Papers by Shumin Zhang
MLBiNet: A Cross-Sentence Collective Event Detection Network (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Detecting multiple events from natural language text is a challenge because of the following problems: a) Sentence-level contextual representation and document-level information aggregation are not enough to detect event triggers. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-layer bidirectional network to capture document-level association of events and semantic information simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance over the current state-of-the-art approach. |
LightNER: A Lightweight Tuning Paradigm for Low-resource NER via Pluggable Prompting (2022.coling-1)
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Xiang Chen, Lei Li, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Changliang Xu, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for Named Entity Recognition (NER) use extensive labeled data for model training, which struggles in low-resource scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight tuning paradigm for low-resource NER via pluggable prompting . they construct a learnable verbalizer of entity categories without any label-specific classifiers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and class transfer models in low-resource scenarios. |
The Side Effects of Being Smart: Safety Risks in MLLMs’ Multi-Image Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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Renmiao Chen, Yida Lu, Shiyao Cui, Xuan Ouyang, Victor Shea-Jay Huang, Shumin Zhang, Chengwei Pan, Han Qiu, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal reasoning may pose new safety risks . evaluators neglect reasoningbased safety, where harm emerges only through MLLMs . |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark for multi-image reasoning safety that includes 2,676 instances . they find that models with more advanced multi- image reasoning are more vulnerable . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark consists of 2,676 instances covering 9 multi-image relations . the results show that models with more advanced multi- image reasoning are more vulnerable . |
Good Visual Guidance Make A Better Extractor: Hierarchical Visual Prefix for Multimodal Entity and Relation Extraction (2022.findings-naacl)
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Xiang Chen, Ningyu Zhang, Lei Li, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Luo Si, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches for named entity recognition and relation extraction suffer from error sensitivity when irrelevant object images are incorporated in texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical visual prefix fusion NeTwork for visual-enhanced entity and relation extraction using pluggable visual prefixed visual features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmark datasets. |
Long-tail Relation Extraction via Knowledge Graph Embeddings and Graph Convolution Networks (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing distance supervised relation extraction models for long-tail data are inadequate for many applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage implicit relational knowledge among class labels and learn explicit relational knowing using graph convolution networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms baselines for long-tail relations on a large-scale dataset. |
Exploring Model Kinship for Merging Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Model merging has become one of the key technologies for enhancing the capabilities and efficiency of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a model merging strategy that incorporates model kinship to improve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model merging strategy can yield better performance on benchmark datasets. |
Neural Search Space in Gboard Decoder (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Gboard decoder uses context, a lexicon and language models to provide a user-friendly keyboard. |
| Approach: | They propose a Neural Search Space which replaces an N-gram LM with a neural network LM and dynamically constructs the search space during decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves the quality of the decoded keyboards on various locales with acceptable latency increases. |
Bridging Text and Knowledge with Multi-Prototype Embedding for Few-Shot Relational Triple Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to supervised relational triple extraction require huge amounts of labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prototype embedding network model to extract the composition of relational triples from unstructured text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the few-shot relational triple extraction problem. |
Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models (2024.lrec-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are not immune to issues of factual accuracy or logically consistent. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will present cutting-edge methods and practical tools for editing Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Outcome: | The aim of this course is to familiarize researchers with the latest advancements and emerging strategies in the realm of knowledge editing for LLMs. |
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
CaKE: Circuit-aware Editing Enables Generalizable Knowledge Learners (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods fail to generalize updates to multi-hop reasoning tasks . Existing methods only edit single or a few model layers, inadequately integrate updated knowledge into reasoning pathways. |
| Approach: | They propose a circuit-aware method that enhances the effective integration of updated knowledge in large language models by leveraging curated data samples guided by their analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and accuracy of 20% on the MQuAKE dataset while requiring less memory. |
SPEECH: Structured Prediction with Energy-Based Event-Centric Hyperspheres (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experiments on two unified-annotated event datasets indicate that SPEECH is predominant in event detection and event-relation extraction tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to model complex dependency among event structured components with energy-based energy-modeling and represent event classes with simple but effective hyperspheres. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two unified-annotated event datasets show that SPEECH is predominant in event detection and event-relation extraction tasks. |
OntoED: Low-resource Event Detection with Ontology Embedding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to ED rely on training instances and ignore correlation of event types. |
| Approach: | They propose a process of event ontology population linking event instances to pre-defined event types in event ontoology and ontological embedding to address these problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be applied to new unseen event types by establishing linkages to existing ones. |
Reasoning with Language Model Prompting: A Survey (2023.acl-long)
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Shuofei Qiao, Yixin Ou, Ningyu Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yunzhi Yao, Shumin Deng, Chuanqi Tan, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Reasoning is an essential ability for complex problem-solving and can provide back-end support for various real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They present cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting and provide systematic resources to help beginners. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches have not been systematically reviewed and analyzed. |
ReLearn: Unlearning via Learning for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Liming Yang, Sendong Zhao, Shumin Deng, Mengru Wang, Bryan Hooi, Nay Oo, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models often rely on reverse optimization to reduce target token probabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a data augmentation and fine-tuning pipeline for effective unlearning . they propose augmentation, evaluation frameworks to measure contextual forgetting . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves targeted forgetting while preserving high-quality outputs. |
Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xiaohan Wang, Shengyu Mao, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods can modify concept-level definitions, but they can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark dataset ConceptEdit and establish new metrics for evaluation to investigate the editing capability of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can modify concept definitions but can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance. |
Summarizing Chinese Medical Answer with Graph Convolution Networks and Question-focused Dual Attention (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate answer summarization for medical questions are not straightforward to apply to the medical domain. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that utilizes graph convolution networks and question-focused dual attention for Chinese medical answer summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and informative summaries compared with baseline models. |
Editing Large Language Models: Problems, Methods, and Opportunities (2023.emnlp-main)
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Yunzhi Yao, Peng Wang, Bozhong Tian, Siyuan Cheng, Zhoubo Li, Shumin Deng, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in model editing for LLMs have created challenges and opportunities for the community. |
| Approach: | They propose to alter the behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alters behavior of LLMs efficiently within a specific domain without negatively impacting performance across other inputs. |
Language Adaptation of Large Language Models: An Empirical Study on LLaMA2 (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) has seen a skyrocketing increase in recent years. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of the language adaptation process for Large Language Models including vocabulary expansion, continued pre-training, and instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on empirical studies conducted on LLaMA2 and discussions on various settings affecting the model's capabilities. |
Beyond Prompt Engineering: Robust Behavior Control in LLMs via Steering Target Atoms (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent research has explored the use of sparse autoencoders (SAE) to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that isolates and manipulates disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety by using sparse autoencoders to disentangle knowledge in high-dimensional spaces for steering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to isolate and manipulate disentangled knowledge components to enhance safety in large reasoning models. |
How Do LLMs Acquire New Knowledge? A Knowledge Circuits Perspective on Continual Pre-Training (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have exceptional capabilities in knowledge-intensive tasks . however, they struggle with knowledge updates due to dynamic nature of world knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose to identify computational subgraphs that facilitate knowledge storage and processing . they also identify a phase shift from formation to optimization in LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture factual knowledge from pre-training corpus and encapsulate it as extensive parametric knowledge. |
Illusions of Confidence? Diagnosing LLM Truthfulness via Neighborhood Consistency (2026.acl-long)
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Haoming Xu, Ningyuan Zhao, Yunzhi Yao, Weihong Xu, Hongru Wang, Xinle Deng, Shumin Deng, Jeff Z. Pan, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations rely on point-wise confidence, which can mask brittle belief. |
| Approach: | They propose a measure of belief robustness that evaluates coherence across a conceptual neighborhood. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is more resistant to interference than existing models. |
Would LLMs be Good Historical Linguists and Chinese Dialect Learners? (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with low-resource Chinese dialects due to substantial phonological divergence. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate Middle Chinese, the common historical ancestor of modern Chinese dialects, into LLMs to improve dialectal pronunciation modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on standard Chinese but struggles with low-resource Chinese dialects . the proposed model improves over baselines while revealing variation across dialects. |
How Controllable Are Large Language Models? A Unified Evaluation across Behavioral Granularities (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Kewei Xu, Haoming Xu, Haiwen Hong, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Ningyu Zhang, Yongliang Shen, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen, Shumin Deng
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive domains, yet their unpredictable behaviors pose significant risks. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical benchmark for evaluating LLM controllability across three domains: language features, sentiment, and personality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework offers a principled and interpretable framework for safe and controllable LLM behavior serving as a foundation for future research. |
Attention-Based Capsule Networks with Dynamic Routing for Relation Extraction (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural networks focus on instance representation, and subsampling fails to retain precise spatial relationships between higher-level parts. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach based on capsule networks with attention mechanisms to extract relational information from a capsule. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the precision of the predicted relations with different benchmarks. |
OpenUE: An Open Toolkit of Universal Extraction from Text (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Ningyu Zhang, Shumin Deng, Zhen Bi, Haiyang Yu, Jiacheng Yang, Mosha Chen, Fei Huang, Wei Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | a large number of natural language processing tasks focus on token-level or sentence-level understandings. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and extensible toolkit for various extraction tasks . they deploy an online demo with restful APIs to support real-time extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to extract information from text without training and deployment. |
Knowledge Mechanisms in Large Language Models: A Survey and Perspective (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Shuofei Qiao, Shumin Deng, Peng Wang, Xiang Chen, Jia-Chen Gu, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Using large language models, we can understand knowledge mechanisms in LLMs for learning, storage, utilization, and evolution. |
| Approach: | They propose to analyze knowledge mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) they examine utilization, evolution, and the potential dark knowledge (hypothesis) they hope to help understand knowledge in LLMs and provide insights for future research . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to analyze the evolution of parametric knowledge in LLMs. |
KnowAgent: Knowledge-Augmented Planning for LLM-Based Agents (2025.findings-naacl)
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Yuqi Zhu, Shuofei Qiao, Yixin Ou, Shumin Deng, Shiwei Lyu, Yue Shen, Lei Liang, Jinjie Gu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) fail to effectively guide the planning trajectories during task solving and result in planning hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to enhance the planning capabilities of large language models by incorporating explicit action knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve comparable or superior performance to existing baselines on HotpotQA and ALFWorld. |
Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamics (2026.acl-long)
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Ziwen Xu, Chenyan WU, Hengyu Sun, Haiwen Hong, Mengru Wang, Yunzhi Yao, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue, Shumin Deng, Zhixuan Chu, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Methods for controlling large language models (LLMs) are often studied in isolation, obscuring connections and making comparison difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose a preference-utility analysis that separates control effects into preference and utility, and measures both on a shared log-odds scale using polarity-paired contrastive examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves preference while preserving utility. |
Proofread: Fixes All Errors with One Tap (2024.acl-demos)
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Renjie Liu, Yanxiang Zhang, Yun Zhu, Haicheng Sun, Yuanbo Zhang, Michael Huang, Shanqing Cai, Lei Meng, Shumin Zhai
| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on a human-labeled golden set showed our tuned PaLM2-XS model achieved 85.56% good ratio. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage tuning approach to acquire the dedicated Large Language Model for the feature, followed by a reinforcement learning approach for targeted refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 85.56% good quality on Rewrite and proofread tasks on human-labeled golden sets. |