Papers by Weikang Zhang
Bridging Intuitive Associations and Deliberate Recall: Empowering LLM Personal Assistant with Graph-Structured Long-term Memory (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs)-based personal assistants struggle to capture entity relationships and handle multiple intents effectively. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-structured memory framework that mimics human cognitive processes and an event-centric memory graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms retrieval and QA methods across long-term dialogue benchmarks and enables more human-like memory systems. |
Learning Universal Sentence Representations with Mean-Max Attention Autoencoder (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn universal sentence representations focus on supervised learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a mean-max attention autoencoder that uses a multi-head mechanism to reconstruct the input sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised single methods on a wide range of 10 transfer tasks. |
CMQA: A Dataset of Conditional Question Answering with Multiple-Span Answers (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing QA datasets only contain unconditional and parallel answers . conditional question answering with hierarchical multi-span answers is challenging for the community to solve . |
| Approach: | They propose a conditional question answering task with hierarchical multi-span answers . they propose CMQA, which contains conditional and hierarchic samples . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task can be used to build more reliable and sophisticated QA systems. |
Farewell to Aimless Large-scale Pretraining: Influential Subset Selection for Language Model (2023.findings-acl)
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Xiao Wang, Weikang Zhou, Qi Zhang, Jie Zhou, SongYang Gao, Junzhe Wang, Menghan Zhang, Xiang Gao, Yun Wen Chen, Tao Gui
| Challenge: | Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use end-task knowledge to select a tiny subset of pretraining corpus to influence performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pretrained models on eight datasets covering four domains with 0.45% of the data and a three-orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. |
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)
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Shihan Dou, Jiazheng Zhang, Jianxiang Zang, Yunbo Tao, Weikang Zhou, Haoxiang Jia, Shichun Liu, Yuming Yang, Shenxi Wu, Zhiheng Xi, Muling Wu, Rui Zheng, Changze Lv, Limao Xiong, Shaoqing Zhang, Lin Zhang, Wenyu Zhan, Rongxiang Weng, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Yueming Wu, Ming Wen, Yixin Cao, Tao Gui, Xipeng Qiu, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
| Challenge: | MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs). |
Are You for Real? Detecting Identity Fraud via Dialogue Interactions (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect identity fraud are prone to errors and are not based on real data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a KG constructor and structured dialogue management to detect identity fraud in loan applications to generate questions based on personal information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can detect fraudsters and achieve higher recognition accuracy compared with rule-based systems. |
Incremental Learning from Scratch for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialogue systems cannot guarantee that all user needs are taken into account in the design phase. |
| Approach: | They propose a new incremental learning framework to design task-oriented dialogue systems without pre-defining user needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is robust to unconsidered user actions and can update itself online with less annotation cost. |
Beyond Prompt: Fine-grained Simulation of Cognitively Impaired Standardized Patients via Stochastic Steering (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training patients with cognitive impairment rely on discrete prompt engineering and fail to capture the heterogeneity of deficits across domains and severity levels. |
| Approach: | They propose to use steering vectors from contrastive pairs of instructions and responses to capture domain-specific features and introduce a Stochastic Token Modulation mechanism to regulate the intervention probability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines in clinical authenticity and severity controllability while remaining open-source. |
A Teacher-Student Framework for Maintainable Dialog Manager (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) is an attractive solution for task-oriented dialog systems . but extending RL-based systems to handle new intents and slots requires a system redesign . |
| Approach: | They propose a teacher-student framework to extend RL-based dialog systems . they propose to specify constraints held in the new dialog manager . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework makes no assumption about unsupported intents and slots, making it possible to improve RL-based systems incrementally. |
LM-Searcher: Cross-domain Neural Architecture Search with LLMs via Unified Numerical Encoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuxuan Hu, Jihao Liu, Ke Wang, Jinliang Zheng, Weikang Shi, Manyuan Zhang, Qi Dou, Rui Liu, Aojun Zhou, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have opened new avenues for solving complex optimization problems, including Neural Architecture Search (NAS). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages LLMs for cross-domain neural architecture optimization without extensive domain-specific tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks. |
Revisiting the Knowledge Injection Frameworks (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Injecting unaligned knowledge tuple into large language models achieves comparable (and sometimes better) results than aligned knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique to inject random knowledge into large language models to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed technique overcomes the sanity problem and pushes the performance limit. |
Ground Every Sentence: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LLMs with Interleaved Reference-Claim Generation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to enhance credibility and verifiability of large language models (LLMs) mainly focus on passage-level or paragraph-level references or citations, which fall short in verifikatability. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that provides sentence-level citations in LLM-generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 90% accuracy in long-form question-answering tasks. |
LeCoDe: A Benchmark Dataset for Interactive Legal Consultation Dialogue Evaluation (2026.acl-long)
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Weikang Yuan, Kaisong Song, Zhuoren Jiang, Junjie Cao, Yujie Zhang, Jun Lin, Kun Kuang, Ji Zhang, Xiaozhong Liu
| Challenge: | Current systems for legal consultation are insufficient to handle the knowledge-intensive nature of real-world consultations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn benchmark dataset to evaluate LLMs in legal consultation settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses LLMs’ consultation capabilities in terms of (1) clarification capability and (2) professional advice quality. |
Improving Cross-Domain Chinese Word Segmentation with Word Embeddings (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Chinese word segmentation (CWS) are character-based and word-based . character-driven approaches use conditional random field models to label sequences, with complex hand-crafted discrete features. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised word-based approach to improve cross-domain Chinese word segmentation given a baseline segmenter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on five datasets covering domains in novels, medicine, and patent. |