Papers by Shulin Zhang
FC-KBQA: A Fine-to-Coarse Composition Framework for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) suffer from generalization issues due to coarse-grained modeling of the logical expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-to- coarse-grained framework for KBQA to ensure generalization and executability of the logical expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework derives new state-of-the-art performance on GrailQA and WebQSP, and runs 4 times faster than baseline. |
LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-Context QA (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jiajie Zhang, Yushi Bai, Xin Lv, Wanjun Gu, Danqing Liu, Minhao Zou, Shulin Cao, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Current long-context large language models lack citations to support their responses, making verification difficult due to potential hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use off-the-shelf LLMs to automatically construct long-context QA instances with precise sentence-level citations and leverage this pipeline to construct a large-scale SFT dataset for LQAC. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can generate responses with fine-grained citations on the fly, surpassing existing models including GPT-4o. |
PLOME: Pre-training with Misspelled Knowledge for Chinese Spelling Correction (2021.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Chinese spelling correction (CSC) is a task to detect and correct spelling errors in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a Pre-trained masked Language model with Misspelled knowledgE (PLOME) which jointly learns how to understand language and correct spelling errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on widely used benchmarks and achieves superior performance against existing models. |
Knowledge-augmented Self-training of A Question Rewriter for Conversational Knowledge Base Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent rise of conversational applications has promoted the development of conversation KBQA (ConvKBQA). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to produce a full-fledged rewritten question based on conversation history and then reason the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces a full-fledged rewritten question based on the conversation history and reasoned the answer by existing single-turn KBQA models. |
KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Program induction (PI) is a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that enables large language models to induce programs over any low-resourced KB. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that KB-Plugin outperforms SoTA low-resourced PI methods with 25x smaller backbone LLM on large-scale and domain-specific KBs and even approaches the performance of supervised methods. |
LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jiajie Zhang, Zhongni Hou, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Zhenyu Hou, Yilin Niu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Ling Feng, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | In recent years, significant advancements have been achieved in the development of long-context large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that utilizes an off-the-shelf LLM to provide rewards for long-context model responses from four human-valued dimensions: helpfulness, logicality, faithfulness, and completeness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves models’ long-context performance and enhances their ability to follow short instructions. |
LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yushi Bai, Shangqing Tu, Jiajie Zhang, Hao Peng, Xiaozhi Wang, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Jiazheng Xu, Lei Hou, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks on longcontext large language models fail to reflect their deep understanding capabilities across diverse tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of long-context large language models to handle long-text problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 50.1% accuracy when directly answering the questions . human experts achieve only 53.7% accuracy under a 15-minute time constraint . |
Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning for Answering Knowledge-intensive Complex Questions (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to solve complex questions with a tree-of-thought approach using parametric knowledge and retrieved external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms SOTA methods on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting. |
MMInA: Benchmarking Multihop Multimodal Internet Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to assess embodied agents in a realistic, evolving environment for compositional Internet tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multihop and multimodal benchmark to evaluate embodied agents for compositional Internet tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protocol significantly improves the performance of both the single-hop and multihop web browsing abilities. |
Reasoning over Hierarchical Question Decomposition Tree for Explainable Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing XQA methods focus on reasoning on a single knowledge source, e.g., structured knowledge bases, unstructured corpora, etc. Existing work in XQA focuses on integrating information from heterogeneous knowledge sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage question decomposing for heterogeneous knowledge integration by breaking down a complex question into simpler ones and selecting the appropriate knowledge source for each sub-question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA methods on complex QA datasets. |
How Proficient Are Large Language Models in Formal Languages? An In-Depth Insight for Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies have validated that large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving some KBQA problems, but there has been little discussion on the differences in LLMs’ proficiency in formal languages used in semantic parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate the understanding and generation ability of large language models (LLMs) to deal with differently structured logical forms by examining the inter-conversion of natural and formal language through in-context learning of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can understand formal languages as well as humans, but generating correct logical forms remains a challenge. |
Evaluation Agent: Efficient and Promptable Evaluation Framework for Visual Generative Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on rigid pipelines that overlook user needs and provide numerical results without clear explanations. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation framework that employs human-like strategies for efficient, dynamic, multi-round evaluations using only a few samples per round. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation agent framework reduces evaluation time to 10% of traditional methods while delivering comparable results. |
An Evaluation of Croatian ASR Models for Čakavian Transcription (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | akavian is an endangered language closely related to Croatian . |
| Approach: | They evaluate four currently available automatic speech recognition systems that are trained on standard Croatian data and assess their performance in the transcription of akavian audio data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform better than the standard conformer model and the best-performing variant of the CTC-based model. |
Linguistic Rules-Based Corpus Generation for Native Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Shirong Ma, Yinghui Li, Rongyi Sun, Qingyu Zhou, Shulin Huang, Ding Zhang, Li Yangning, Ruiyang Liu, Zhongli Li, Yunbo Cao, Haitao Zheng, Ying Shen
| Challenge: | Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) is a challenging NLP task and a common application in human daily life. |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistic rules-based approach to construct large-scale CGEC training corpora with automatically generated grammatical errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance of existing CGEC models and the benchmark is excellent resource for further development. |
TransferNet: An Effective and Transparent Framework for Multi-hop Question Answering over Relation Graph (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing models infer the answer by predicting the sequential relation path or aggregating the hidden graph features. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which jumps between entities at multiple steps . they demonstrate that TransferNet surpasses state-of-the-art models by a large margin . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses state-of-the-art models on MetaQA and on other datasets. |
Event Detection without Triggers (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to event detection require annotated triggers and event types in training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that encodes the representation of a sentence based on target event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performances compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Zijun Yao, Yuanyong Chen, Xin Lv, Shulin Cao, Amy Xin, Jifan Yu, Hailong Jin, Jianjun Xu, Peng Zhang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge base question answering systems that parse natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL) . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge base question answering system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can debug and edit knowledge base questions on a million-entity-level . it provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. |
KQA Pro: A Dataset with Explicit Compositional Programs for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base (2022.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shulin Cao, Jiaxin Shi, Liangming Pan, Lunyiu Nie, Yutong Xiang, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li, Bin He, Hanwang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Complex KBQA lack compositional reasoning capabilities . Existing methods for Complex questions are poor in diversity or scale . |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes around 120K diverse natural language questions . it provides a compositional and interpretable programming language to represent the reasoning process of complex questions based on the proposed model . |
LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles (2024.lrec-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation benchmarks, such as MMLU, C-Eval, and GSM8K, evaluate models by posing a variety of problems, including problems about mathematics, science, law, and general knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark which assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation benchmark assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. |