Papers by Xi Zhao

42 papers
FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic (2024.emnlp-main)

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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.
CLHA: A Simple Yet Effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (2024.lrec-main)

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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"
AS-ES Learning: Towards efficient CoT learning in small models (2024.findings-acl)

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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.
Enhancing LLM Knowledge Learning through Generalization (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
Inter-Passage Verification for Multi-evidence Multi-answer QA (2025.findings-acl)

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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%.
Conditioned Masked Language and Image Modeling for Image-Text Dense Retrieval (2022.findings-emnlp)

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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.
UniCoRN: Unified Cognitive Signal ReconstructioN bridging cognitive signals and human language (2023.acl-long)

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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.
Analyzing Chain-of-thought Prompting in Black-Box Large Language Models via Estimated V-information (2024.lrec-main)

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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.
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)

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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.
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)

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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.
ChatHLS: Towards Systematic Design Automation and Optimization for High-Level Synthesis (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Imperfect also Deserves Reward: Multi-Level and Sequential Reward Modeling for Better Dialog Management (2021.naacl-main)

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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.
Datasets for Scientific Literature Understanding: A Survey (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Enhancing Text-to-SQL Capabilities of Large Language Models through Tailored Promptings (2024.lrec-main)

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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.
MuG: A Multimodal Classification Benchmark on Game Data with Tabular, Textual, and Visual Fields (2023.findings-emnlp)

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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 .
Pruning via Merging: Compressing LLMs via Manifold Alignment Based Layer Merging (2024.emnlp-main)

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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.
Dream to Chat: Model-based Reinforcement Learning on Dialogues with User Belief Modeling (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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 .
Not All Directions Matter: Towards Structured and Task-Aware Low-Rank Model Adaptation (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Can MLLMs Understand the Deep Implication Behind Chinese Images? (2025.acl-long)

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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.
SMASH: Improving SMAll Language Models’ Few-SHot Ability with Prompt-Based Distillation (2022.findings-emnlp)

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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.
AJ-Bench: Benchmarking Agent-as-a-Judge for Environment-Aware Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
Class Lifelong Learning for Intent Detection via Structure Consolidation Networks (2023.findings-acl)

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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.
Which Reasoning Trajectories Teach Students to Reason Better? A Simple Metric of Informative Alignment (2026.acl-long)

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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.
RAVR: Reference-Answer-guided Variational Reasoning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
UER: An Open-Source Toolkit for Pre-training Models (D19-3)

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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.
LLMs May Perform MCQA by Selecting the Least Incorrect Option (2025.coling-main)

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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.
EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations (2026.findings-acl)

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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.
GBV-SQL: Guided Generation and SQL2Text Back-Translation Validation for Multi-Agent Text2SQL (2026.acl-long)

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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.
AEGIS: A Holistic Benchmark for Evaluating Forensic Analysis of AI-Generated Academic Images (2026.acl-long)

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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.
What Is That Talk About? A Video-to-Text Summarization Dataset for Scientific Presentations (2025.acl-long)

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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.
Ambiguity Awareness Optimization: Towards Semantic Disambiguation for Direct Preference Optimization (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Self-Demos: Eliciting Out-of-Demonstration Generalizability in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

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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.
Context-Aware Query Rewriting for Improving Users’ Search Experience on E-commerce Websites (2023.acl-industry)

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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.
Decoding Scientific Experimental Images: The SPUR Benchmark for Perception, Understanding, and Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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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.
Easy and Efficient Transformer: Scalable Inference Solution For Large NLP Model (2022.naacl-industry)

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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.
Distill Visual Chart Reasoning Ability from LLMs to MLLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

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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.
M2Edit: Locate and Edit Multi-Granularity Knowledge in Multimodal Large Language Model (2025.emnlp-main)

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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.
Prompt Combines Paraphrase: Teaching Pre-trained Models to Understand Rare Biomedical Words (2022.coling-1)

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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.
Beyond Single-shot Writing: Deep Research Agents are Unreliable at Multi-turn Report Revision (2026.acl-long)

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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.
KuiLeiXi: a Chinese Open-Ended Text Adventure Game (2021.acl-demo)

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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.
Mitigating Biases of Large Language Models in Stance Detection with Counterfactual Augmented Calibration (2025.naacl-long)

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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.

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