Papers by Tiancheng 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. |
Talk to Papers: Bringing Neural Question Answering to Academic Search (2020.acl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Talk to Papers aims to improve the current experience of academic search by using open-domain question answering (QA) techniques. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-domain question answering techniques to improve the current experience of academic search by combining natural language queries with machine reading at scale. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool improves on existing search engines and provides a collaborative data collection tool to curate the first natural language processing research QA dataset. |
Lil: Less is Less When Applying Post-Training Sparse-Attention Algorithms in Long-Decode Stage (2026.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Fangze Li, Mingtao Xu, Feifan Meng, Shiju Zhao, Tiancheng Hu, Ting Peng, Anmin Liu, Wenrui Huang, Chenxu Liu, Ziyue Hua, Tao Xie
| Challenge: | Prior work typically decomposes inference into prefill and decode stages, with the decode stage dominating total latency. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that detects threshold where information loss exceeds information gain during sparse decoding to reduce token consumption by up to 90% and a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces token consumption by 90% with a marginal accuracy degradation of less than 2% across reasoning-intensive benchmarks. |
SPARTA: Efficient Open-Domain Question Answering via Sparse Transformer Matching Retrieval (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | SPARTA is a novel neural retrieval method for open-domain question answering . it learns a sparse representation that can be efficiently implemented as an Inverted Index . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that learns a sparse representation that can be implemented as an Inverted Index. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results on 4 open-domain question answering tasks and 11 retrieval question answering (ReQA) tasks. |
SF-QA: Simple and Fair Evaluation Library for Open-domain Question Answering (2021.eacl-demos)
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| Challenge: | Open-domain question answering (QA) requires large amounts of resources and is difficult to reproduce results due to complex configurations. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple and fair evaluation framework for open-domain question answering (QA) it modularizes the pipeline open- domain QA system, making it easily accessible . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation framework is publicly available and anyone can contribute to the code and evaluations. |
“None of the Above”: Measure Uncertainty in Dialog Response Retrieval (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end (E2E) dialog retrieval models jointly encode a dialog and a candidate response, assuming the ground truth is always present in the candidate set. |
| Approach: | They propose to capture the original retrieval model's confidence concerning the best prediction using trivial additional computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can capture the model's confidence concerning the best prediction using trivial additional computation. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Target-Guided Open-Domain Conversation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | a new study aims to improve opendomain chat systems by integrating goals and strategy into the system. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured approach that introduces coarse-grained keywords to control intended content of system responses and attains smooth conversation transition through turn-level supervised learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces meaningful and effective conversations significantly better than other approaches. |
Rethinking Action Spaces for Reinforcement Learning in End-to-end Dialog Agents with Latent Variable Models (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to define action spaces for conversational agents have limitations . end-to-end dialog systems can handle complex domains with limited action space . |
| Approach: | They propose a latent action framework that treats the action spaces of an end-to-end dialog agent as latent variables and develops unsupervised methods to induce its own action space from the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves better performance than word-level policy gradient methods on DealOrNoDeal and MultiWoz dialogs. |
ParaCook: On Time-Efficient Planning for Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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Shiqi Zhang, Xinbei Ma, Yunqing Xu, Zouying Cao, Pengrui Lu, Haobo Yuan, Tiancheng Shen, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao, Ming-Hsuan Yang
| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
Unsupervised Discrete Sentence Representation Learning for Interpretable Neural Dialog Generation (P18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing encoder-decoder dialog models cannot output interpretable actions as in traditional systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised discrete sentence representation learning method that integrates with existing encoder-decoder dialog models for interpretable response generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be integrated with existing encoder-decoder dialog models and discover interpretable semantics via either auto encoding or context predicting. |
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. |
Pretraining Methods for Dialog Context Representation Learning (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pretraining dialog context encoders are still in their infancy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use unsupervised pretraining objectives for dialog context representations to fine-tune and evaluate them on a set of downstream dialog tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on a set of dialog tasks and are less data hungry. |
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. |
OmAgent: A Multi-modal Agent Framework for Complex Video Understanding with Task Divide-and-Conquer (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities to multimodal contexts, including comprehensive video understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose to store and retrieve relevant video frames for specific queries and a Divide-and-Conquer loop capable of autonomous reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model efficiently stores and retrieves relevant video frames for specific queries, preserving the detailed content of videos. |
An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies evaluate VLP models by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance with the average downstream task accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a toolbox for evaluating Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolbox provides the preliminary datasets that deepen the image-texting ability of a VLP model. |
Apertus: Democratizing Open and Compliant LLMs for Global Language Environments (2026.acl-long)
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Alejandro Hernández-Cano, Alexander Hägele, Allen Hao Huang, Angelika Romanou, Antoni-Joan Solergibert, Barna Pásztor, Bettina Messmer, Dhia Garbaya, Eduard Frank Ďurech, Ido Hakimi, Juan Garcia Giraldo, Mete Ismayilzada, Negar Foroutan, Skander Moalla, Tiancheng Chen, Vinko Sabolčec, Yixuan Xu, Michael Aerni, Badr AlKhamissi, Inés Altemir Marinas, Mohammad Hossein Amani, Matin Ansaripour, Ilia Badanin, Harold Benoit, Emanuela Boros, Nicholas John Browning, Fabian Bösch, Maximilian Böther, Niklas Canova, Camille Challier, Clément Charmillot, Jonathan Coles, Jan Milan Deriu, Arnout Devos, Lukas Drescher, Daniil Dzenhaliou, Maud Ehrmann, Dongyang Fan, Simin Fan, Silin Gao, Miguel Gila, María Grandury, Diba Hashemi, Alexander Miserlis Hoyle, Jiaming Jiang, Mark Klein, Andrei Kucharavy, Anastasiia Kucherenko, Frederike Lübeck, Roman Machacek, Theofilos Ioannis Manitaras, Andreas Marfurt, Kyle Matoba, Simon Matrenok, Henrique Mendonça, Fawzi Roberto Mohamed, Syrielle Montariol, Luca Mouchel, Sven Najem-Meyer, Jingwei Ni, Gennaro Oliva, Matteo Pagliardini, Elia Palme, Andrei Panferov, Léo Paoletti, Marco Passerini, Ivan Pavlov, Auguste Poiroux, Kaustubh Ponkshe, Nathan Ranchin, Javier Rando, Mathieu Sauser, Jakhongir Saydaliev, Mukhammadali Sayfiddinov, Marian Schneider, Stefano Schuppli, Marco Scialanga, Andrei Semenov, Kumar Shridhar, Raghav Singhal, Anna Sotnikova, Alexander Sternfeld, Ayush Kumar Tarun, Paul Teiletche, Jannis Vamvas, Xiaozhe Yao, Hao Zhao, Alexander Ilic, Ana Klimovic, Andreas Krause, Caglar Gulcehre, David Rosenthal, Elliott Ash, Florian Tramèr, Joost VandeVondele, Livio Veraldi, Martin Rajman, Thomas C. Schulthess, Torsten Hoefler, Antoine Bosselut, Martin Jaggi, Imanol Schlag
| Challenge: | Apertus is a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) designed to address responsibility shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem, namely data responsibility and global representation. |
| Approach: | They propose to release a fully open suite of large language models (LLMs) that address data responsibility and global representation shortcomings in today’s open model ecosystem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is pretrained on openly available data and suppresses verbatim recall of data while retaining task performance. |
Unsupervised Dialog Structure Learning (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current dialog systems require human experts to design the dialog structure, which is time consuming and sometimes insufficient to satisfy various customer needs. |
| Approach: | They propose to extract dialog structure using a modified VRNN model with discrete latent vectors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on the ability to predict unseen data and is faster and more effective in a reinforcement learning setting. |
VisualSparta: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach to Large-scale Text-to-Image Search with Weighted Bag-of-words (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-image retrieval models lack good representations for textual and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel text-to-image retrieval model that uses a transformer to match images with textual queries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in MSCOCO and Flickr30K . it achieves substantial speed advantages for a 1 million image index . |