMs: Analysis and Interpretation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have shown that fine-tuning on new knowledge can induce factual hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), leading to incorrect outputs when evaluated on previously known information. |
| Approach: | They propose to conduct a fine-grained analysis of large language models using a dataset Biography-Reasoning and QA and knowledge reasoning tasks to understand their findings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to perform a range of downstream tasks without requiring a large amount of knowledge and is compared with a control dataset. |
EfficientRAG: Efficient Retriever for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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Ziyuan Zhuang, Zhiyang Zhang, Sitao Cheng, Fangkai Yang, Jia Liu, Shujian Huang, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang, Qi Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing retrieval-augmented generation methods rely on multiple calls of large language models (LLMs) Large-language models lack knowledge underrepresented in training data and still face hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient retriever for multi-hop question answering that generates new queries iteratively without the need for LLM calls. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses existing methods on three open-domain multi-hop question-answering datasets. |
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. |
ALLSH: Active Learning Guided by Local Sensitivity and Hardness (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that labeling in crowdsourcing annotations is not an annotation artifact but rather a core linguistic phenomenon. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrieve unlabeled data with a local sensitivity and hardness-aware acquisition function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent gains over the commonly used active learning strategies in various classification tasks. |
SFTMix: Elevating Language Model Instruction Tuning with Mixup Recipe (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Efforts to improve instruction tuning often focus on higher-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets, typically requiring data filtering with proprietary LLMs or human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Mixup-based recipe that elevates LLM instruction tuning without relying on well-curated datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves instruction-following and healthcare-specific tasks with consistent improvements across LLM families and SFT datasets. |
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing reasoning-oriented LLMs lack a blind self-thinking paradigm . current models fail to recognize when their reasoning is underinformed or based on ambiguous user instructions . |
| Approach: | They propose a new reasoning paradigm that transforms LLMs into proactive inquirers that interleave reasoning with clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and document editing. |
WPO: Enhancing RLHF with Weighted Preference Optimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenxuan Zhou, Ravi Agrawal, Shujian Zhang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Sanqiang Zhao, Kaiqiang Song, Silei Xu, Chenguang Zhu
| Challenge: | Off-policy preference optimization suffers from a distributional gap between the policy used for data collection and the target policy, leading to suboptimal optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to simulate on-policy learning with off-police preference data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) by up to 5.6% on Alpaca Eval 2 and MT-bench. |
Addressing Linguistic Bias through a Contrastive Analysis of Academic Writing in the NLP Domain (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a reviewer’s opinion of the nativeness of expression in an academic paper affects the likelihood of it being accepted for publication. |
| Approach: | They conduct a statistical analysis of paper abstracts from the natural language processing domain to identify how authors from different linguistic backgrounds differ in the lexical, morphological, syntactic and cohesive aspects of their writing. |
| Outcome: | The results suggest that there is potential for linguistic bias in the domain of natural language processing. |
Probing Cross-modal Semantics Alignment Capability from the Textual Perspective (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | In recent years, vision and language pre-training (VLP) models have advanced the state-of-the-art results in a variety of cross-modal downstream tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new probing method that is based on image captioning to first empirically study the cross-modal semantics alignment of VLP models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method analyzes captions generated by five popular VLP models to reveal how well they align with visual words and how well these align with images. |
Passage-Mask: A Learnable Regularization Strategy for Retriever-Reader Models (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Xu et al., 2021) find that retrieval-reader models overfit top-rank passages and fail to reason over entire retrieval passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a passage mask mechanism which desensitizes the impact from top-rank retrieval passages and prevents the model from overfitting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on open question answering, dialogue conversation, and fact verification show that the proposed model outperforms baselines. |
T-REG: Preference Optimization with Token-Level Reward Regularization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a dominant approach for large language models to follow instructions and produce meaningful alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages human feedback to optimize large language models . they propose to use sequence-level and token-level rewards to optimize preference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on Alpaca Eval 2 and Arena-Hard benchmarks. |
Learning Representation Mapping for Relation Detection in Knowledge Base Question Answering (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect relation detection only get high accuracy for questions whose relations have been seen in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to learn representation mapping for both seen and unseen relations based on previously learned relation embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of unseen relations while keeping the performance comparable to the state-of-the-art. |
Knowing More About Questions Can Help: Improving Calibration in Question Answering (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on calibration focuses on model confidence, such as the max probability of the predicted class. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration method which estimates whether model correctly predicts answer for each question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration method achieves 5-10% gains on reading comprehension benchmarks. |
Process-based Self-Rewarding Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to reward LLMs' outputs are not effective in mathematical reasoning scenarios and may lead to a decline in performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a process-based self-rewarding pipeline that integrates long-thought reasoning, step-wise LLM-as-a-Judge, and step- wise preference optimization within the existing paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of Large Language Models on multiple mathematical reasoning benchmarks and shows that it can surpass human capabilities. |
Improving Long-Context Translation via Self-Supervised Dual Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models with long context windows suffer from catastrophic information distortion, undermining the strict faithfulness required for translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised post-training framework that improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves long-document translation reliability via round-trip consistency. |
Non-Parametric Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Neural Machine Translation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | kNN-MT is a non-parametric method that uses nearest neighbor retrieval to translate out-of-domain sentences, rare words, etc. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that directly uses in-domain monolingual sentences to build an effective datastore for k-nearest-neighbor retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves translation accuracy with target-side monolingual data while achieving comparable performance with back-translation. |