Papers by Xiaofeng Chen
Adaptive Spatial and Temporal Redundancy Optimization for Efficient Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Tianle Chen, Pengyu Cheng, Qiyuan Zhu, Jiacheng Wang, Bei Liu, Hao Gu, Ruijie Shen, Xiaofeng Hou, Sirui Han, Jiacheng Liu
| Challenge: | Existing research to improve CoT efficiency falls into three categories, each with distinct limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that addresses both dimensions of CoT reasoning by applying a progressive precision reduction strategy coupled with an entropy-based confidence mechanism for adaptive termination. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed framework achieves 11.3 efficiency gain without compromising accuracy. |
DAFNet: Dynamic Auxiliary Fusion for Sequential Model Editing in Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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Taolin Zhang, Qizhou Chen, Dongyang Li, Chengyu Wang, Xiaofeng He, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue’, Jun Huang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results, but still suffer from hallucination, i.e., the generation of false information. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of sequential model editing that aims to rectify mistakes continuously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines in single-turn and sequential editing. |
Taming "Zombie" Agents: A Markov State-Aware Framework for Resilient Multi-Agent Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Pukun Zhao, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Chen Chen, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve efficiency of multi-agent systems rely on aggressive graph topology evolution . however, such hard pruning overlooks the potential for "zombie" agents to recover and contribute in subsequent discussion rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a Markov state-aware framework for resilient multi-agent evolution that manages agent collaboration through soft state transitions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines and significantly reduces token consumption through state-aware agent scheduling. |
ProCut: LLM Prompt Compression via Attribution Estimation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | ProCut compresses prompts using attribution analysis to reduce prompt size and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that compresses prompts through attribution analysis using a heuristic and attribution-based attribution model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces prompt size by 78% while maintaining or improving task performance by 62%. |
Enhancing Speech Large Language Models with Prompt-Aware Mixture of Audio Encoders (2025.emnlp-main)
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Weiqiao Shan, Yuang Li, Yuhao Zhang, Yingfeng Luo, Chen Xu, Xiaofeng Zhao, Long Meng, Yunfei Lu, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing work on integrating audio encoders with large language models (LLMs) has focused on semantic understanding tasks, but different tasks may require distinct features that emphasize either semantic or acoustic aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a prompt-aware mixture to enhance the Speech LLM that uses multiple audio encoders to extract different features based on the prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms all single-encoder Speech LLMs on ASR, speaker number verification, and AC tasks. |
TokenPenalty: Alleviating Attention Sinks and Positional Decay in LVLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often hallucinate due to two relevant phenomena: massive activation phenomenon and positional information decay. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level intervention strategy that dynamically suppresses irrelevant visual tokens while preserving key contextual signals. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TokenTruth significantly improves factual consistency across MLLMs on standard image understanding benchmarks. |
SalaMAnder: Shapley-based Mathematical Expression Attribution and Metric for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yue Xin, Chen Shen, Shaotian Yan, Xiaosong Yuan, Yaoming Wang, Xiaofeng Zhang, Chenxi Huang, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought prompting improves the math reasoning capability of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for attribution of component-level contributions in CoT reasoning using Shapley value and a stratified sampling algorithm that significantly reduces computational complexity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces computational complexity and provides robust correlations with model performance. |
From Redundancy to Relevance: Information Flow in LVLMs Across Reasoning Tasks (2025.naacl-long)
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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Liang Xie, Wenxiao Wang, Chaochen Gu, Hao Tang, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Large visionlanguage models (LVLMs) are a powerful visual-language reasoning tool. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate attention analysis with LLaVA-CAM to determine interactions between visual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be used to determine interactions between visual representations. |
QueueEDIT: Structural Self-Correction for Sequential Model Editing in LLMs (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can be effective for correcting factual inaccuracies but can still suffer from hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose a queue-based self-correction framework that addresses parameter bias during sequential model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models while maintaining competitive performance in single-turn editing. |
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuan Ge, Yilun Liu, Chi Hu, Weibin Meng, Shimin Tao, Xiaofeng Zhao, Mahong Xia, Zhang Li, Boxing Chen, Hao Yang, Bei Li, Tong Xiao, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset. |
| Approach: | They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR). |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations. |
Trident: Self-Supervised Preference Alignment via Triplet Regularization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-Language Models suffer from noisy supervision and semantic ambiguity in self-supervised settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised framework that constructs reliable preference triplets . they propose 'trident' objective that enforces semantic separation between the triplet components . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art RLHF and RLAIF benchmarks on LLaVA-1.5-7B and achieves 95.70% precision on POPE using only 4k self-generated triplets and a single epoch. |
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) are slow and cumbersome, resulting in catastrophic knowledge forgetting and degradation of model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method that converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM’s input query embedding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) while maintaining the overall performance of the model. |
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Transferability estimation has been a topic of great interest in computer vision fields . a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods is a problem . |
| Approach: | They conduct a thorough survey of existing methods to find the most suitable model . they also outline difficulties of consideration of training details and applicability to text generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. |
A Two-phase Prototypical Network Model for Incremental Few-shot Relation Classification (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing supervised and distantly supervised RC models ignore the emergence of novel relations in open environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-phase prototypical network with prototype attention alignment and triplet loss to dynamically recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model performs better on deep learning and few-shot learning . it can recognize the novel relations with a few support instances without catastrophic forgetting . |
Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Contextual Language Representations for Domain Natural Language Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)
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Taolin Zhang, Ruyao Xu, Chengyu Wang, Zhongjie Duan, Cen Chen, Minghui Qiu, Dawei Cheng, Xiaofeng He, Weining Qian
| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs with relational triples are difficult to adapt to close domains due to the lack of sufficient domain graph semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning framework for various closed domains that captures the implicit graph structure among the entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for pre-training KEPLMs in closed domains significantly. |
ART: Attention Replacement Technique to Improve Factuality in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to mitigate hallucinations in large language models are expensive and require significant resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free method that replaces uniform attention patterns in shallow layers with local attention patterns to reduce hallucinations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucinations across multiple LLM architectures. |
BELLE: A Bi-Level Multi-Agent Reasoning Framework for Multi-Hop Question Answering (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multi-hop question answering employ specific methods regardless of question types . complexity of multihop question answerrs often exceeds knowledge boundaries of LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that uses chain-of-thought prompting to prompt LLMs to answer multi-hop questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models in multi-hop QA scenarios. |
PE: A Poincare Explanation Method for Fast Text Hierarchy Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent work on feature interactions neglects underlying linguistic information in feature representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for modeling feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces using Poincare Explanation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to model feature interactions with hyperbolic spaces in a time efficient manner. |
League of LLMs: A Benchmark-Free Paradigm for Mutual Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Qianhong Guo, Wei Xie, Xiaofang Cai, Enze Wang, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Xiaobing Sun, Tian Xia, Kai Chen, Xiaofeng Wang, Baosheng Wang
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional capabilities across a wide range of tasks, but reliable evaluation remains a challenge due to data contamination, opaque operation, and subjective preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark-free evaluation paradigm that organizes multiple LLMs into a self-governed league for multi-round mutual evaluation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on eight mainstream LLMs in mathematics and programming show that the proposed model can distinguish capabilities while maintaining high internal ranking stability. |
SConU: Selective Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing frameworks fail to identify outliers that violate the exchangeability assumption, leading to unbounded miscoverage rates and unactionable prediction sets. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that implements significance tests to determine whether a given sample deviates from the uncertainty distribution of the calibration set. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach facilitates rigorous management of miscoverage rates across single-domain and interdisciplinary contexts, and enhances the efficiency of predictions. |
MirrorQA: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Mirror-Orientation Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, yet their ability to perform left–right reasoning in mirror contexts remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' ability to distinguish left from right from a subject-centered perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that even the best performing models achieve only 65.40% accuracy, far below the 99.28% accuracy of humans. |
ShieldHead: Decoding-time Safeguard for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in LLM-based moderation methods have demonstrated remarkable promise in identifying safety risks associated with both inputs and outputs in human-AI interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a classification head on the last-layer hidden states of a dialogue model and use it to detect harmful content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is 300 faster (**1ms**) than previous LLM-based moderation models with 99% less parameters than LlamaGuard. |
Shallow Focus, Deep Fixes: Enhancing Shallow Layers Vision Attention Sinks to Alleviate Hallucination in LVLMs (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xiaofeng Zhang, Yihao Quan, Chen Shen, Chaochen Gu, Xiaosong Yuan, Shaotian Yan, Jiawei Cao, Hao Cheng, Kaijie Wu, Jieping Ye
| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) demonstrate excellent abilities for understanding visual information, but the hallucination remains a challenging problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free approach to enhance vision attention sinks to facilitate convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the convergence of the image token attention sink within shallow layers and strengthens the layer’s focus on the image itself. |
AMATA: Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering (2026.acl-long)
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Taolin Zhang, Dongyang Li, Chen Chen, Qizhou Chen, Jiuheng Wan, Xiaofeng He, Chengyu Wang, Richang Hong
| Challenge: | Empirical results show that AMATA outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLMs on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose an Adaptive Multi-Agent Trajectory Alignment framework that integrates external knowledge to improve response interpretability and factual grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline approaches, knowledge-augmented frameworks, and LLM-based trajectory systems on five established knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks. |
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback (2026.acl-long)
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Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
| Challenge: | Traditional alignment methods rely on human annotations and are subjective and misalignment with real-world user preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages in-situ user feedback during conversations with LLMs to create preference datasets automatically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework identifies and classifies user feedback to LLM responses between conversation turns and creates examples of preferred and dispreferred responses according to user preferences. |
When TableQA Meets Noise: A Dual Denoising Framework for Complex Questions and Large-scale Tables (2026.acl-long)
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Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Dong Jin, Yuxiang Wang, Yikai Shen, Yunpeng Hou, Shuangwu Chen, null Jianyang, Xiaofeng Jiang
| Challenge: | Extensive research shows that noisy data significantly degrades the performance of table reasoning in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual denoising framework for complex questions and large-scale tables that uses Tree-guided table pruning to remove irrelevant data step by step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves outstanding performance on TableQA tasks with complex questions and large-scale tables. |