Papers by Xiaojie Zhang
From Alignment to Entailment: A Unified Textual Entailment Framework for Entity Alignment (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods encode the triples of entities as embeddings and learn to align the embeddables, which prevents the direct interaction between the original information of the cross-KG entities. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform the triples into unified textual sequences and model the EA task as a bi-directional textual entailment task between the sequences of cross-KG entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five cross-lingual datasets and allows the mutual enhancement of the heterogeneous information. |
PaddleSpeech: An Easy-to-Use All-in-One Speech Toolkit (2022.naacl-demo)
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Hui Zhang, Tian Yuan, Junkun Chen, Xintong Li, Renjie Zheng, Yuxin Huang, Xiaojie Chen, Enlei Gong, Zeyu Chen, Xiaoguang Hu, Dianhai Yu, Yanjun Ma, Liang Huang
| Challenge: | PaddleSpeech is an open-source speech toolkit that supports speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Approach: | They describe the design philosophy and core architecture of PaddleSpeech to support several essential speech-to-text and text-to speech tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance on various speech datasets and implements the most popular methods. |
UniToolBench: A Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs in Cross-Domain, Universal Task Automation (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks that focus on manually curated tool graphs lack scalability and diversity across domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale, cross-domain benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to reason over and utilize interconnected tools for automation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates automated tool graph construction by formulating link prediction as a probabilistic task, instead of relying on categorical LLM outputs. |
A Slot Is Not Built in One Utterance: Spoken Language Dialogs with Sub-Slots (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Sub-Slot based task-oriented dialogs provide slot values segment by segment over multiple turns. |
| Approach: | They define a task called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) they build a Chinese dialog dataset SSD for boosting research on SSTOD. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is called Sub-Slot based Task-Oriented Dialog (SSTOD) it includes 40K dialogs and 500K utterances from Chinese names, phone numbers, ID numbers and license plate numbers . the dataset is well annotated with sub-slot values, slot values, dialog states and actions . |
Grouped-Attention for Content-Selection and Content-Plan Generation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent neural data-to-text generation models explicitly learn content-plan given a set of attributes as input. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural content-planner that captures local and global contexts . they use a token-level attention constrained within each input attribute . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms competitors by 4.92%, 4.70%, and 16.56% on real-world datasets. |
MCIL: Multimodal Counterfactual Instance Learning for Low-resource Entity-based Multimodal Information Extraction (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to perform multimodal information extraction only investigated entity-based tasks under supervised learning with adequate labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate the entity-based MIE tasks under the low-resource settings by decomposing the features into image, entity, and context factors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to perform on two public MIE benchmark datasets and the experimental results confirm it. |
PM2F2N: Patient Multi-view Multi-modal Feature Fusion Networks for Clinical Outcome Prediction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focused on time series data but ignored clinical notes . fusion of multi-modal features of patients from different views is not feasible due to the time series and clinical notes data being stored as time series. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine time series and clinical notes to fuse multi-modal features of patients from different perspectives using graph neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing models on MIMIC-III benchmark. |
Licon: A Diverse, Controllable and Challenging Linguistic Concept Learning Benchmark (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for Concept Learning focus on visual information, but visual information cannot present abstract concepts exactly, which struggles the introduction of novel concepts related to known concepts. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark where concepts in diverse forms are defined by linguistic descriptions and an entailment-based concept learning method to model the relationship among concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark is based on the existing visual concepts learning benchmarks and will be released to the public soon. |
Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis under Conditional Relation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to analyze social media sentiments rely on image-based aspects. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task framework to extract aspect terms from text-image pairs and identify their sentiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on a text-image dataset. |
Selecting Key Views for Zero-Shot Entity Linking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a task of assigning ambiguous mentions in textual input to entities in knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to align mentions in text to entities in knowledge bases . they use unsupervised clustering to select key views from descriptions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the zero-shot entity linking dataset. |
A Joint Learning Framework for Restaurant Survival Prediction and Explanation (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in deep learning have various models that research reviews and interactions for different kinds of tasks, such as predicting restaurant survival. |
| Approach: | They propose a joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on two datasets showing that it can model restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. |
Bring Invariant to Variant: A Contrastive Prompt-based Framework for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for temporal knowledge graph forecasting are insufficient structural contexts to learn effective representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contrastive Prompt-based framework with Entity background information for TKG forecasting that brings time-invariant entity background information to time-variant structural information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and stays competitive in inference with limited structural information. |
AoM: Detecting Aspect-oriented Information for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract aspects from text-image pairs and recognize their sentiments are noisy and coarsely establishing image-aspect alignment will interfere with aspect-relevant semantic and sentiment information. |
| Approach: | They propose an Aspect-oriented method to detect aspect-relevant semantic and sentiment information by selecting textual tokens and image blocks that are semantically related to the aspects. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing methods in the field of sentiment analysis. |
Connecting Embeddings for Knowledge Graph Entity Typing (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge graphs suffer from incompleteness and miss important facts, jeopardizing their usefulness in downstream tasks such as question answering. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which is trained by utilizing local typing knowledge from existing entity type assertions and global triple knowledge in KGs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model favors inferences that agree with both entity type instances and triple knowledge in KGs. |
Look before You Leap: Dual Logical Verification for Knowledge-based Visual Question Generation (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual question generation focus on leveraging the semantics of inputs to propose questions, ignoring the logical coherence between generated questions and images. |
| Approach: | They propose a logical verification method that checks logical structure between Q, images, answers and acquired outside knowledge by incorporating logical coherence between Q and Q twice in the whole procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can generate diverse and insightful knowledge-based visual questions on two common datasets. |
Collab-Overcooked: Benchmarking and Evaluating Large Language Models as Collaborative Agents (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haochen Sun, Shuwen Zhang, Lujie Niu, Lei Ren, Hao Xu, Hao Fu, Fangkun Zhao, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) based agent systems have made great strides in real-world applications beyond traditional NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new LLM-based Multi-Agent System benchmark, Collab-Overcooked, built on the popular Overcooked-AI game with more applicable and challenging tasks in interactive environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark provides a multi-agent framework supporting diverse tasks and objectives and encourages collaboration through natural language communication. |
CoTD-PO: Chain-of-Thought Distillation with Preference Optimization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Lujie Niu, Haochen Sun, Fangkun Zhao, Sheng Chen, Zimeng Bai, Jiawei Zhang, Caixia Yuan, Xiaojie Wang
| Challenge: | Existing methods for chain-of-thought distillation suffer from a distribution mismatch between teacher-generated training trajectories and the student model's own generative distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the training paradigm from passive imitation to active trajectory exploration by allowing students to sample their own answer paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms standard CoT distillation baselines while mitigating mode collapse and preserving semantic diversity. |
MELOV: Multimodal Entity Linking with Optimized Visual Features in Latent Space (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to multimodal entity linking focus on textual contexts but lack in social media vision modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent space vision feature optimization framework MELOV to address these challenges . they exploit variational autoencoder to mine shared information and generate text-based visual features . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing methods on three benchmark datasets. |
Overcoming Language Priors in Visual Question Answering via Distinguishing Superficially Similar Instances (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing VQA models rely on the superficial correlation between question type and frequent answers to make predictions, without really understanding the input. |
| Approach: | They propose a training framework that explicitly encourages the VQA model to distinguish between superficially similar instances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on VQA-CP v2 . it explicitly encourages the model to distinguish between the superficially similar instances . |
Orchestrating Audio: Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Video Audio Synthesis (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for video-to-audio dubbing for long-form content are fragmented and lack dedicated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework that offers a coordinated, multi-component approach to long-video audio generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art V2A models in audio quality. |
BioFEG: Generate Latent Features for Biomedical Entity Linking (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to biomedical entity linking suffer from multiple types of errors due to the rarity of many biomedically relevant entities in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a latent feature generation framework to generate latent semantic features for unseen entities to capture fine-grained coherence information of unseened entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is superior to existing models on two benchmark datasets. |
Learn to Adapt for Generalized Zero-Shot Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generalized zero-shot text classification generalize poorly since the learned parameters are only optimal for seen classes rather than for both classes. |
| Approach: | They propose a network that trains an adaptive classifier by using both seen and virtual unseen classes to simulate a generalized zero-shot learning scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several previous approaches on five text classification datasets. |
An End-to-End Progressive Multi-Task Learning Framework for Medical Named Entity Recognition and Normalization (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for medical named entity recognition and named entity normalization suffer from error propagation between the two tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end progressive multi-task learning model for jointly modeling medical named entity recognition and normalization in an effective way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces error propagation by exploiting the learnable features for both tasks to improve performance. |
The Model Agreed, But Didn’t Learn: Diagnosing Surface Compliance in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models internalize vast world knowledge as parametric memory, yet inherit the staleness and errors of their source corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that subjects models to discriminative self-assessment under diverse contextual pressures to scrutinize subtle behavioral nuances induced by memory modifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves high benchmarks without overwriting internal beliefs, while recursive modifications accumulate representational residues, triggering cognitive instability and permanently diminishing the reversibility of the model’s memory state. |
Incorporating Object-Level Visual Context for Multimodal Fine-Grained Entity Typing (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that fine-grained entity typing is superior to text-based methods. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called fine-grained entity typing to classify entities . they propose combining textual and visual contexts to capture fine-granular semantic information . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves superior classification performance compared to previous text-based approaches. |
PreGenie: An Agentic Framework for High-quality Visual Presentation Generation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Visual presentations are vital for effective communication, but they are limited by their complexity and lack of visual understanding. |
| Approach: | a new framework is proposed to generate high-quality visual presentations using multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models in multimodal understanding and content consistency. |
Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Entity linking is a task of assigning entity mentions to referent entities in a knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ultra-fine-grained type information to improve the generalization ability of EL models by utilizing a low-level task to extract ultra-finish entity type information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in the zero-shot entity linking task . |
A Span-based Multimodal Variational Autoencoder for Semi-supervised Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for named entity recognition on social media are not efficient for semi-supervised MNER because of the mismatch between the posted text and image. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel method to fuse the text and image features for multimodal named entity recognition under semi-supervised setting by exploiting modal-specific VAEs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines under supervised setting and improves performance with less labeled data than existing semi-supervised methods. |
Topic-Aware Contrastive Learning for Abstractive Dialogue Summarization (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to abstractly summarize dialogues are limited to two or more interlocutors. |
| Approach: | They propose to use existing document summarization models to capture the various topic information of a conversation and outline salient facts for the captured topics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly outperforms baselines and achieves new state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. |