Papers by Xiaotian Zhang
Multijugate Dual Learning for Low-Resource Task-Oriented Dialogue System (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems are expensive to annotate and lack data in real scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose to implement dual learning in task-oriented dialogues to exploit the correlation of heterogeneous data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the effectiveness of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems under multiple benchmarks and obtains state-of-the-art results in low-resource scenarios. |
Towards Proactive Personalization through Profile Customization for Individual Users in Dialogues (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing alignment methods focus on universal human values or static, single-turn preferences, thereby failing to address the critical needs of long-term personalization and the initial user cold-start problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a user-centric lifelong agent that continuously infers and adapts to user preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves superior performance over strong prompt-based and policy optimization baselines, not only in idealized but also in noisy conversational contexts. |
KELE: Residual Knowledge Erasure for Enhanced Multi-hop Reasoning in Knowledge Editing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing techniques show limitations when applied to multi-hop reasoning . residual single-hop knowledge causes edited models to revert to original answers . |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge editing method that incorporates a Knowledge Erasure mechanism for Large language model Editing (KELE) they propose an erasure function for residual knowledge and an injection function for new knowledge . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves multi-hop reasoning capability of edited models. |
InfiGUIAgent: A Multimodal Generalist GUI Agent with Native Reasoning and Reflection (2026.eacl-long)
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Yuhang Liu, Pengxiang Li, Zishu Wei, Congkai Xie, Xueyu Hu, Xinchen Xu, Shengyu Zhang, Xiaotian Han, Hongxia Yang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | Existing GUI Agents face challenges in multi-step reasoning and reliance on textual annotations, limiting their effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose an MLLM-based GUI Agent with a two-stage supervised fine-tuning pipeline that enhances GUI understanding and grounding. |
| Outcome: | InfiGUIAgent achieves competitive performance on several GUI benchmarks, highlighting the impact of native reasoning skills in enhancing GUI interaction for automation tasks. |
Persona-judge: Personalized Alignment of Large Language Models via Token-level Self-judgment (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for aligning language models with human preferences rely on reward signals and additional annotated data, limiting their scalability and adaptability to diverse human values. |
| Approach: | They propose a discriminative paradigm that leverages the intrinsic preference judgment capabilities of the model to align language models with human preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is scalable and efficient, paving the way for more adaptive personalized alignment. |
MEPT: Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning as a Manifold Mapper (2025.emnlp-main)
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Runjia Zeng, Guangyan Sun, Qifan Wang, Tong Geng, Sohail Dianat, Xiaotian Han, Raghuveer Rao, Xueling Zhang, Cheng Han, Lifu Huang, Dongfang Liu
| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations show that Mixture of Expert Prompt Tuning outperforms state-of-the-art parameter efficient baselines on SuperGLUE. |
| Approach: | They propose a pretrain-then-fine-tune paradigm for manifold mapping using multiple prompt experts. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on SuperGLUE while reducing activated prompts by 79.25%. |
Spectral Characterization and Mitigation of Sequential Knowledge Editing Collapse (2026.acl-long)
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Chi Zhang, Mengqi Zhang, Xiaotian Ye, Runxi Cheng, Zisheng Zhou, Ying Zhou, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to reducing the effects of knowledge editing are insufficiently understood. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework that preserves the dominant subspace of the original weights and analyzes parameter updates in the spectral basis of the weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves editing efficacy while preserving general abilities under long-horizon sequential editing, including extreme settings with up to 20,000 edits. |
GOBench: Stage-Wise Diagnostics and the Visual Paradox in Multimodal Graph Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, score outcomes only and cannot localize where failures occur along the modeling pipeline. |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph Optimization benchmark that aligns multiple modalities with solver-derived oracles and a diagnostic protocol that evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results. |
| Outcome: | Graph Optimization benchmark (GOBench) evaluates intermediate artifacts as well as end results . vision reliably increases inference cost, while reliability impact is regime-dependent . current benchmarks fail to represent multimodal problem specifications, fail to localize failures . |
Quantize What Counts: More for Keys, Less for Values (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Empirical evaluations across various prominent LLMs and benchmarks show that key-favored allocations retain up to 98.3% accuracy compared to uniform allocations (e.g., 4-bit keys, 2-bit values). |
| Approach: | They propose two theorems that anchor mixed-precision KV quantization in the intrinsic geometry of Transformer models. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluations show that key-favored allocations retain up to 98.3% accuracy while conserving memory. |
Investigating Glyph-Phonetic Information for Chinese Spell Checking: What Works and What’s Next? (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained Chinese language models have shown impressive performance on a wide range of NLP tasks, but the generalization ability of these models has not been well understood. |
| Approach: | They propose to use glyph-phonetic information to improve Chinese spell checking models . they propose a new, more challenging, and practical setting for testing the generalizability of CSC models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates glyph-phonetic information and is more challenging and practical. |
Knowledge Graph Enhanced Large Language Model Editing (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for editing large language models struggle to track and incorporate changes in knowledge associated with edits, which limits the generalization ability of post-edit LLMs in processing edited knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model editing method that leverages knowledge graphs to enhance LLM editing by capturing changes in associated knowledge by constructing an external graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the generalization ability of LLMs in processing edited knowledge. |
UIPE: Enhancing LLM Unlearning by Removing Knowledge Related to Forgetting Targets (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to unlearning large language models focus on forgetting target data while overlooking the impact of logically related knowledge on the effectiveness of unlearning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that removes knowledge highly correlated with the forgetting targets and a technique that remove logically related knowledge from the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves the performance of the proposed method on the TOFU and WMDP benchmarks. |
DiffPO: Diffusion-styled Preference Optimization for Inference Time Alignment of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Ruizhe Chen, Wenhao Chai, Zhifei Yang, Xiaotian Zhang, Ziyang Wang, Tony Quek, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Soujanya Poria, Zuozhu Liu
| Challenge: | Inference-time alignment approaches still face limitations due to policy-specific value functions and latency during the inference phase. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient and policy-agnostic preference optimization method that avoids time latency associated with token generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a favorable trade-off between alignment quality and inference-time latency. |
Task Calibration: Calibrating Large Language Models on Inference Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive zero-shot performance on inference tasks, however, they may suffer from spurious correlations between input texts and output labels, which limits their ability to reason based purely on general language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot and inference-only calibration method inspired by mutual information which recovers LLM performance through task reformulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration method improves on 13 benchmarks and prompt templates and can be integrated with other calibration methods. |
Concise Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifan Wu, Jingze Shi, Bingheng Wu, Jiayi Zhang, Xiaotian Lin, Yizhang Zhu, Zhaoyang Yu, Bang Liu, Chenglin Wu, Nan Tang, Yuyu Luo
| Challenge: | Human experts tackle difficult math problems by identifying and executing a few pivotal steps rather than listing every intermediate thought. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for producing training data that mirrors concise human reasoning by rewriting a problem's solution to retain only the essential steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms models trained on 800k long CoT and cuts training and inference costs. |