Papers by Xiang Zeng
Don’t Half-listen: Capturing Key-part Information in Continual Instruction Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yongquan He, Wenyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Peng Zhang, Lingxun Meng, Xiang Zhou, Ke Zeng, Xunliang Cai
| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve instruction tuning for large language models may cause catastrophic forgetting (CF) CF is a problem where previously learned abilities are degraded . |
| Approach: | They propose a continual instruction tuning method that uses key-part information gain to replay data and refine training objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance on both seen and held-out tasks. |
Event-Radar: Event-driven Multi-View Learning for Multimodal Fake News Detection (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting multimedia fake news have demonstrated excellent results . however, addressing event-level inconsistency and learning from poor-quality news remains a challenge . |
| Approach: | They propose an Event-diven fake news detection framework that integrates visual manipulation, textual emotion and multimodal inconsistency at event-level for fake news identification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework performs well on three large-scale fake news detection benchmarks. |
SafeSteer: A Decoding-level Defense Mechanism for Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing defense methods rely on fine-tuning or inefficient post-hoc interventions, limiting their ability to address novel attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-level defense mechanism that employs a lightweight discriminator to iteratively steer the decoding process toward safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves safety performance by up to 33.40% without fine-tuning on multiple MLLMs. |
DRAMA: Dynamic Multi-Granularity Graph Estimate Retrieval over Tabular and Textual Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | TableTextQA tasks require tabular and textual data, gaining increasing attention . however, row-based approaches suffer from limitations such as lack of interaction between rows . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that incorporates an interaction mechanism among multiple rows . Empirical results demonstrate that the proposed method is effective . |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed model is effective on tabFact and HybridQA datasets. |
Xiaomingbot: A Multilingual Robot News Reporter (2020.acl-demos)
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Runxin Xu, Jun Cao, Mingxuan Wang, Jiaze Chen, Hao Zhou, Ying Zeng, Yuping Wang, Li Chen, Xiang Yin, Xijin Zhang, Songcheng Jiang, Yuxuan Wang, Lei Li
| Challenge: | Xiaomingbot is a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Approach: | They propose to build a multilingual and multimodal software robot with four inte- gal capabilities: news generation, news translation, news reading and avatar animation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates Chinese news, then reads it in multiple languages and generates an animated avatar reading it. |
Automated Peer Reviewing in Paper SEA: Standardization, Evaluation, and Analysis (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Jianxiang Yu, Zichen Ding, Jiaqi Tan, Kangyang Luo, Zhenmin Weng, Chenghua Gong, Long Zeng, RenJing Cui, Chengcheng Han, Qiushi Sun, Zhiyong Wu, Yunshi Lan, Xiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to review scientific papers are limited by their content or quality . SEA is a framework for automated scientific review, but its contents are generic or partial. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for automated scientific review using large language models . they propose to use a standardized review dataset to fine-tune an LLM to generate high-quality reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate high-quality reviews from standardized datasets and improves on the existing feedback mechanisms. |
Weakly Supervised Text Classification using Supervision Signals from a Language Model (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing weakly supervised text classification methods require a large number of annotated data and human annotations are expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose to query a masked language model with cloze style prompts to obtain supervision signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on three datasets by 2%, 4%, and 3%. |
HiDe-LLaVA: Hierarchical Decoupling for Continual Instruction Tuning of Multimodal Large Language Model (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve instructionfollowing performance of MLLMs often trade off memory efficiency for performance gains, compromising overall efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-specific expansion and task-general fusion framework based on variations in Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity across different model layers when trained on diverse datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance compared to existing benchmarks. |
MixTEA: Semi-supervised Entity Alignment with Mixture Teaching (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to learn informative entity embeddings are insufficient for semi-supervised entity alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method which guides the model learning with an end-to-end mixture teaching of manually labeled mappings and probabilistic pseudo mappings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods on benchmark datasets and further analyses. |
HyperEdit: Unlocking Instruction-based Text Editing in LLMs via Hypernetworks (2026.findings-acl)
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Yiming Zeng, Jinghan Cao, Zexin Li, Wanhao Yu, Zhankai Ye, Dawei Xiang, Ting Hua, Xin Liu, Shangqian Gao, Tingting Yu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches treat instruction-based text editing as a generic text generation problem. Existing methods either over-edit or fail to apply modifications consistently. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that processes each editing request to best align with it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 9% improvement over the state-of-the-art model. |
CLEEK: A Chinese Long-text Corpus for Entity Linking (2020.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a fundamental task in natural language processing, says nigel kilgstrom . existing corpora for entity linking in china are lacking and deficient, he says . kilsmstrom: a new method for entity disambiguation can be developed for Chinese . |
| Approach: | They build a Chinese corpus of multi-domain long text for entity linking . they evaluate the difficulty of documents with respect to entity linking using a measure . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on 100 documents from diverse domains and is publicly accessible. |
PromptSculptor: Multi-Agent Based Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization (2025.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | PromptSculptor automates the iterative prompt optimization process for Text-to-Image models . previous work focused on generating detailed, high-quality prompts based on user feedback . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes a task into four specialized agents . they use Chain-of-Thought reasoning to transform a short, vague user prompt into a comprehensive, refined prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves output quality and reduces iterations needed for user satisfaction. |
Stephanie: Step-by-Step Dialogues for Mimicking Human Interactions in Social Conversations (2025.findings-naacl)
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Hao Yang, Hongyuan Lu, Xinhua Zeng, Yang Liu, Xiang Zhang, Haoran Yang, Yumeng Zhang, Shan Huang, Yiran Wei, Wai Lam
| Challenge: | a new paradigm for dialogue systems is being developed to mimic human interactions . the current single-step dialogue paradigm lacks the depth and fluidity of human interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step dialogue paradigm that mimics human interactions . they use a dataset to fine-tune existing language models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system mimics the dynamic nature of human conversations . it is compared with existing paradigms and will be released later this year . |
DPN-LE: Dual Personality Neuron Localization and Editing for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Lifan Zheng, Xue Yang, Jiawei Chen, Chenyan WU, Jingyuan Zhang, Fanheng Kong, Xinyi Zeng, Xiang Chen, Yu Tian
| Challenge: | Current methods for editing personality traits in large language models can change personalities but reduce performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel paradigm for personality editing that locates and edits LLM neurons and enables competitive personality control at inference time. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct and Qwen2.5-7B-instruct show that the proposed approach can improve performance and improve performance. |
Multi-Modal Entities Matter: Benchmarking Multi-Modal Entity Alignment (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing MMEA datasets consider multi-modal data as attributes of textual entities, neglecting correlations between the multi-modal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal entity alignment dataset that models multi-dimensional data as textual entities in the MMKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can learn the structural information of entities by considering both intra-modal and cross-modal relations and infer the similarity of different types of entity pairs. |
Reinforcement Learning–Guided Adaptive Tuning for Out-of-Distribution Harmful Text Detection (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for testing harmful information on social media rely on fixed parameters that fail to handle substantial semantic discrepancies . RLAT can be used to adapt to semantic variations while preventing overfitting from continuous tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning-guided adaptive tuning method for harmful text detection that optimizes consistency loss and applies word-level attention constraints to reduce over-reliance on local words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art models in cross-platform and cross-temporal scenarios across multiple public datasets. |
From Knowledge to Treatment: Large Language Model Assisted Biomedical Concept Representation for Drug Repurposing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for drug repurposing ignore common-sense biomedical concept knowledge in real-world labs, such as mechanistic priors indicating that certain drugs are fundamentally incompatible with specific treatments. |
| Approach: | They propose a Large Language Model-assisted framework for Drug Repurposing which improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the representation of biomedical concepts within KGs by extracting treatment-related textual representations of biomedic entities from large language models and fine-tuning knowledge graph embedding models. |
RShield: A User-level Traceable Backdoor Watermark for LLMs in Embedding-as-a-Service (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor watermarking techniques are limited to zero-bit detection . RShield enables reliable user-level attribution of large language models under model extraction attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-bit backdoor watermarking technique that enables reliable user-level attribution of large language models under model extraction attacks. |
| Outcome: | RShield achieves 100% multi-bit watermark recovery and high semantic fidelity under model extraction attacks compared to existing methods. |
FARSS: Fisher-Optimized Adaptive Low-Rank and Singular-Vector Selection for Knowledge-Preserving Fine-Tuning (2026.findings-acl)
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Renxing Chen, Ziwei Xiang, Peisong Wang, Hongjian Fang, Meng Li, Fanhu Zeng, Yanan Zhu, Peipei Yang, Xu-Yao Zhang, Jian Cheng
| Challenge: | Low-rank adaptation methods for large language models have limitations in preserving world knowledge and limiting updates to preserve world knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a Fisher-optimized adaptive low Rank and Singular-VectorSelection framework for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning that allows efficient and task-sensitive updates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for knowledge-preserving fine-tuning. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memory (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents store private user-agent interactions in memory for demonstrations, introducing new privacy risks for LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that extracts private information from memory under a black-box setting and propose a method that can be used to attack the agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is effective under a black-box setting and it is demonstrated on two representative agents. |
DiffER: Diffusion Entity-Relation Modeling for Reversal Curse in Diffusion Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing large language models exhibit unidirectional behavior when processing bidirectional relationships . authors propose a solution to alleviate the reversal curse in Diffusion LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that addresses the "reversal curse" of bidirectional behavior in large language models . they propose 'entity-aware training' and balanced data construction to alleviate asymmetry and missing relations . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model alleviates the "reversal curse" in Diffusion LLMs . the proposed model employs whole-entity masking to mitigate entity fragmentation . |
EFSA: Towards Event-Level Financial Sentiment Analysis (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a large-scale Chinese dataset contains 12,160 news articles and 13,725 quintuples . a four-hop Chain-of-Thought LLM-based approach is devised for this task . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend financial sentiment analysis to event-level since events usually serve as the subject of the sentiment in financial text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can reach the current state-of-the-art on a large-scale Chinese dataset. |
OssCSE: Overcoming Surface Structure Bias in Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Zhan Shi, Guoyin Wang, Ke Bai, Jiwei Li, Xiang Li, Qingjun Cui, Belinda Zeng, Trishul Chilimbi, Xiaodan Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that contrastive learning is effective in sentence representation learning . but, the surface structure bias is a problem in the current model . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a sentence with a sub-semantic sentence to investigate the surface structure bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on standard semantic textual similarity tasks using different pre-trained backbones. |
KG-FiD: Infusing Knowledge Graph in Fusion-in-Decoder for Open-Domain Question Answering (2022.acl-long)
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Donghan Yu, Chenguang Zhu, Yuwei Fang, Wenhao Yu, Shuohang Wang, Yichong Xu, Xiang Ren, Yiming Yang, Michael Zeng
| Challenge: | Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) models typically include a retrieving module and a reading module. |
| Approach: | They propose a new open-domain question-answering framework that uses a knowledge-enhanced version of FiD to improve the approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on ODQA benchmark datasets with less than 40% computation cost. |