Papers by Wei Zou

42 papers
LLMs Assist NLP Researchers: Critique Paper (Meta-)Reviewing (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: a comparative analysis of paper (meta-)reviews by large language models (LLMs) aims to identify and distinguish LLMs from human activities .
Approach: They present a comparative analysis to identify and distinguish LLM activities from human activities.
Outcome: The proposed analysis aims to improve recognition of instances when someone implicitly uses LLMs for reviewing activities.
Simple but Challenging: Natural Language Inference Models Fail on Simple Sentences (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Natural language inference (NLI) tasks are difficult to perform on large datasets . a small number of simple sentences can improve model performance, authors say .
Approach: They propose to use syntactically simple sentences to test the inference ability of NLI models.
Outcome: The proposed set of simple sentences shows that the models fine-tuned on MNLI and SNLI perform poorly on Simple Pair.
Learning Cross-lingual Distributed Logical Representations for Semantic Parsing (P18-2)

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Challenge: Recent research efforts have looked into the problem of learning semantic parsers in a multilingual setup, but how to improve the performance of a monolingual semantic parsed system remains a research question that is under-explored.
Approach: They propose to use data annotated in different languages to learn distributed representations of logical forms for improving a monolingual semantic parser.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on the standard multilingual GeoQuery dataset.
A Lexicon-Based Graph Neural Network for Chinese NER (D19-1)

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Challenge: Chinese named entity recognition models are vulnerable to word ambiguities due to the lack of global semantics and chain structure.
Approach: They propose a lexicon-based graph neural network with global semantics to solve word ambiguities in Chinese named entity recognition (NER) Lexicons are used to construct the graph and provide word-level features.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on four NER datasets on Chinese characters, potential words, and the whole-sentence semantics.
Modal Feature Optimization Network with Prompt for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Multimodal sentiment analysis(MSA) is used to understand human emotional states through multimodal.
Approach: They propose a Modal Feature Optimization Network with a modal prompt attention mechanism to optimize the under-optimized modal representation by determining which modalities are under- optimized .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on public benchmark datasets.
Pre-training for Abstractive Document Summarization by Reinstating Source Text (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Abstractive document summarization models are often trained on limited supervised data . authors present three objectives for pretraining abstractive summarizing models .
Approach: They propose to pre-train a SEQ2SEQ based abstractive summarization model on unlabeled text.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on two benchmark summarization datasets with 19GB of text . the goal is sentence reordering, next sentence generation and masked document generation .
NUT-RC: Noisy User-generated Text-oriented Reading Comprehension (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing RC models focus on extractive or generative, but ignore integration of them.
Approach: They propose a noisy user-generated text-oriented RC model that integrates extractive and generative RC models by a multi-task learning mechanism and an answer selection module.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on Twitter.
Text2Math: End-to-end Parsing Text into Math Expressions (D19-1)

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Challenge: Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
Approach: They propose a model for semantically parsing text into math expressions and propose 'text2math' which aims to predict the complete math expression as a tree structure, with minimal manual efforts.
Outcome: Empirical results on benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed model.
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents.
Approach: They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.
Outcome: The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech .
MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages . existing models lack consistency across languages due to imbalance of training data .
Approach: They propose a multilingual alignment-as-preference optimization framework to align reasoning processes in other languages with the dominant language.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves multilingual reasoning across languages on three benchmarks.
Making Parameter-efficient Tuning More Efficient: A Unified Framework for Classification Tasks (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated superior performance in industrial applications.
Approach: They propose a framework that re-uses existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the efficiency of existing parameter-efficient methods with a unified classifier.
EDA: Easy Data Augmentation Techniques for Boosting Performance on Text Classification Tasks (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing data augmentation techniques for text classification are difficult to implement and cost a high amount of money.
Approach: They propose to use four simple but powerful operations to boost performance on text classification tasks to improve synonym replacement, random insertion, random swap, and random deletion.
Outcome: The proposed techniques improve performance on five classification tasks and are particularly useful for smaller datasets.
A Reinforced Generation of Adversarial Examples for Neural Machine Translation (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Neural machine translation systems fail on less decent inputs, which may harm the credibility of these systems.
Approach: They propose a paradigm that generates adversarial examples using reinforcement learning to expose pitfalls for a given performance metric.
Outcome: The proposed paradigm produces stable attacks with meaning-preserving adversarial examples.
DEAR: Distributional Error-Aware Reliability for Robust Multimodal Sentiment Analysis with Missing Modalities (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods focus on feature completion but neglect semantic shifts caused by distribution gaps and decision risks under high uncertainty.
Approach: They propose a distributional error-aware reliability estimation framework for robust MSA . they propose reconstructed features to be explicitly aligned with original distributional manifold .
Outcome: The proposed framework mitigates semantic shifts by aligning reconstructed features with original distributional manifold . Extensive experiments on MOSI, MOSEI, and SIMS validate the framework .
Improved Pseudo Data for Machine Translation Quality Estimation with Constrained Beam Search (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: evaluating the quality of machine translation outputs becomes increasingly essential with the rapid development of machine language (MT).
Approach: They propose to generate pseudo data using the MT model with constrained beam search (CBSQE) they propose to preserve the reference parts with high MT probabilities as correct translations .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines in both supervised and unsupervised settings.
PAPERMIND: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning and Critique over Scientific Papers in Multimodal LLMs (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks assess integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning in isolation . Existing systems assess integrated reasoning in isolated tasks .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over research papers.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark evaluates integrated and agent-oriented scientific reasoning over scientific papers.
Quantity Tagger: A Latent-Variable Sequence Labeling Approach to Solving Addition-Subtraction Word Problems (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to solve arithmetic word problems require additional annotations.
Approach: They propose a method that automatically discovers hidden mathematical relations by tagging each quantity with a sign corresponding to one type of mathematical operation.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves 5 and 8 points of accuracy gains on two datasets compared to prior approaches.
Local Interpretation of Transformer Based on Linear Decomposition (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on local explanation generation attempts to understand model dynamics on word-level or phraselevel by assigning importance scores on input features.
Approach: They propose to interpret neural networks by linear decomposition by a Transformer model on a single input and a linear decomposing of the output to generate local explanations.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves competitive performance in sentiment classification and machine translation, and fidelity of explanation.
DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing jailbreak methods only use a single image, restricting the attack space . Existing frameworks only use single image to distribute harmful requests across multiple images .
Approach: They propose a compositional jailbreak framework that leverages Distributed instruction, Multimodal evidence and a Number chain task to fully enhance the jailbreak performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of over 90% on GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4 .
Not All Voices Are Rewarded Equally: Probing and Repairing Reward Models across Human Diversity (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Using real-world datasets, we conduct the most comprehensive study to date, auditing various state-of-the-art reward models across nine sensitive attributes, including age, gender, ethnicity, etc.
Approach: They propose a method to mitigate group disparities in reward modeling by using real-world data.
Outcome: The proposed method is based on a population-based dataset with nine demographic attributes, including gender, ethnicity, age, gender, and ethnicity.
SMART: Semantic Header Flattening and Pseudo-Code-Style Reasoning for LLM-based Complex Table Question Answering (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to complex table question answering rely on handcrafted table linearization or prompts . Existing methods rely only on hand-crafted table and require hierarchical hierarchies to align conditions, attributes, and values.
Approach: They propose a framework that explicitly decouples table structure understanding from reasoning execution.
Outcome: Experiments show that SMART improves accuracy and robustness of complex table question answering (TQA) . SMart decouples table structure understanding from reasoning execution, enabling state-of-the-art performance.
SAM3-I: Segment Anything with Instructions (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning use coarse representations and iterative mask filtering.
Approach: They propose an instruction-following extension of the Segment Anything Model 3 family that unifies concept-level grounding and instruction-level reasoning within a single segmentation framework.
Outcome: Experiments show that SAM3-I achieves appealing performance across referring and reasoning-based segmentation while maintaining its strong concept recall ability.
LLM-Forest: Ensemble Learning of LLMs with Graph-Augmented Prompts for Data Imputation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for missing data imputation are lacking in a finetuning-free process and mitigating biases and uncertainty in LLM outputs.
Approach: They propose a framework for imputation of large language models with a forest of few-shot learning LLM "trees" they use bipartite information graphs to identify relevant neighboring entries with feature and value granularity.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on a concept of bipartite information graphs to identify high-quality relevant neighboring entries with both feature and value granularity.
Understanding the Modality Gap: An Empirical Study on the Speech-Text Alignment Mechanism of Large Speech Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: LSLMs have impressive conversational generation abilities, but consistently fall short of traditional pipeline systems on semantic understanding benchmarks.
Approach: They propose to analyze the performance gap between speech and text inputs through a systematic experiment . they find that representation similarity is strongly correlated with the modality gap .
Outcome: The proposed models improve the accuracy of speech inputs and their semantic understanding benchmarks.
Does Memory Need Graphs? A Unified Framework and Empirical Analysis for Long-Term Dialog Memory (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing literature on dialog memory systems is inconsistent on their effectiveness . empirical findings on graph structures are difficult to attribute to specific design choices .
Approach: They propose a framework that decomposes dialog memory systems into core components . they conduct stage-wise experiments on LongMemEval and HaluMeM, and compare implementation details .
Outcome: The proposed framework compares graph-based and non-graph memory architectures on long-term dialog memory systems.
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation.
Approach: They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP.
SDGO: Self-Discrimination-Guided Optimization for Consistent Safety in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various tasks but are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce harmful content generation.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that leverages the model’s own discrimination capabilities as a reward signal to enhance generation safety through iterative self-improvement.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves model safety by iterative self-improvement without additional annotated data or external models during training phase.
Fin-STAR: Structure-as-Semantics to Resolve Implicitness in Financial Retrieval (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems treat structure as a physical navigational skeleton rather than intrinsic semantic knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that redefining hierarchy as intrinsic semantics and uses snippets to enrich hierarchical lineage.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art hierarchical and graph-based benchmarks on FinTierQA Gold.
Don’t Eclipse Your Arts Due to Small Discrepancies: Boundary Repositioning with a Pointer Network for Aspect Extraction (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing aspect extraction methods suffer from boundary errors, but they hurt performance severely.
Approach: They propose to use a pointer network to reposition the boundaries of extracted aspects . they conduct experiments on laptop and restaurant benchmark datasets .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets . it achieves substantial improvements over baseline and outperformed existing methods .
Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing studies focus on specific aspects or applications, but this study provides a comprehensive overview of Protein-specific large language models.
Approach: This paper proposes a structured taxonomy of state-of-the-art ProteinLLMs . they analyze how they leverage large-scale protein sequence data for improved accuracy .
Outcome: The proposed model covers their architectures, training datasets, evaluation metrics, and diverse applications.
Learning Implicit Sentiment in Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis with Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on identifying the sentiment polarity of aspects in product reviews.
Approach: They propose to use supervised Contrastive Pre-Training to learn implicit sentiment . they propose to train large-scale sentiment-annotated corpora from in-domain language resources .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SemEval2014 benchmarks and comprehensively validates its effectiveness on learning implicit sentiment.
PersonaAgent: Bridging Memory and Action for Personalized LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Large Language Model (LLM) enabled agents lack flexibility to respond to users’ varying needs and preferences.
Approach: They propose a test-time user-preference alignment strategy that optimizes the persona prompt, ensuring real-time preference alignment through textual loss feedback between simulated and ground-truth responses.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-time and in real applications.
Lightweight LLM Agent Memory with Small Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing external memory systems for LLMs have low online overhead but are unstable in accumulating latency over long interactions.
Approach: They propose a lightweight memory system for better agent memory driven by Small Language Models . lightmem modularizes memory retrieval, writing, and long-term consolidation . they show consistent gains across model scales and high efficiency .
Outcome: The proposed system improves agent memory but has low latency and low online overhead . it separates online processing from offline consolidation to enable efficient memory invocation . the proposed system achieves an average F1 improvement of 2.5 over A-MEM on LoCoMo .
Joint Detection and Location of English Puns (N19-1)

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Challenge: Existing research on puns has focused on understanding the meanings of words and phrases.
Approach: They propose a model that addresses pun detection and pun location jointly from a sequence labeling perspective.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed model can handle both homographic and heterographic puns.
TRANS-ZERO: Self-Play Incentivizes Large Language Models for Multilingual Translation Without Parallel Data (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped machine translation, but multilingual MT still relies heavily on parallel data for supervised fine-tuning.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages only monolingual data and the intrinsic multilingual knowledge of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Outcome: The proposed framework matches models trained on large-scale parallel data and excels in non-English translation directions.
MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in machine learning (MU) have enabled the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks.
Approach: They propose to "reformulate" the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs by preserving only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses baselines that finetuned MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions.
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems.
Approach: They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets.
CompTab: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Real-World TableQA with Complex Reasoning and Irregular Tables (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on well-structured tables and fail to reflect irregular structures and complex reasoning commonly encountered in real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate TableQA under complex reasoning and irregular table conditions.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves generalization and realism of large language models under complex and irregular table conditions.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
DANCE: Diversity-attended Dynamic Caching with Asymmetric Quantization for Test-time Adaptation of Vision-Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to test-time adaptation of vision-language models measure prediction entropy but these samples tend to approach prototypes with limited coverage of data distributions.
Approach: They propose a new approach for test-time adaptation of vision-language models . they construct a dynamic cache to store diversity-aware test samples .
Outcome: The proposed approach is more efficient than current methods on augmented visual models.
Chain-of-Thought Matters: Improving Long-Context Language Models with Reasoning Path Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks.
Approach: They propose a chain-of-thought framework that teaches models to generate high-quality reasoning paths for enhanced long-context performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework generalizes across most long-context scenarios and amplifys with increasing context length.

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