Papers by Wenjie Zhang
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large generative models have catalyzed a paradigm shift in content generation to Personalized Generation (PGen). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level taxonomy that systematically formalizes PGen's key components, core objectives, and abstract workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy bridging PGen research across multiple modalities highlights open challenges and promising directions for future exploration. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to detect fake news in unseen domains are limited by domain-specific training. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-domain fake news detection method based on adversarial training . they use a document-level and entity-level model to generate domain-independent representations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can detect fake news in unseen domains with the help of pre-trained language models. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought prompting. |
| Approach: | They examine the factors influencing CoT distillation including granularity, format and teacher model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on four teacher models and seven student models across seven mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text retrieval are based on a multi-stage process that involves retrieving documents from a large corpus. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual text representation model and a cross-encoder reranker from scratch for text retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the state-of-the-art models on long-context retrieval benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Counterfactual training is expensive because of the complexity of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They propose a hypothetical training framework that uses paired examples with different hypothetical questions to supervise the direction of model gradient towards the counterfactual answer change. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on tabular MRC datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing reward models evaluate empathy from a single perspective, overlooking bidirectional interaction nature of empathy. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward model that evaluates empathy from a single perspective . they propose PERM to integrate a bystander perspective to monitor overall interaction quality . |
| Outcome: | a new reward model outperforms state-of-the-art models on an emotional intelligence benchmark and an industrial daily conversation dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalized text generation rely on retrieval-augmented generation and parameter-efficient fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that disentangles and represents personalized writing style as a vector in LLM’s activation-space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 8% relative improvement in personalized generation while reducing storage requirements by 1700 over PEFT method. |
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| Challenge: | Molecular Relational Learning (MRL) is a promising way to understand interactions between molecular pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based multi-modal framework for molecular interaction modeling following Chain-of-Thought (CoT) theory which integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework integrates graphical information of two molecules in pair. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on coding tutoring, but their capabilities in guiding users to solve complex tasks remain underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel agent workflow, Trace-and-Verify, which combines knowledge tracing to estimate a student’s knowledge state and turn-by-turn verification to ensure effective guidance toward task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent workflow achieves significantly higher success rates than existing tutoring agents. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on constraint categories, offering little guidance for improving instruction following abilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional constraint framework that allows for instruction following . they construct 9,106 code-verifiable samples and evaluate 18 LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves instruction following performance without compromising general performance. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to cross-lingual phrase retrieval only deal with textual modality, leaving the question of the effectiveness of using multimodal information unanswered. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal cross-lingual phrase retrieval resource that integrates a Wikimedia Commons media store and a large multimodal pre-trained model to bridge the gap between different modalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach performs significantly better than pure textual cross-lingual phrase retrieval on a benchmarked dataset covering eight language pairs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work suffers from mismatching between question type and answer . existing work fails to generate questions with type how while answer is personal name . |
| Approach: | They propose to automatically predict the question type based on the input answer and context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on both SQuAD and MARCO datasets and improves accuracy on the input answer and context. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods operate by learning to fuse modalities, leading to frequent misjudgments. |
| Approach: | They propose a paradigm shift from *learning to fuse* to *learning the reason's process' inspired by the dual-process theory of human cognition, MIND operationalizes a self-improving loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model significantly outperforms baseline models and exhibits strong generalization. |
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that DPL significantly enhances LLM personalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that emphasizes extracting inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach extracts inter-user differences to enhance LLM personalization. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have highlighted the effectiveness of chain-of-thought reasoning in symbolic domains such as mathematics and programming. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-augmented protein reasoning agent that unifies problem decomposition, tool invocation, and grounded answer generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed protein function understanding agent outperforms text-only reasoning models with an average performance improvement of 103%. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models often fail to provide rigorous proof-based reasoning for research-level mathematics. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple yet effective RAG framework that augments retrieved proofs with queries and document contexts to improve retrieval performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves retrieval performance by 34.19% . dual RAG can be used to prove research-level theorems in theoretical machine learning . |
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| Challenge: | Tabular data preparation is a critical step in enhancing the usability of tabular data. |
| Approach: | They analyze how LMs can be combined with other components for different tabular data preparation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lack the ability to capture the relationships within tables and adapt to the tasks involved. |
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| Challenge: | Language features are evolving in real-world social media, resulting in deteriorating performance of text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that allows models to adapt to shifted data via latent topic evolution . they use two information bottleneck regularizers to distinguish past and future topics . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on Twitter on three tasks with 3% of data. |
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| Challenge: | Global scientific publications are growing annually by about 4%-5% (Pinedo et al., 2024). |
| Approach: | They introduce an AI-assisted platform that answers diverse questions from researchers using Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) they develop various tools to understand queries, search from the scientific literature, filter retrieved information, provide accurate and comprehensive answers, and self-refine answers. |
| Outcome: | OpenResearcher is built on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date, domain-specific knowledge. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual biomedical training are monolingual, resulting in limited cross-lingual capability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that transforms a multilingual biomedical corpus into a biomedically domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms monolingual and multilingual models in cross-lingual scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Existing code translation models only learn the contextual semantics of code during pre-training, neglecting executability information closely related to the execution state of the code. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM specifically designed for code translation called ExeCoder . it uses executability representations such as functional semantics and syntax structures to enhance LLMs' capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing open-source code translation models on two metrics. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models are robust in commonsense reasoning . however, some variations in questions can lead to incorrect responses . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale bilingual benchmark consisting of 11,200 cases . they conduct extensive experiments on 41 representative LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark systematically evaluates the robustness of large language models in commonsense reasoning. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multi-turn reasoning evaluation framework to cover multi-turn interactions with the environments of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework covers diverse reasoning capabilities, fine-grained difficulty granularity, and necessitates multi-turn interactions with the environments. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents have accelerated deployment of multi-agent systems for complex tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for instantiating, probing, and measuring emergent risks in LLM-based multi-agent systems under controlled conditions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit is based on a structured topology–environment–protocol–agent–task quintuple enabling reproducible studies of how communication structure, coordination mechanisms, and incentives shape system-level risks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal question answering models rely on sequential retrieval and reasoning, but this single-path paradigm makes them vulnerable to errors due to misleading intermediate steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal multi-hop question answering framework guided by an Adaptive Planning Graph . they propose modality-specific strategies that dynamically adapt to distinct data types . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models that rely on training. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations focus on problem-solving from examiner perspective, overlooking a dual perspective of examiner regarding error identification and correction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an annotated dataset to evaluate large language models from the examiner perspective and to use diverse prompts to evaluate eleven representative LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms all models while LLaMA-2-7B has comparable abilities to closed-source models GPT-3.5 and Gemini Pro. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have proven highly capable in handling downstream tasks, but the token-by-token generation in autoregressive decoding results in quadratic computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that proposes skipping certain layers to construct a draft model, which eliminates the need for additional parameters or training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.31.6 speedup in LLM inference while being sensitive to domain shifts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to adapt Large Language Models for Recommendation (LLMRec) do not represent collaborative information in a text-like format, which may not align optimally with LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLMRec method that integrates collaborative information through text-like encoding. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that BinLLM integrates collaborative information better with LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to optimize large language models with human preferences suffer from preference conflicts in the data. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct Pareto-optimal responses to resolve preference conflicts by using a self-improving DPO framework that enables LLMs to self-generate and select Paret-optimized responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior Pareto Front performance over baselines on two datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Enterprise LLM agents can dramatically improve workplace productivity, but their core capability, retrieving and using internal context to act on a user’s behalf, also creates new risks for sensitive information leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Integrity-grounded benchmark that simulates enterprise workflows across five information-flow directions and evaluates whether agents can convey *essential* content while withholding *sensitive* context in dense retrieval settings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that privacy failures are prevalent in enterprise workflows and that higher task utility correlates with increased privacy violations. |
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| Challenge: | Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based recommender systems face challenges to adapt to dynamic user interests without any model-level updates. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that establishes recommendation-oriented in-context learning by structuring recent user interactions and current inputs into ICL formats. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model adapts to dynamic user interests without model updates without any model updates and is available online at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecICL-8003. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research has explored automatic prompt optimization methods to eliminate manual effort in identifying effective prompts for a given task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for prompt optimization that can be generalized to an unlabeled target group. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on target group and source group while generalizing to unlabeled target group. |
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| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) is a key NLP task aimed at extracting structured information from unstructured text sources. |
| Approach: | They propose to categorize OpenIE into rule-based, neural, and pre-trained large language models and discuss each within a chronological framework. |
| Outcome: | The paper categorizes OpenIE approaches into rule-based, neural, and pre-trained large language models, discussing each within a chronological framework. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on active learning methods focus on the out-of-distribution generalization of out- of-distortion samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual active learning approach that empowers active learning with counterfact thinking to bridge the seen samples with unseen cases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing active learning methods on public datasets with comparable IID performance. |
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| Challenge: | Text error correction methods usually use the source (incorrect) sentence as encoder input and generate the target (correct) sentences through the decoder. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to correct errors in text sequences by randomly masking out the correct tokens in the source sentence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy on Mandarin and English datasets with autoregressive and non-autoregressive generation models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies for sentiment-to-sentiment "translation" only change the underlying sentiment and fail to keep the semantic content. |
| Approach: | They propose a cycled reinforcement learning method that combines neutralization module and emotionalization module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art systems on Yelp and Amazon review datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to process graph problems. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose substructure counting into node-level tasks distributed among node agents and embed the knowledge of distributed algorithms and DP frameworks in the curator agent and privacy controller. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on 6 real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework for substructure counting tasks under edge local differential privacy (LDP). |
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| Challenge: | Current RAG system retrieves evidence from knowledge graphs and text documents but has limitations in multi-hop reasoning, multi-entity questions, and source verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that unifies graph topology, document semantics, and source reliability to support deep, faithful reasoning in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the current hybrid model-based model-driven system by 20.3% and 30.1% on seven benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tool learning methods focus on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose to predict query performance and cost required to accomplish a given task . they then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves higher performance at lower cost compared to baseline approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have achieved remarkable performance in OpenQA, but for practical deployment, knowledge distillation is crucial to maintain high performance while operating under computational constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to perform unsupervised knowledge distillation without the guidance of labels to achieve 99.5% of performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves 99.5% of performance in a commercial question-answering system. |
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| Challenge: | Generative retrieval is a promising new paradigm in text retrieval that generates identifier strings of relevant passages as the retrieval target. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages generative language models to enhance generative retrieval by distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance among the generative retrieval methods. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal information retrieval models rely on single-image inputs . current models use a dense retrieval paradigm, but this approach is not effective . |
| Approach: | They propose a text-image interleaved retrieval task where query and document are interleaves . they adapt off-the-shelf retrievers and build a dense baseline by interleaded multimodal large language model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant improvements over the baseline by substantially fewer visual tokens. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on answer-aware questions generates a sentence and answer span as input . previous work on QG was mainly tackled by rule-based approach and neural-based one . |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate an auxiliary task of language modeling to help question generation in a hierarchical multi-task learning structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on SQuAD and MARCO datasets and human evaluation proves it. |