Papers by Wenjie Zhang

43 papers
Personalized Generation In Large Model Era: A Survey (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Cross-Domain Fake News Detection based on Dual-Granularity Adversarial Training (2025.coling-main)

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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.
Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
mGTE: Generalized Long-Context Text Representation and Reranking Models for Multilingual Text Retrieval (2024.emnlp-industry)

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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.
Hypothetical Training for Robust Machine Reading Comprehension of Tabular Context (2023.findings-acl)

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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.
PERM: Psychology-grounded Empathetic Reward Modeling for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Personalized Text Generation with Contrastive Activation Steering (2025.acl-long)

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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.
MolTC: Towards Molecular Relational Modeling In Language Models (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
MulDimIF: A Multi-Dimensional Constraint Framework for Evaluating and Improving Instruction Following in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Multimodal Cross-lingual Phrase Retrieval (2024.lrec-main)

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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.
Question-type Driven Question Generation (D19-1)

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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.
MIND Your Reasoning: A Meta-Cognitive Intuitive-Reflective Network for Dual-Reasoning in Multimodal Stance Detection (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Measuring What Makes You Unique: Difference-Aware User Modeling for Enhancing LLM Personalization (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
Interleaved Tool-Call Reasoning for Protein Function Understanding (2026.acl-long)

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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%.
Retrieval-Augmented Language Models are Mimetic Theorem Provers (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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 .
Empowering Tabular Data Preparation with Language Models: Why and How? (2026.acl-long)

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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.
VIBE: Topic-Driven Temporal Adaptation for Twitter Classification (2023.emnlp-main)

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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.
OpenResearcher: Unleashing AI for Accelerated Scientific Research (2024.emnlp-demo)

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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.
KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model (2023.findings-emnlp)

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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.
ExeCoder: Empowering Large Language Models with Executability Representation for Code Translation (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
HellaSwag-Pro: A Large-Scale Bilingual Benchmark for Evaluating the Robustness of LLMs in Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
MTR-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Multi-Turn Reasoning Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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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.
RiskLab: A Controlled Toolkit for Probing Emergent Risks in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-demo)

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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.
MMAPG: A Training-Free Framework for Multimodal Multi-hop Question Answering via Adaptive Planning Graphs (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Focus on Error Identification and Correction (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
KNN-SSD: Enabling Dynamic Self-Speculative Decoding via Nearest Neighbor Layer Set Optimization (2026.findings-eacl)

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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.
Text-like Encoding of Collaborative Information in Large Language Models for Recommendation (2024.acl-long)

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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.
Self-Improvement Towards Pareto Optimality: Mitigating Preference Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
CI-Work: Benchmarking Contextual Integrity in Enterprise LLM Agents (2026.acl-industry)

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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.
Customizing In-context Learning for Dynamic Interest Adaption in LLM-based Recommendation (2025.findings-acl)

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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.
Robust Prompt Optimization for Large Language Models Against Distribution Shifts (2023.emnlp-main)

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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.
A Survey on Open Information Extraction from Rule-based Model to Large Language Model (2024.findings-emnlp)

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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.
Counterfactual Active Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Mask the Correct Tokens: An Embarrassingly Simple Approach for Error Correction (2022.emnlp-main)

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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.
Unpaired Sentiment-to-Sentiment Translation: A Cycled Reinforcement Learning Approach (P18-1)

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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.
Agent-based Substructure Counting under Local Differential Privacy (2026.acl-long)

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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).
HydraRAG: Structured Cross-Source Enhanced Large Language Model Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario (2024.findings-emnlp)

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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.
GOVERN: Gradient Orientation Vote Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Reinforced Distillation (2024.emnlp-industry)

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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.
Distillation Enhanced Generative Retrieval (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
Towards Text-Image Interleaved Retrieval (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Multi-Task Learning with Language Modeling for Question Generation (D19-1)

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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.

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