Papers by Xiaomeng Zhao

8 papers
Typographic Attacks in a Multi-Image Setting (2025.naacl-long)

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Challenge: Large Vision-Language Models are susceptible to typographic attacks, which are misclassifications caused by an attack text that is added to an image.
Approach: They propose a multi-image setting for studying typographic attacks by leveraging the difficulty of the target image, the strength of the attack text, and text-image similarity.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves success rates by 21% over random, non-specific methods on the CLIP model while maintaining stealth in a multi-image scenario.
Parallelism and Generation Order in Masked Diffusion Language Models: Limits Today, Potential Tomorrow (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Autoregressive (AR) language models dominate modern natural language processing due to strong likelihood-based training objectives and reliable left-to-right decoding.
Approach: They characterize MDLM behavior along two dimensions: parallelism strength and generation order . authors propose a Generate-then-Edit paradigm that mitigates dependency loss .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on tasks that require "backward information" the Generate-then-Edit paradigm improves parallel decoding efficiency while reducing dependency loss.
Fine-Grained Data Ordering Improves Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work focused on data preprocessing, focusing on filtering and cleaning data . a study aimed to improve fine-grained scheduling of data order in epochs .
Approach: They propose a fine-grained scheduling method of data order in epochs to fill this gap . they define data difficulty based on relevance between data and model .
Outcome: The proposed method improves on pre-training and small-scale fine-tuning experiments 2.4% over baselines.
ALPS: Attention Localization and Pruning Strategy for Efficient Adaptation of Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior research has focused on optimizing general-purpose large language models to downstream tasks . however, these approaches inherently introduce data dependency, which hinders generalization and reusability.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that localizes the most task-sensitive attention heads and prunes by restricting attention training updates to these heads, thereby reducing alignment costs.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm achieves 2% performance improvement over baselines on three tasks while localizing the most task-sensitive attention heads.
LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent research focuses on integrating reasoning capabilities into the realm of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) via outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RL).
Approach: They propose a process-level reward module to mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation.
Outcome: The proposed framework can boost LLMs’ reasoning ability by integrating external knowledge sources through retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) The proposed model can mitigate the unawareness of intermediate reasoning steps in outcome-level supervision without additional annotation.
Embedding and Gradient Say Wrong: A White-Box Method for Hallucination Detection (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for hallucination detection have attracted more attention from the community.
Approach: They propose to model the distributional distance between the regular conditional output and the unconditional output, which is generated without a given input text.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the hallucination benchmarks HADES and other datasets.
CYCLE-INSTRUCT: Fully Seed-Free Instruction Tuning via Dual Self-Training and Cycle Consistency (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for instruction tuning rely on expensive human-annotated seed data or powerful external teacher models.
Approach: They propose a framework that achieves fully seed-free instruction tuning by employing a dual self-training loop where two models are bootstrapped solely from raw, unlabeled text.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms seed-driven back-translation baselines and achieves comparable performance to strongly supervised methods.

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