Papers by Wenlong Zhang
MSEarth: A Multimodal Benchmark for Earth Science Phenomenon Discovery with MLLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Xiangyu Zhao, Wanghan Xu, Bo Liu, Yuhao Zhou, Fenghua Ling, Ben Fei, Xiaoyu Yue, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu
| Challenge: | Existing datasets often rely on synthetic data or figure-caption pairs, failing to capture the depth and complexity of geoscientific reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal scientific dataset and benchmark curated from open-access publications. |
| Outcome: | MSEarth features over 289K figures with captions enriched by contextual discussions and reasoning from original papers. |
Test-Time Strategies for More Efficient and Accurate Agentic RAG (2026.acl-srw)
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Abhinav Sharma, Brian Zhang, Deepti Guntur, Zhiyang Zuo, Shreyas Chaudhari, Wenlong Zhao, Franck Dernoncourt, Puneet Mathur, Ryan A. Rossi, Nedim Lipka
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems face challenges with complex, multi-hop questions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate contextualization module and de-duplication module to improve the accuracy of retrieved documents and to reduce the number of turns by 10.5%. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves a 5.6% increase in EM score and reduces the average number of turns by 10.5% compared to the baseline. |
MEVTR: A Multilingual Model Enhanced with Visual Text Representations (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that generate multilingual text representations perform poorly on low-resource languages due to lack of representation space and model capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual model enhanced with visual text representations which complements textual representations and extends multilingual representation space with visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer tasks without the target language adapter. |
MTLS: Making Texts into Linguistic Symbols (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | In linguistics, all languages can be considered as symbolic systems . most work overlooks the properties of languages as symbol systems - aaron et al., 1989). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to make texts into linguistic symbols to improve multilingual capability . they use a pre-training method to replace pre-trained language models with a vocabulary map . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves multilingual capabilities on multilingual tasks using BERT and RoBERTa as the backbone. |
UniFashion: A Unified Vision-Language Model for Multimodal Fashion Retrieval and Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | e-commerce tasks such as multimodal retrieval and multimodal generation are largely ignored due to the diversity of the multimodal fashion domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates image generation with retrieval and text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models across fashion tasks. |
For-Value: Efficient Forward-Only Data Valuation for finetuning LLMs and VLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Wenlong Deng, Qi Zeng, Jiaming Zhang, Minghui Chen, Zixin Ding, Christos Thrampoulidis, Boying Gong, Xiaoxiao Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for data valuation rely on gradient computations, making them prohibitive for billion-parameter models. |
| Approach: | They propose a forward-only data valuation framework that enables efficient batch-scalable value estimation while maintaining effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or outperforms gradient-based baselines in detecting influential data and mislabeled data while achieving significant efficiency improvements. |
FlowSearch: Advancing Deep Research with Dynamic Structured Knowledge Flow (2026.acl-long)
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Yusong Hu, Runmin Ma, Yue Fan, Jinxin Shi, Zongsheng Cao, Yuhao Zhou, Jiakang Yuan, Shuaiyu Zhang, Shiyang Feng, Xiangchao Yan, Shufei Zhang, Wenlong Zhang, Lei Bai, Bo Zhang
| Challenge: | FlowSearch is a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that actively constructs and evolves a dynamic structured knowledge flow to drive subtask execution and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive performance on GAIA, HLE, GPQA and TRQA benchmarks and is available to download. |