Papers by Tianqi Zhang
Towards Knowledge Checking in Retrieval-augmented Generation: A Representation Perspective (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Bingheng Li, Yuping Lin, Tianqi Zheng, Dante Everaert, Hanqing Lu, Hui Liu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Monica Xiao Cheng, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing studies have shown that LLMs struggle to identify the boundaries of their own knowledge and tend to prioritize external information over internal knowledge learned during pre-training. |
| Approach: | They conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM representation behaviors and demonstrate the significance of using representations in knowledge checking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed classifiers improve performance even when dealing with noisy knowledge databases. |
DetectRL-X: Towards Reliable Multilingual and Real-World LLM-Generated Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Junchao Wu, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Hao Zhang, Zeyu Wu, Tianqi Shi, Yichao Du, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Jinsong Su, Derek F. Wong
| Challenge: | Existing detectors are limited in their ability to detect large language models generated content in multilingual environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark to evaluate advanced detectors across 8 dimensions to better align with real-world applications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark encompasses 8 languages commonly used in commercial contexts and collects human-written texts from 6 domains highly susceptible to LLM misuse. |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
What’s Missing in Screen-to-Action? Towards a UI-in-the-Loop Paradigm for Multimodal GUI Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing GUI reasoning methods rely on direct screen-based decision-making, which lacks interpretability and overlooks a comprehensive understanding of UI elements, ultimately leading to task failure. |
| Approach: | They propose a GUI reasoning paradigm that treats the GUI reasoning task as a cyclic ***Screen-UI elements-Action** process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm achieves state-of-the-art UI understanding performance while yielding superior results in GUI reasoning tasks. |
Marco-Bench-MIF: On Multilingual Instruction-Following Capability of Large Language (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Bo Zeng, Chenyang Lyu, Sinuo Liu, Mingyan Zeng, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Tianqi Shi, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Chenyu Zhu, Ruizhe Li, Jiahui Geng, Qing Li, Yu Tong, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing datasets for instruction-following are monolingual and centered on English . existing data are unable to capture linguistic and cultural subtle differences . |
| Approach: | They propose an extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version called Marco-Bench-MIF . their benchmark addresses linguistic constraints and cultural references via translation and verification . |
| Outcome: | The proposed extension of IFEval to a localized multilingual version covers 30 languages with varying levels of localization. |
PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization (2025.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | PromptSculptor automates the iterative prompt optimization process for Text-to-Image models . previous work focused on generating detailed, high-quality prompts based on user feedback . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes a task into four specialized agents . they use Chain-of-Thought reasoning to transform a short, vague user prompt into a comprehensive, refined prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves output quality and reduces iterations needed for user satisfaction. |
ART: rule bAsed futuRe-inference deducTion (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Mengze Li, Tianqi Zhao, Bai Jionghao, Baoyi He, Jiaxu Miao, Wei Ji, Zheqi Lv, Zhou Zhao, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on language-based premises and deduce valid conclusions from visual observations. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based deductive reasoning task that uses video to deduce the correct future event . they use commonsense knowledge to annotate video and a strong baseline to conduct reasoning . |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies validate the rationality of ARTNet in deductive reasoning upon visual observations . ART is a method that rigorously follows a set of explicit constraints to deduce valid conclusions from empirical facts . |
Beyond Text: Unveiling Privacy Vulnerabilities in Multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) can process text, images, and audio, but they introduce privacy vulnerabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a compositional structured prompt attack to exploit MRAG privacy vulnerabilities . they show that LMMs can generate outputs resembling retrieved content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach generates outputs resembling retrieved content and exposes sensitive information. |
PLaD: Preference-based Large Language Model Distillation with Pseudo-Preference Pairs (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Rongzhi Zhang, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Haorui Wang, Zhen Qin, Feng Han, Jialu Liu, Simon Baumgartner, Michael Bendersky, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) is a technique for transferring expertise from large teacher models to compact student models with reduced memory footprints and inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose to transfer knowledge from large teacher models to compact student models by exploiting teacher-student capacity discrepancies to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits teacher-student capacity discrepancy to generate pseudo-preference pairs where teacher outputs are preferred over student outputs. |
VIEWS: Entity-Aware News Video Captioning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Hammad Ayyubi, Tianqi Liu, Arsha Nagrani, Xudong Lin, Mingda Zhang, Anurag Arnab, Feng Han, Yukun Zhu, Xuande Feng, Kevin Zhang, Jialu Liu, Shih-Fu Chang
| Challenge: | Existing video captioning benchmarks and models produce generic captions for videos that lack specific identification of individuals, locations, or organizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of directly summarizing news videos into captions that are entity-aware . they validate the effectiveness of their approach across three video captioning models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective across three video captioning models. |
ARXSA: A General Negative Feedback Control Theory in Vision-Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | a new approach to the self-attention mechanism is proposed for integrating data from multiple batches. |
| Approach: | They propose an autoregressive with exogenous inputs approach for the Transformer model . the proposed method transforms the Encoder block into a negative feedback predictive control system . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is validated through comparative evaluations. |
Mitigating the Privacy Issues in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) via Pure Synthetic Data (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Shenglai Zeng, Jiankun Zhang, Pengfei He, Jie Ren, Tianqi Zheng, Hanqing Lu, Han Xu, Hui Liu, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang
| Challenge: | Existing literature suggests that RAG systems may face privacy issues when the retrieval process involves private data. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage synthetic data generation paradigm that uses attributes to preserve contextual information from the original data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach preserves key contextual information from the original data while reducing privacy risks. |
An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)
Copied to clipboard
| 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. |
Air-Decoding: Attribute Distribution Reconstruction for Decoding-Time Controllable Text Generation (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Controllable text generation (CTG) aims to generate text with desired attributes, but current methods lack high levels of controllability. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight decoding framework that reconstructs attribute distributions to balance the weights between attribute words and non-attribute words to generate more fluent text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art control performance on multiple CTG tasks. |
Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
Explanation-aware Soft Ensemble Empowers Large Language Model In-context Learning (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yue Yu, Jiaming Shen, Tianqi Liu, Zhen Qin, Jing Nathan Yan, Jialu Liu, Chao Zhang, Michael Bendersky
| Challenge: | Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have witnessed the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose an Explanation-Aware Soft Ensemble framework to empower in-context learning with Large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can be used to enhance in-context learning on seven natural language understanding tasks and four varying-size LLMs. |