Papers by Weidong Wang
Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach for Dialogue Policy Learning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is the main dialogue policy learning method in recent years. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach to dialogue policy learning . they propose evaluating the quality of experiences generated by the world model using a discriminator . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the effectiveness and efficiency of dialogue policy learning by 20% with fewer human-machine interactions. |
SafeAgent: Safeguarding LLM Agents via an Automated Risk Simulator (2026.acl-long)
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Xueyang Zhou, Weidong Wang, Lin Lu, Jiawen Shi, Guiyao Tie, Xu Yongtian, Lixing Chen, Pan Zhou, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Lichao Sun
| Challenge: | SafeAgent improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that improves agent safety through fully automated synthetic data generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms closed-source models on two safety benchmarks and one real-world task. |
Improving Image Captioning via Predicting Structured Concepts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on image captioning ignore the relationship between concepts . current methods for image caption generation ignore this relationship . |
| Approach: | They propose a structured concept predictor to predict concepts and their structures . they integrate these predictions into captioning to enhance visual signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves image captioning performance by using semantic concepts as a bridge between images and texts. |
ConKI: Contrastive Knowledge Injection for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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Yakun Yu, Mingjun Zhao, Shi-ang Qi, Feiran Sun, Baoxun Wang, Weidong Guo, Xiaoli Wang, Lei Yang, Di Niu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for multimodal sentiment analysis focus on general knowledge, which is inadequate to identify specific sentiments across modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose a method where specific-knowledge representations for each modality can be learned together with general knowledge representations via knowledge injection based on an adapter architecture. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms all prior methods on three popular benchmarks on multimodal sentiment analysis metrics. |
Text Style Transfer with Contrastive Transfer Pattern Mining (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text style transfer only focus on the transformation between styles, yet they do not take into account that this transformation can be achieved via different hidden transfer patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach which automatically mines hidden transfer patterns to improve TST . they use a clustering module to automatically discover hidden transfer pattern from the data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be applied in a plug-and-play manner to enhance other methods to further improve their performance. |
Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Multimodal Large Language Models to Discern Causal Links Across Modalities (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing MLLMs lack robustness in multimodal causal reasoning compared to their performance in textual settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multimodal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning benchmark that leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark leverages siamese images and text pairs to challenge MLLMs. |
Enhancing Advanced Visual Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Vision-Language (VL) research have sparked new benchmarks for complex visual reasoning, challenging models’ advanced reasoning ability. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel multi-modal in-context learning methodology to enhance LLMs’ contextual understanding and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves SOTA performance among all visual reasoning tasks and achieves a 'higher level of accuracy' than previous models. |
RaaS: Reasoning-Aware Attention Sparsity for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Junhao Hu, Wenrui Huang, Weidong Wang, Zhenwen Li, Tiancheng Hu, Zhixia Liu, Xusheng Chen, Tao Xie, Yizhou Shan
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across various domains, but their large-scale deployment faces a major obstacle: the high computational cost of long-sequence inference. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that retains key-value vectors until they are no longer needed to solve reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves high accuracy with O(L) time but O(N) memory complexities. |
HMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture of Experts for Language Modeling (2025.emnlp-main)
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An Wang, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiaqi Zhu, Zhen Yang, Pinxue Zhao, Weidong Han, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Naoaki Okazaki, Cheng-zhong Xu
| Challenge: | Mixture of Experts (MoE) models use homogeneous experts with diverse capacities, resulting in a lack of expert specialization and parameter utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where experts differ in size and possess diverse capacities . they propose HMoE to encourage frequent activation of smaller experts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms homogeneous homogenous MoE models on evaluation benchmarks and achieves lower loss rate with fewer activated parameters. |
LearnerCoMPASS: Intelligent Tutoring System with Dynamic Cognitive Diagnosis and Multi-Model Path Planning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing adaptive learning systems struggle to achieve deep personalization, dynamic adaptability, and content trustworthiness. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates large language models into adaptive learning systems . they propose 'cognitive multi-model planning adapted system' to enable deep personalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art learning paths and improves trustworthiness. |
TiKMiX: Efficient Semi-Dynamic Data Mixture via Data Influence for LLM Pre-training (2026.acl-long)
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Yifan Wang, null Binbinliu, Fengze Liu, Yuanfan Guo, Jiyao Deng, Xuecheng Wu, Weidong Zhou, Xiaohuan Zhou, Taifeng Wang
| Challenge: | Static data mixing strategies in large language models are often suboptimal as they fail to adapt to the model’s evolving learning states. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-dynamic data mixing framework that uses a key observation of influence ranking invariance to reduce computational overhead by 80% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computational overhead by 80% and achieves an average performance gain of 2% across nine downstream benchmarks, effectively mitigating data under-digestion. |
Pluggable Neural Machine Translation Models via Memory-augmented Adapters (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent years, neural machine translation systems are often developed with large-scale parallel data extracted from the Web. |
| Approach: | They propose a memory-augmented adapter to steer pretrained neural machine translation models in a pluggable manner by combining model representations and retrieved results. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms several representative pluggable baselines on style- and domain-specific experiments. |
PretrainRL: Alleviating Factuality Hallucination of Large Language Models at the Beginning (2026.findings-acl)
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Langming Liu, Kangtao Lv, Haibin Chen, Weidong Zhang, Yejing Wang, Shilei Liu, Xin Tong, Yujin Yuan, Yongwei Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Large language models suffer from factual hallucinations where they generate verifiable falsehoods. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning into the pretraining phase to consolidate factual knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly alleviates factual hallucinations and outperforms state-of-the-art methods. |
CIRAG: Construction–Integration Retrieval and Adaptive Generation for Multi-hop Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for iterative retrieval-augmented generation (iRAG) suffer from greedy single-path expansion and granularity–demand mismatch . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that constructs candidate triples and history-conditionally integrates them to distill core triples to generate the next-hop query. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model mitigates the greedy single-path expansion and granularity–demand mismatch by preserving multiple plausible evidence chains. |
MRT: Multi-modal Short- and Long-range Temporal Convolutional Network for Time-sync Comment Video Behavior Prediction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Using time-sync comments, it is difficult to understand user behavior due to complexity of interactions between users, videos, and comments. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel time-sync comment behavior prediction model that takes historical behavior into account and optimizes it on the basis of user preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the performance of time-sync comments on visual frames and textual comments on two cats playing simultaneously. |
VisLingInstruct: Elevating Zero-Shot Learning in Multi-Modal Language Models with Autonomous Instruction Optimization (2024.naacl-long)
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Dongsheng Zhu, Daniel Tang, Weidong Han, Jinghui Lu, Yukun Zhao, Guoliang Xing, Junfeng Wang, Dawei Yin
| Challenge: | Current MMLMs show impressive zero-shot abilities in multi-modal tasks, but their performance depends heavily on the quality of instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to advancing multi-modal language models in zero-shot learning by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts through In-Context Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves zero-shot performance in multi-modal tasks by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts. |