Papers by Wenkai Zhou
BIG5-CHAT: Shaping LLM Personalities Through Training on Human-Grounded Data (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for embedding human personality traits into LLMs are limited by realism and validity issues. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale dataset to embed human personality traits into LLMs . they use supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to train LLM models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods outperform prompting on personality assessments and IPIP-NEO, and show higher conscientiousness, agreeableness, lower extraversion, and lower neuroticism on reasoning tasks. |
Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Tingchao Fu, Wenkai Wang, Fanxiao Li, Huadong Zhang, Jinhong Zhang, Dayang Li, Yunyun Dong, Renyang Liu, Wei Zhou
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing paradigms suffer from editing decoupling failures . entity knowledge is sequestered into disentangled modality-specific pathways . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines in reliability and consistency while preserving model locality. |
Bridging Semantic and Modality Gaps in Zero-Shot Captioning via Retrieval from Synthetic Data (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot image captioning fail to bridge the semantic gap between images and textual inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-based framework that leverages only existing synthetic image-text pairs as its search corpus to bridge the gap when using synthetic data for captioning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method bridges the semantic gap between a synthetic image and its input text . it extracts image-related textual descriptions to mitigate the modality gap during decoding . |
Distilling Rule-based Knowledge into Large Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have broadened their applicability across diverse realworld scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to encode rule-based knowledge into large language models by using strong in-context abilities to extract the knowledge from the textual rules and then explicitly encode it into the parameters of LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed learning paradigm is much more efficient than example-based learning in both sample size and generalization ability. |
RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Backdoor attacks are a serious threat to the safety of reusing deep neural networks (DNNs). |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient online defense mechanism based on robustness-aware perturbations to distinguish poisoned and clean samples to defend against backdoor attacks on natural language processing models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better defending performance and lower computational costs than existing defense methods. |
Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor attacks are not stealthy to system deployers or users. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel backdoor attack method based on negative data augmentation and modifying word embeddings that is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is much stealthier while maintaining pretty good attacking performance. |
AlphaContext: An Evolutionary Tree-based Psychometric Context Generator for Creativity Assessment (2026.acl-long)
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Yixuan Wang, Yue Huang, Hong Qian, Yunzhao Wei, Yifei Ding, Wenkai Wang, Zhi Liu, Zhongjing Huang, Aimin Zhou, Jiajun Guo
| Challenge: | Existing LLM-based tools struggle with insufficient assessment cues, weak narrative coherence, limited stylistic diversity, and poor support for creative thinking. |
| Approach: | They propose an evolutionary tree-based psychometric context generator that integrates rule-guided outline planning, sentence-level MCTS generation, MAP-Elites quality-diversity optimization and assessment-guide refiner simulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms strong LLMs and structured frameworks on 7 evaluation dimensions and shows higher alignment with expert-designed contexts. |
PPTAgent: Generating and Evaluating Presentations Beyond Text-to-Slides (2025.emnlp-main)
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Hao Zheng, Xinyan Guan, Hao Kong, Wenkai Zhang, Jia Zheng, Weixiang Zhou, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu, Xianpei Han, Le Sun
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating presentations from documents focus on improving and evaluating content quality in isolation, overlooking visual appeal and structural coherence. |
| Approach: | They propose an edit-based presentation generation system that analyzes and iterates on slides to create new slides. |
| Outcome: | The proposed presentation generation tool outperforms existing methods in three dimensions . it analyzes slides, iterates and generates edit actions based on selected slides . |