Papers by Tianhua Zhang
Title2Event: Benchmarking Open Event Extraction with a Large-scale Chinese Title Dataset (2022.emnlp-main)
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Haolin Deng, Yanan Zhang, Yangfan Zhang, Wangyang Ying, Changlong Yu, Jun Gao, Wei Wang, Xiaoling Bai, Nan Yang, Jin Ma, Xiang Chen, Tianhua Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing EE datasets define fixed event types and design specific schemas for each of them, failing to cover diverse events emerging from the online text. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a sentence-level dataset to benchmark Open Event Extraction without restricting event types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains more than 42,000 news titles in 34 topics collected from Chinese web pages. |
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to incorporate retriever’s preference during the training of query rewriting models rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting their generalization and adaptation capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. |
Search Augmented Instruction Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyin Luo, Tianhua Zhang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-augmented instruction learning model which grounds the language generation and instruction following abilities on complex search results generated by in-house and external search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms plain LLMs on zero-shot language tasks and can generate both natural and programming languages following natural language guidance and requests. |
Generate, Discriminate, Evolve: Enhancing Context Faithfulness via Fine-Grained Sentence-Level Self-Evolution (2025.findings-acl)
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Kun Li, Tianhua Zhang, Yunxiang Li, Hongyin Luo, Abdalla Mohamed Salama Sayed Moustafa, Xixin Wu, James R. Glass, Helen M. Meng
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve context faithfulness in large language models are either inadequate or overlook the potential for self-improvement. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances context faithfulness through fine-grained sentence-level optimization. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on ASQA and ConFiQA datasets show that GenDiE surpasses baselines in faithfulness and correctness and exhibits robust performance for domain adaptation. |
RAG-Zeval: Enhancing RAG Responses Evaluator through End-to-End Reasoning and Ranking-Based Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks rely on direct prompting of resource-intensive models with complex multi-stage prompts, introducing significant computational cost and underutilizing models’ reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that trains evaluators with reinforcement learning to generate comprehensive and sound assessments with detailed explanation in one-pass. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline evaluation frameworks that rely on LLMs with 10-100 more parameters and achieves the strongest correlation with human judgments. |
Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Tianhua Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Hongyin Luo, Yung-Sung Chuang, Mingye Gao, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Existing methods for surfacing symbolic reasoning capabilities are limited to narrow tasks . arithmetic computations are unnatural to perform in pure language space, and hence present difficulties for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language embedded program framework for solving symbolic reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on strong baselines across math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following tasks. |
Decoding on Graphs: Faithful and Sound Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs through Generation of Well-Formed Chains (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on the utilization of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) for large language models (LLMs) relies on subgraph retriever or iterative prompting, overlooking the potential synergy of LLMs’ step-wise reasoning capabilities and KGs’ structural nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-aware constrained decoding framework that facilitates a deep synergy between LLMs and KGs by constraint derived from the topology of the KG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can provide faithful and sound reasoning for KGQA. |
Self-DC: When to Reason and When to Act? Self Divide-and-Conquer for Compositional Unknown Questions (2025.naacl-long)
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Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou, Tianhua Zhang, Cunxiang Wang, Huimin Wang, Guanhua Chen, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on leveraging internal knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer known questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows LLMs to choose between internal and external knowledge . they use a dataset to analyze compositional questions that are composed of unknown sub-questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve comparable or even better performance with much fewer external calls compared with several strong baselines. |
DREAM-S: Speculative Decoding with Searchable Drafting and Target-Aware Refinement for Multimodal Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Speculative decoding (SD) has proven to be effective for autoregressive generation in large language models (LLMs), however its application to vision-language models (VLMs) remains relatively unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a Speculative Decoding framework for vision-language models that integrates a neural architecture search framework and target-aware supernet training to identify optimal interaction strategies. |
| Outcome: | DREAM-S achieves 3.85 speedup compared to baselines on well-established vision-language models. |
Event-enhanced Retrieval in Real-time Search (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing embedding-based retrieval models face the "semantic drift" problem . a low adoption rate of retrieval results is evident in real-time search scenarios . |
| Approach: | They propose an embedding-based retrieval approach that enhances real-time retrieval performance by adding contrastive learning to the dual-encoder model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the dual-encoder model of traditional EBR. |
Event-Centric Query Expansion in Web Search (2023.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies rely on long-term search log mining to improve search experience . EQE system is a novel event retrieval framework that can select the best expansion from a significant amount of potential events quickly and accurately. |
| Approach: | They propose a QE system that uses a four-stage event retrieval framework . they collect news headlines and then refine a dual-tower semantic model to serve as an encoder . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can select the best expansion from a significant amount of potential events quickly and accurately. |