Papers by Wendi Zhang
From Passive Metric to Active Signal: The Evolving Role of Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but unreliability remains a barrier to deployment in high-stakes domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform uncertainty from a passive diagnostic metric to an active control signal guiding real-time model behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evolution from passive diagnostic metric to active control signal is critical for high-stakes applications. |
Gradient-guided Attention Map Editing: Towards Efficient Contextual Hallucination Mitigation (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) often experience “contextual hallucination” where they prioritize self-generated content over input context, leading to a disregard for pertinent details. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically adjusts attention maps to enhance contextual relevance by using a trained classifier to identify attention maps likely to induce hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces hallucinations across open-source models on summarization and open-book QA tasks. |
Synthetic Knowledge Ingestion: Towards Knowledge Refinement and Injection for Enhancing Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models capture factual knowledge across a wide range of domains, but refining their capabilities on previously seen knowledge remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a synthetic knowledge ingestion method that leverages fine-grained synthesis and interleaved generation to construct high-quality data representations from raw knowledge sources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on question-answering tasks spanning finance, biomedicine, and open-generation domains. |
Zero-Shot Event Detection Based on Ordered Contrastive Learning and Prompt-Based Prediction (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing zero-shot event detection methods do not work for unseen types . supervised methods require predefined event types or external tools . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to detect events from unstructured text without annotating samples . they propose to use ordered contrastive learning and prompt-based prediction to identify trigger words . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model detects events more effectively and accurately than state-of-the-art methods. |
Denoising Multi-Source Weak Supervision for Neural Text Classification (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent years have witnessed the rapid development of deep neural networks (DNNs) for text classification problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a label denoiser which estimates the source reliability using a conditional soft attention mechanism and reduces label noise by aggregating rule-annotated weak labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on sentiment, topic, and relation classifications and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods even without labeled data. |
Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Model with Weak Supervision: A Contrastive-Regularized Self-Training Approach (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Fine-tuned pre-trained language models (LMs) have enormous success in many natural language processing tasks, but they still require excessive labeled data in the fine-tuning stage. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable fine-tuning pre-trained language models with weak supervision without any labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the strongest baseline and achieves competitive performance with fully-supervised fine-tuning methods. |
Heuristic-based Search Algorithm in Automatic Instruction-focused Prompt Optimization: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of automatic prompt optimization methods that explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
Towards Statistical Factuality Guarantee for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in image-conditioned text generation, but hallucinated outputs pose a major barrier to their use in safety-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal-prediction-based framework that achieves finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees to the factuality of LVLM output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the error rate of LLaVa-1.5 claims from 87.8% to 10.0% while ensuring that the output is accurate. |
SEE: Strategic Exploration and Exploitation for Cohesive In-Context Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing approaches separate the optimization of prompt instructions and in-context learning examples, leading to incohesive, suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines both prompt instructions and in-context learning examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods on 35 benchmark tasks. |
Survival of the Safest: Towards Secure Prompt Optimization through Interleaved Multi-Objective Evolution (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Experimental evaluations across diverse benchmark datasets affirm ‘s efficacy in delivering high performance and notably enhancing safety and security compared to single-objective methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-objective prompt optimization framework that integrates semantic, feedback, and crossover mutations to effectively traverse the prompt landscape. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enhances both performance and security in large language models while keeping computational demands low. |
Divide-Conquer-Reasoning for Consistency Evaluation and Automatic Improvement of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the quality and consistency of text generated by Large Language Models are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-conquer-reasoning approach to evaluate LLM-generated texts using a split-and-conquers evaluator and an automatic metric converter to facilitate this approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on multiple benchmarks and reduces 90% of output inconsistencies in one iteration. |
Grounded Graph Decoding improves Compositional Generalization in Question Answering (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current compositional generalization models lose syntax context when learning a flat input . a new method to improve compositional globalization is proposed to ground structured predictions with an attention mechanism. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to ground structured predictions by a structure-based attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method performs competitively on the Compositional Freebase Questions dataset. |