Papers by Weiming Zhang
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks and MLLMs focus on single-image input scenarios, leaving performance of ML models when handling multiple images underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate fine-grained abilities of multimodal large language models in multi-image scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark categorizes the multi-image abilities into three scenarios: MII, MKS and MIC. |
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| Challenge: | Early debugging efforts focused on code-level analysis, which often fails when addressing complex programming errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that employs natural language as an intermediate representation to improve code debugging by debuggating at a natural language level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms traditional debugging methods and enables a broader modification space through direct refinement guided by execution feedback. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the field of natural language processing because of their excellent performance on various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box method with better generalizability for detecting LLM-generated text by mining the intrinsic features of the text to be detected. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 7.36% and 2.84% improvement in detection performance compared to baselines in detecting texts from different domains generated by GPT-4 and Claude3 respectively. |
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| Challenge: | Existing debate-based approaches to code generation are limited due to several reasons: 1) Reliance on different instances of the same LLM for debate, 2) under-utilization of test cases, and 3) reliance on third-party moderators for result consolidation and decision-making. |
| Approach: | They propose to use test cases to analyze code and identify bugs while opposing models generate test cases for each other to challenge each other's code during the debate process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model collects intelligence of LLMs via test case-driven debate for code generation. |
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-SQL systems that use large language models struggle with complex database structures and domain-specific queries. |
| Approach: | a framework that aligns large language models with database knowledge is proposed . DB-Explore constructs database graphs to capture complex relational schemas . |
| Outcome: | a new framework outperforms existing text-to-SQL systems by outperforming existing systems. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models implicitly fabricate information when inputs are incomplete, causing confidence but unreliable conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for grounded reasoning under incomplete information that decomposes reasoning into two stages . they propose stage-specific rewards to penalize hallucinations, enabling models to detect gaps, stop proactively, and resume reasoning after clarification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves premise detection and task success by 30% . it also reduces average response length by over 20% . |
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| Challenge: | Logic-RL is a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms critique-guided outline refinement into a learnable policy through reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on FreshWiki and WikiOutline . it can be iteratively applied, with improved quality continuing through three refinement rounds before diminishing returns. |
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) aims to predict all quads (aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, sentiment polarity) for a given review. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-training framework with a pseudo-label scorer to assess the match between reviews and their pseudo-labels and train a generative model on it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict all quads (aspect term, aspect category, opinion term, sentiment polarity) for a given review, and it can significantly improve self-training. |
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| Challenge: | Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) is an advanced capability of conversational AI systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-parametric paradigm for Emotion Recognition in conversation that uses supervised contrastive learning to align semantic-view and context-view features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on four widely used benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to retrieve entity information are limited by document level retrieval and intermingled storage of information from different entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enhances entity-specific query handling . MES-RAG introduces proactive security measures that ensure system integrity . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that MES-RAG improves accuracy and recall . the framework can be integrated into existing RAG architectures . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating step-by-step rationales fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, limiting the effectiveness of feedback provided. |
| Approach: | They propose a tree-based preference learning verifier that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing benchmarks on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for long-form outline generation have low knowledge density and lack detail . retrieval-augmented approaches struggle to maintain logical coherence across retrieved information . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that mimics human writers' refinement process by mimicking outlines through imitation and critical self-refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves on the FreshWiki and WikiOutline datasets and establishes a coherent planning framework and structured knowledge base. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models lack interpretability due to the neglect of rationale in the prediction process. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-based legal judgment prediction framework that follows the judge's real trial logic and provides good interactivity and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides good interactivity and interpretability which enables practical use. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed as specific task solvers with sophisticated prompt engineering, but are inherently incapacitating to address complex dynamic scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based agent with policy-level reflection and optimization that can learn from interactive experiences and progressively elevate its behavioral policy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms vanilla LLM and specialized models in blackjack and Texas hold’em. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for ambiguous and incomplete queries are limited by manual construction and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that exploits the mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions by removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. |
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| Challenge: | Label-free reinforcement learning enables large language models to improve reasoning capabilities . but as training maximizes self-consistency, output diversity collapses, authors say . authors propose a framework where a single model alternates between generator and verifier roles . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework where a model alternates between generator and verifier roles, bootstrapping each other. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that CoVerRL outperforms label-free baselines on reasoning benchmarks . the framework can be used to improve reasoning abilities without ground-truth supervision . |
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| Challenge: | CompileAgent is the first LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLM-based agent framework dedicated to repo-level compilation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves compilation success rate, ranging from 10% to 71%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-text retrieval capture fine-grained semantic concepts . however, they lack the ability to capture finer-grain concepts such as objects and actions. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder architecture for fast video-text retrieval that learns lexicon representations to capture fine-grained semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods with 4.8% and 8.2% improvement on MSR-VTT and DiDeMo respectively. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks emphasize general-domain retrieval or static scientific question answering . SciExplore focuses on scientific database navigation, ambiguous literature retrieval, missing reference completion, and cross-source structured knowledge synthesis tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate scientific information-seeking and reasoning capabilities of LLMs and agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark assesses the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and agents in scientific research workflows. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination mitigation are based on external dependency and require external annotations or auxiliary models for preference data collection. |
| Approach: | a new method is proposed to help model-generated hallucinations without external dependencies. |
| Outcome: | a new method that self-injects hallucinations into a generated response improves halluuutations mitigation. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in language generation, but they encounter difficulties in the knowledge-intensive legal domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose court views into different parts, stimulate internal knowledge, and incorporate external information to unleash the power of LLMs in the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates more accurate and reliable court views on two real-world datasets LAIC2021 and CJO2022. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect LLM-generated texts rely on static benchmarks that neglect the evolving nature of LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the generalization of LLM-generated text detection methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark measures generalization of 14 detection methods across LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal Mixture-of-Experts models accurately perceive image content yet fail in subsequent reasoning . Seeing but not thinking phenomenon is a puzzling phenomenon . |
| Approach: | They propose a routing-guided intervention method that enhances domain expert activation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves consistent improvements on visual reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for vision-language pre-training lack high-level semantics and text is not sufficiently involved in masked modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semantics-enhanced cross-modal MIM framework for vision-language representation learning that harvests high-level semantics from global image features via self-supervised agreement learning and transfers them to local patch encodings by sharing the encode space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance on multiple vision-language tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have examined how large language models’ social reasoning capabilities evolve during model size scaling or reasoning tokens scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose to optimize evaluation of Large Language Models from both data and model perspectives and to analyze their reasoning trajectories to identify notable cognitive "Aha Moments" |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the o1-preview model by 19.0 points in the evaluation of large language models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating complex semantics and diverse equations are limited by a fixed view. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view consistent contrastive learning approach that decouples human reasoning into two independent but consistent views. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing baselines on complex problems on multiple languages. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages the strength of both LLMs and domain-specific models in the context of precedents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Named entity recognition (NER) are not consistent with the task, which makes the model vulnerable to incorrect biases. |
| Approach: | They propose to use generative model to recognize entities from sentences . they analyze incorrect biases in the generation process from a causal perspective . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of the generative NER model in various datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly being deployed as content moderators . however, they exploit the Human-AI capability gap and create adversarial environments . smuggling attacks exploit the human-AI gap and exploit the vulnerability . |
| Approach: | They construct a benchmark to evaluate the vulnerability of MLLMs as content moderators . they identify three root causes: limited capabilities of vision encoders, robustness gap in OCR . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exploits the Human-AI capability gap and is vulnerable to smuggling attacks. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that UI-Copilot-7B achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging MemGUI-Bench, outperforming strong 7B-scale GUI agents such as GUI-Owl-7B and UITARS-1.5-7B. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative framework where the GUI agent focuses on task execution while a lightweight copilot provides on-demand assistance for memory retrieval and numerical computation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms GUI-Owl-7B and UI-TARS-1.5-7B on MemGUI-Bench and delivers 17.1% improvement on AndroidWorld over the base Qwen model. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate mathematical equations from natural language ignore parallel or dependent relations between math expressions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate tree structure into the expression-level generation and advocate an expression tree decoding strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods for generating mathematical equations from natural language. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) use Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) but subgraph selection process is non-differentiable, preventing end-to-end training of the retriever and the generator. |
| Approach: | They propose a Differentiable RAG approach that optimizes the retriever and the generator for KGQA. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on WebQSP and CWQ. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance, but their training costs are exorbitant. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient method for exploring optimal solutions within latent space by using latent units to extract input representations from LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on a range of natural language processing tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to extract relational triples from open domain texts suffer from error propagation, relation redundancy and lack of high-level connections. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based approach to construct instance-level representations for relational triples . they use query embeddings and token embeddables to extract all types of triples in one step . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on five widely used benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) experience significant performance degradation when the input exceeds the pretraining context window due to the out-of-distribution (OOD) behavior of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE). |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that remaps out-of-distribution (OOD) positions into the in-distance range with fixed mapping strategies, ignoring the dynamic relationship between input length and effective context window. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on three representative LLMs across five mainstream long-context benchmarks show that the proposed method achieves significant performance improvements compared to existing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating step-by-step “chain-of-thought” rationales are limited to text-to-SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that prompts SQL query generation to produce reasoning steps for SQL queries and fine-tunes it on rationales that lead to correct outcomes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms agent-like prompting methods on the Spider benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Existing reconstruction attacks on text sanitization are not able to accurately assess their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ASR to measure the effectiveness of reconstruction attacks to evaluate sanitization performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reconstruction attacks achieve a 46.4% improvement in ASR over the state-of-the-art baseline with a privacy budget of =4.0 on the SST-2 dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for prompt learning require a multi-round prompting manner and require elaborate templates. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify entity locating and entity typing into prompt learning by enumerating spans to predict their entity types or constructing type-specific prompts to locate entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model in a few-shot setting . it uses a template filled with multiple prompts and a bipartite graph matching mechanism . |
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| Challenge: | Gunrock is a speech-based social chatbot that can be used to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that allows users to understand complex sentences and have in-depth conversations in open domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system produces longer sentences, which are directly related to user engagement (e.g., ratings, number of turns). |
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| Challenge: | Using data from English cloze tests, we demonstrate wide performance gaps across demographic groups and show that pretrained language models disfavor young non-white male speakers. |
| Approach: | They use data from English cloze tests to examine performance differences of pretrained language models across demographic groups. |
| Outcome: | The models disfavor young non-white male speakers, but larger models reduce performance gaps between majority and minority groups. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to jailbreak Large Language Models (LLMs) exploited internal properties or capabilities of the model, such as optimization-based jailbreak methods and methods that leveraged the model’s context-learning abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a new method which injects jailbreak information into user prompts and induces the model to generate harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves near 100% success rates on open-source models while incurring lower time costs compared to previous methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on response generation focus on relevance and fluency, rarely paying attention to the focus. |
| Approach: | They propose a Focus-aware response generation method that takes the focus into consideration and optimizes a multi-level encoder and focal decoder to generate multiple candidate responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generates candidate responses that correspond to different focuses and performs better on two orthogonal inquiry conversation datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Xue et al., 2025): deploying autonomous web agents in production remains difficult due to site heterogeneity and long-horizon instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-evolving agent that can be used to automate web workflows . they use human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebArena, WebChoreAren and industrial deployment show it outperforms baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research indicates without external feedback, LLM’s intrinsic reflection is unstable. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines self-evaluated and external feedback to improve LLM's reflection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of self-evaluated feedback and can catalyze more accurate and stable reflection. |
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) is a well-studied task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that generates span proposals and labels them with categories . they use boundary information of entities and partially matched spans to locate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models on nested NER datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
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| Challenge: | a goal of LLM alignment is to balance usefulness with harmlessness, but this conflictes when knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines safety-research contexts with adversarial interactions to exploit a vulnerability in Jargon queries. |
| Outcome: | a framework outperforms existing methods in analyzing Jargon queries, a study shows . it achieves 93% of attacks across seven models, while remaining useful, the authors say . |
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| Challenge: | Existing automated approaches operate within fixed task schemas and often fail to autonomously discover new evaluation dimensions. |
| Approach: | They propose an automated framework that constructs domain-specific benchmarks directly from unstructured corpora using Bloom’s Taxonomy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework uncovers a broader and more fine-grained task space than expert-curated benchmarks while producing high-quality instances that preserve established model-level evaluation trends. |
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| Challenge: | Theory of Mind (ToM) is the foundation of social interaction and is crucial for social interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-belief solver that can transform a character’s higher-order beliefs into another character’ s first-order belief under belief communication period. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the ToM capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in multiple scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Using large language models, large multimodal models struggle with basic tasks like reading time from a clock and planning a route using a road map. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal self-instruct that synthesizes massive abstract images and visual reasoning instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes 11,193 abstract images and reasoning instructions across eight visual scenarios. |