Papers by Xi Zhao
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for logical reasoning in large language models lack language naturalness or limited complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose to use first-order logic annotations to evaluate logical reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset evaluates the FOL reasoning ability of supervised fine-tuning on medium-sized language models. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have attracted considerable attention from academic and industrial communities due to their outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment to evaluate the noise within the data and dynamically adjust the training process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses other algorithms in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used dataset "Helpful and Harmless" |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to induce Chain-of-Thought (CoT) in LLMs are limited and do not consider the importance of efficiently utilizing existing CoT data. |
| Approach: | They propose a new training paradigm which exploits the inherent information in CoT for iterative generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm surpasses direct seq2seq training on CoT-extensive tasks without data augmentation or altering the model itself. |
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| Challenge: | Continued pre-training on paraphrased data has shown empirical promise for enhancing knowledge acquisition, but this approach is costly and unreliable as it relies on external models or manual effort for rewriting. |
| Approach: | They propose formatting-based data augmentation which diversifies documents conveying the same knowledge by altering document formats rather than their content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve generalization to diverse paraphrased contexts and enhance pre-training and instruction tuning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-answer question answering systems struggle to retrieve and synthesize a large number of evidence passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-answer question answering framework that generates a large set of passages and then processes each passage individually to generate an initial high-recall but noisy answer set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on the QAMPARI and RoMQA datasets, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 11.17%. |
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| Challenge: | Large-scale two-stream pre-trained models like CLIP have achieved tremendous success in image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal framework for image-text retrieval using two-stream pre-trained models . they embed images and texts into instance representations with two separate encoders . experimental results on MSCOCO and Flickr30k reveal the effectiveness of their framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves image-text retrieval performance on two popular cross-modal retrieval benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on decoding word-level fMRI volumes from a restricted vocabulary. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-vocabulary task to bridge fMRI time series and human language . they use a pre-trained language model to construct a robust encoder for cognitive signals . |
| Outcome: | The proposed task bridges fMRI time series and human language with a baseline model. |
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential in improving performance on challenging reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new metric which extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models and quantifies label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric extends the concept of pointwise V-information to black-box models, quantifying label-relevant new information introduced by CoT prompting beyond pre-existing label information. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis. |
| Outcome: | SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields. |
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| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
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| Challenge: | High-Level Synthesis (HLS) is a hardware design tool that can be used to design hardware from C-like languages, but its widespread adoption is limited by strict coding constraints and design-specific optimizations. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent HLS design framework that leverages specialized LLMs for automated debugging and directive tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-3-pro in debugging and speedups across various HLS kernels and neural network accelerators. |
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| Challenge: | Existing research on taskoriented dialog systems mainly includes pipeline and end-to-end methods due to its non-differentiable nature. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level reward modeling approach that factorizes a reward into a three-level hierarchy: domain, act, and slot. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves performance and speed of training in a wide range of dialog systems. |
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| Challenge: | Empowering machines to understand scientific literature is crucial for accelerating scientific discovery and advancing the AI for Science paradigm. |
| Approach: | They propose a systematic taxonomy that organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy organizes resources spanning structural understanding, text understanding, multimodal understanding and pre-training/instruction fine-tuning. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models with prompting have achieved encouraging results on many natural language processing tasks due to the absence of task-tailored promptings. |
| Approach: | They propose three promptings specifically designed for Text-to-SQL: SL-prompt, CC-promped, and SL+CC prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed promptings achieve execution accuracy of 86.2% and test-suite accuracy of 76% . the granularity of schema linking and the order of clause generation have great impact on performance, which are considered little in previous research. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multimodal classification systems use tabular, textual, and visual data to provide efficient and scalable services. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal classification benchmark MuG with eight datasets . they analyze label balance ratios, percentages of missing features, distributions of data within each modality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is available on https://github.com/lujiaying/MUG-Bench . it includes eight datasets that allow researchers to evaluate and improve their models . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for parameter pruning fail to utilize the knowledge from pruned parameters. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses manifold learning and the Information Bottleneck measure to merge similar layers to preserve model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms pruning methods on multiple datasets and LLMs with quantization and achieves substantial compression ratios. |
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| Challenge: | a framework for constructing dialogue world models for natural language tasks is currently lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be used to train a dialogue world model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can predict future utterances and user beliefs . it can achieve state-of-the-art performance on emotion classification and sentiment identification . |
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| Challenge: | Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a key parameter-efficient fine-tuning method . however, its effectiveness is hampered by semantic drift and structural incoherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank Adaptation framework that tackles semantic drift and structural incoherence by pruning task-irrelevant directions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on large language models, vision models, and vision models show that the proposed framework outperforms LoRA and advanced dynamic rank allocation and sparsity-based methods. |
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| Challenge: | MLLMs perform poorly on traditional culture images, indicating limitations in understanding high-level semantics and lacking a deep knowledge base of Chinese traditional culture. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese images to assess MLLMs' higher-order perception and understanding of Chinese visual content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates images that represent Chinese traditional culture, such as famous Chinese traditional paintings, to ensure the authenticity of the Chinese context. |
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| Challenge: | Large-scale language models with prompts have shown remarkable performance on few-shot learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to improve SMAll language models’ few-SHot ability by training on intermediate tasks before prompt-based fine-tuning on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on sentence-pair and sentiment classification tasks by training on intermediate tasks before fine-tuning on downstream tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to verify agent behaviors in complex environments rely on rule-based verifiers or LLM-as-a-Judge models. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate Agent-as-a-Judge across three domains . the benchmark covers search, data systems, and graphical user interfaces - with 155 tasks and 516 trajectories . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark outperforms existing benchmarks in search, data systems, and GUI domains while revealing open challenges in agent-based verification. |
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| Challenge: | Existing intent detection models can only handle predefined intent classes in the offline environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that continually learns new intent classes from new data . structure-based retrospection and contrastive knowledge distillation are used to solve these problems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on three benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods assess suitability primarily through student likelihood, favoring trajectories that align closely with the student model’s current behavior but overlooking more informative ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a Rank–Surprisal Ratio metric that captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric captures both alignment and informativeness to assess the suitability of a reasoning trajectory. |
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that reinforcement learning (RL) can refine the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) but requires a key prerequisite: the model must already be able to generate high-utility reasoning paths with non-negligible probability. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses answer-conditioned reasoning as a variational surrogate for question-only reasoning. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 benchmarks and 3 models show that RAVR reduces hesitation, strengthens conclusion consolidation, and promotes problem-specific strategies in reasoning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on pre-training models have shown that it is important to use a framework to deploy various pre- training models efficiently. |
| Approach: | They propose an assemble-on-demand pre-training toolkit that assembles pre-trained models on demand and encapsulates them with rich modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can reproduce state-of-the-art models or develop models that remain unexplored. |
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| Challenge: | Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is a fundamental format for various tasks in NLP, such as commonsense reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to increase the number of correct options in a dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of multiple choice question answering (MCQA) and improves its accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors. |
| Outcome: | The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Text2SQL generation still have a critical semantic gap . a dedicated validator translates generated SQL back into natural language and checks whether its logic is aligned with the original question. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces Guided Generation with SQL2Text Back-translation Validation . dedicated validator translates generated SQL back into natural language and checks whether logic is aligned with original question . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 63.23% execution accuracy on the BIRD benchmark and 90.42% on repaired BIDR dev. |
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| Challenge: | AEGIS examines whether current models can effectively audit AI-generated images in academic papers. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic benchmark for forensic analysis of AI-Generated academic ImageS that reveals limitations in academic image forensics. |
| Outcome: | AEGIS compared with existing benchmarks on seven academic categories and features key advances in forensic analysis. |
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| Challenge: | VISTA dataset contains 18,599 recorded AI conference presentations . large multimodal models exhibit reduced performance in scientific contexts, study shows . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset specifically designed for video-to-text summarization in scientific domains. |
| Outcome: | This paper compares the performance of large models with human models and shows that they improve on human models. |
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| Challenge: | Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) method across various domains. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that automatically re-weights ambiguous content to reduce ambiguities by calculating semantic similarity from preference pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in performance across multiple model scales and widely adopted benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that rely on limited demos and out-of-demonstration (OOD) queries fail when faced with out- of-demotion queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-aware prompting method that elicits the inherent generalizability of large language models by query-based demo generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in the OOD setting and two public math benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing query rewriting models ignore user history behaviors and consider only the instant search query, which is often a short string offering limited information about the true shopping intent. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end context-aware query rewriting model that takes search context into account and builds a session graph using the history search queries and their contained words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models under various metrics. |
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| Challenge: | Xu and Peng, 2025) . . SPUR is a comprehensive benchmark for scientific experimental image perception, understanding, and reasoning, comprising 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
| Approach: | They propose to use 4,264 question-answering (QA) pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images to evaluate the visual perception of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) . they also propose to utilize cross-panel relation understanding to evaluate MLLM’s ability to decipher intricate cross-panel relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on 4,264 question-answering pairs derived from 1,084 expert-curated images. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that transformer-based models are effective over many tasks, but they are expensive to deploy in the industrial application. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformer-based inference solution that optimizes kernels for long inputs and large hidden sizes and a flexible CUDA memory manager to reduce the memory footprint when deploying a large model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution achieves an average speedup of 1.40-4.20x on the transformer decoder layer with an A100 GPU. |
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| Challenge: | a new method for generating chart annotations is proposed to improve visual reasoning in multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a code-as-intermediary translation method for distilling visual reasoning abilities from LLMs to MLLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is cost-effective, efficient and scalable. |
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods for MLLMs lack multi-granularity knowledge . existing knowledge editing approaches lack multimodality knowledge and generalize to multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal knowledge editing method which integrates key knowledge layers within MLLMs and collaboratively edits them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves visual generality performance on knowledge data of different granularities. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained models perform poorly with limited data and rare biomedical words. |
| Approach: | They propose to use prompt to fine-tune pre-trained models for biomedical domain tuning with a simple approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 6% improvement in biomedical natural language inference task without any extra parameters or training steps using few-shot vanilla prompt settings. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for Deep Research Agents (DRAs) treat report generation as a single-shot writing task. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation suite that establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation suite establishes multi-turn report revision as a new axis. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models generate biased stances due to spurious correlations and preference towards certain individuals and topics. |
| Approach: | They propose a counterfactual Augmented Calibration Network to calibrate potential bias in stance detection of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration network can mitigate biases of large language models, achieving state-of-the-art results. |