Papers by Xiao Zhan
The Efficiency vs. Accuracy Trade-off: Optimizing RAG-Enhanced LLM Recommender Systems Using Multi-Head Early Exit (2025.acl-long)
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Huixue Zhou, Hengrui Gu, Zaifu Zhan, Xi Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Mingfu Liang, Srinivas Prasad Govindan, Piyush Chawla, Jiyan Yang, Xiangfei Meng, Huayu Li, Buyun Zhang, Liang Luo, Wen-Yen Chen, Yiping Han, Bo Long, Rui Zhang, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing frameworks for Large Language Models (LLMs) for Click-Through Rate prediction require a careful balance between computational efficiency and predictive accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Retrieval-Augmented Generation with a novel multi-head early exit architecture to address both challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces retrieval time while maintaining high model performance. |
MathCoder-VL: Bridging Vision and Code for Enhanced Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Ke Wang, Junting Pan, Linda Wei, Aojun Zhou, Weikang Shi, Zimu Lu, Han Xiao, Yunqiao Yang, Houxing Ren, Mingjie Zhan, Hongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LMMs) struggle with simple tasks such as geometry, e.g., arithmetic, and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage code as supervision for cross-modal alignment . they propose to use FigCodifier and ImgCode-8.6M to synthesize novel mathematical figures . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet in the geometry problem-solving subset of MathVista, achieving improvements of 8.9% and 9.2%. |
LiGen: Active Lipid Generation via a Molecular Language Model (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) can deliver cargos to tumor and immune cells . traditional approaches rely on experimental screening and expert judgment . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate lipid molecules efficiently and actively using deep learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on multiple cell lines and achieves a 30% improvement over the current methods. |
Protecting Bystander Privacy via Selective Hearing in Audio LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Audio Large language models capture speech from unintended bystanders, raising privacy risks that existing benchmarks and defences did not consider. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate selective hearing by evaluating a model’s ability to attend to an intended main speaker while refusing to process or reveal information about incidental bystander speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can attend to an intended main speaker while refusing to process or reveal information about incidental bystander speech. |
Similarizing the Influence of Words with Contrastive Learning to Defend Word-level Adversarial Text Attack (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Neural language models are vulnerable to word-level adversarial text attacks . previous word-based search methods assume important words influence prediction . |
| Approach: | They propose a method for similarizing the influence of words with contrast learning that encourages model to learn sentence representations in which words of varying importance have a more uniform influence on prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is compatible with various training methods and improves model robustness against various adversarial attacks. |
Unlearning vs. Obfuscation: Are We Truly Removing Knowledge? (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent methods often rely on obfuscation by injecting incorrect or irrelevant information to suppress knowledge, leaving models vulnerable to probing. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that flattens the model predictive distribution over automatically generated multiple-choice questions, effectively removing knowledge about target individuals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves unlearning with over 90% refusal rate and a higher uncertainty than obfuscation on probing questions. |
ViDove: A Translation Agent System with Multimodal Context and Memory-Augmented Reasoning (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Yichen Lu, Wei Dai, Jiaen Liu, Ching Wing Kwok, Zongheng Wu, Xudong Xiao, Ao Sun, Sheng Fu, Jianyuan Zhan, Yian Wang, Takatomo Saito, Sicheng Lai
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in Machine Translation (MT) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation agent system designed for multimodal input that leverages visual and contextual background information to enhance the translation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed translation agent achieves significantly higher translation quality in subtitle generation and general translation tasks compared to previous state-of-the-art systems. |
X-ray Made Simple: Lay Radiology Report Generation and Robust Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
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Kun Zhao, Chenghao Xiao, Sixing Yan, Haoteng Tang, William K. Cheung, Noura Al Moubayed, Liang Zhan, Chenghua Lin
| Challenge: | Technical language and templated nature of professional reports hinder patient comprehension and allow models to artificially boost lexical metrics such as BLEU by reproducing common report patterns. |
| Approach: | They propose a layman's RRG framework that leverages layperson-friendly language to enhance patient accessibility and promote robust evaluation and report generation by encouraging models to focus on semantic accuracy over rigid templates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model performance with more layman-style data, compared to templated professional language and inflated lexical scores. |
When Personalization Misleads: Understanding and Mitigating Hallucinations in Personalized LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Personalization can inadvertently distort factual reasoning when faced with factual queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight inference-time approach that mitigates personalization-induced factual distortions while preserving personalized behavior. |
| Outcome: | Experiments across multiple LLM backbones and personalization methods show that FPPS significantly improves factual accuracy while maintaining personalized performance. |
Contrastive Learning with Adversarial Examples for Alleviating Pathology of Language Model (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing interpretation methods fail to obtain faithful attributions on these models, thereby failing to reveal potential flaws and biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive learning regularization method which calibrates the sentence representation of out-of-distribution examples and utilizes adversarial examples to introduce direction information in regularization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method alleviates the model pathology while impacting generalization ability on in-distribution examples and thus helps interpretation methods obtain more faithful results. |
Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | IRNet synthesizes SQL queries in an end-to-end manner, but it yields unsatisfactory performance on public benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy on the Spider benchmark, a 19.5% improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. |