Papers by Xiaohan Zhang

16 papers
How Does the Experimental Setting Affect the Conclusions of Neural Encoding Models? (2022.lrec-1)

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Challenge: Recent studies have shown that neural encoding models explore brain language processing using naturalistic stimuli.
Approach: They propose a block-wise cross-validation training method and an adequate data size for increasing the performance of neural encoding models.
Outcome: The proposed training method and data size can significantly decrease the performance of neural encoding models in the temporal and frontal lobes.
Is the Brain Mechanism for Hierarchical Structure Building Universal Across Languages? An fMRI Study of Chinese and English (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that the brain builds hierarchical syntactic structures, but it is unknown whether they are universal across languages.
Approach: They analyze the working memory requirements when applying parsing strategies to two languages: Chinese and English.
Outcome: The proposed method shows that the brain adopts parsing strategies with less memory load according to different language structures.
AlignBench: Benchmarking Chinese Alignment of Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Effective evaluation of alignment for emerging Chinese LLMs is still significantly lacking, calling for real-scenario grounded, open-ended, challenging and automatic evaluations tailored for alignment.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ alignment in Chinese with 8 main categories, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and corresponding human verified references.
Outcome: The benchmark uses a human-in-the-loop data curation pipeline, 683 real-scenario rooted queries and human verified references.
Editing Conceptual Knowledge for Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge editing methods can modify concept-level definitions, but they can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance.
Approach: They construct a benchmark dataset ConceptEdit and establish new metrics for evaluation to investigate the editing capability of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed methods can modify concept definitions but can distort instantial knowledge in LLMs, leading to poor performance.
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving.
Approach: They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger.
FFAEval: Evaluating Dialogue System via Free-For-All Ranking (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems show poor correlation with human assessment.
Approach: They propose a free-for-all human evaluation framework that shares dialogue history with annotators for multi-turn scoring.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves a strong correlation with human assessment on English and Chinese dialogue systems.
Cross-lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment via Graph Convolutional Networks (D18-1)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to align multilingual knowledge graphs with counterparts in different languages are not effective.
Approach: They propose a novel approach for cross-lingual KG alignment via graph convolutional networks . they train GCNs to embed entities of each language into a unified vector space .
Outcome: The proposed approach gets the best performance on real multilingual KGs compared with other embedding-based approaches.
AutoSearch: Adaptive Search Depth for Efficient Agentic RAG via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work limits search depth to reduce cost, but this often leads to underexploration of complex questions.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that evaluates each search step via self-generated intermediate answers.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks show that AutoSearch achieves a superior accuracy-efficiency trade-off, alleviating over-searching while preserving search quality.
RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for retrieving medical textual knowledge Graphs struggle to perform well, a study finds . existing methods struggle to provide accurate answers to complex questions, he says .
Approach: They synthesize user queries integrating diverse topological structures, relational information, and complex textual descriptions.
Outcome: a new dataset for medical textual knowledge graphs shows that existing methods struggle to perform well . main bottlenecks lie in the scarcity of existing medical TKGs and the limited expressiveness of their topological structures .
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data.
Approach: They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization.
Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing online backdoor defense methods for NLP models focus on anomalies at input or output level, causing fragility to adaptive attacks and high computational cost.
Approach: They propose a feature-based online defense method to detect poisoned samples . they use a distance-based anomaly score to distinguish poisones from clean samples based on feature-level regularization .
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in sentiment analysis and offense detection tasks.
Gloss-Free End-to-End Sign Language Translation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: a study of sign language translation without gloss annotations focuses on the problem of gloss annotation . gloss annotation is hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, and limits the domain coverage of translation datasets .
Approach: They propose a gloss-free end-to-end sign language translation framework to solve this problem . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities, they argue .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves sign language translation performance on large-scale datasets . gloss annotations are hard to acquire, especially in large quantities .
AlignMMBench: Evaluating Chinese Multimodal Alignment in Large Vision-Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on basic abilities using nonverbal methods, such as yes-no and multiple-choice questions.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that provides more nuanced evaluations of alignment capabilities for large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) they use a rule-calibrated evaluator that exceeds GPT-4's evaluation ability and a “alignment score” to assess the robustness and stability of models across diverse prompts.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers 13 tasks across three categories and includes both single-turn and multi-turn dialogue scenarios.
CharacterGLM: Customizing Social Characters with Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Character-based dialogue systems (CharacterDial) allow users to customize social characters for social interactions.
Approach: They will collect a large-scale Chinese corpus of characters with diverse categories and behaviors and develop CharacterGLM models to address these challenges.
Outcome: Experiments show that CharacterGLM outperforms most popular open- and closed-source LLMs and performs comparable to GPT-4.
Asclepius: A Spectrum Evaluation Benchmark for Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Medical Multi-Modal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) are a promising new form of artificial general intelligence due to their ability to tackle complex tasks.
Approach: They propose a new benchmark that comprehensively assesses medical multi-modal large language models in terms of distinct medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities.
Outcome: The proposed model covers 15 medical specialties and different diagnostic capacities, and excludes overlap with existing VQA dataset.
A Cause-Effect Look at Alleviating Hallucination of Knowledge-grounded Dialogue Generation (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing dialogue systems have demonstrated impressive performance conducting fluent and natural-sounding conversations, but they are plagued by the Knowledge Hallucination problem.
Approach: They propose a method that exploits the dialogue-knowledge interaction to reduce hallucination by using external knowledge resources to generate more informative responses.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces hallucination without disrupting other dialogue performance while keeping adaptive to different generation models.

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