Papers by Xingjian Zhang
Meta-rater: A Multi-dimensional Data Selection Method for Pre-training Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Xinlin Zhuang, Jiahui Peng, Ren Ma, Yinfan Wang, Tianyi Bai, Xingjian Wei, Qiu Jiantao, Chi Zhang, Ying Qian, Conghui He
| Challenge: | composition of pre-training datasets for large language models remains undisclosed . current methods for evaluating data quality are limited by single-dimensional evaluation or redundancy-focused strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-dimensional data selection method that integrates dimensions with existing quality metrics through learned optimal weightings. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method doubles convergence speed for 1.3B model models and improves downstream task performance by 3.23%. |
RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Bo Peng, Eric Alcaide, Quentin Anthony, Alon Albalak, Samuel Arcadinho, Stella Biderman, Huanqi Cao, Xin Cheng, Michael Chung, Leon Derczynski, Xingjian Du, Matteo Grella, Kranthi Gv, Xuzheng He, Haowen Hou, Przemyslaw Kazienko, Jan Kocon, Jiaming Kong, Bartłomiej Koptyra, Hayden Lau, Jiaju Lin, Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri, Ferdinand Mom, Atsushi Saito, Guangyu Song, Xiangru Tang, Johan Wind, Stanisław Woźniak, Zhenyuan Zhang, Qinghua Zhou, Jian Zhu, Rui-Jie Zhu
| Challenge: | recurrent neural networks struggle to match the performance of Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. |
| Approach: | They propose a model architecture that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs on par with similarly sized RNNs, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. |
Beyond Literal Descriptions: Understanding and Locating Open-World Objects Aligned with Human Intentions (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for visual grounding rely on the assumption that the given expression must be literal . this impedes the practical deployment of agents in real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual grounding task that uses intention expressions to locate foreground entities . they build a large-scale IVG dataset with free-form intention expression to promote VG . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a large-scale intention-driven visual-language (V-L) dataset with free-form intention expressions. |
OpenHuEval: Evaluating Large Language Model on Hungarian Specifics (2025.findings-acl)
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Haote Yang, Xingjian Wei, Jiang Wu, Noémi Ligeti-Nagy, Jiaxing Sun, Yinfan Wang, Győző Zijian Yang, Junyuan Gao, Jingchao Wang, Bowen Jiang, Shasha Wang, Nanjun Yu, Zihao Zhang, Shixin Hong, Hongwei Liu, Wei Li, Songyang Zhang, Dahua Lin, Lijun Wu, Gábor Prószéky, Conghui He
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) represent significant strides toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). |
| Approach: | They introduce OpenHuEval, the first benchmark for LLMs focusing on the Hungarian language and specifics. |
| Outcome: | The framework reveals intrinsic patterns and mechanisms of LLMs in non-English languages, with Hungarian serving as an example. |
Your Reasoning Benchmark May Not Test Reasoning: Revealing Perception Bottleneck in Abstract Reasoning Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus and ARC-AGI are widely used to assess progress in artificial intelligence. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage pipeline that separates perception and reasoning . they propose to test this pipeline against standard end-to-end one-stage evaluation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline separates perception and reasoning, and isolates reasoning from bottlenecks. |
Dive into Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing (D19-2)
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| Challenge: | GluonNLP is a powerful new toolkit that automates the most laborious aspects of deep learning for NLP. |
| Approach: | This hands-on tutorial demonstrates how to scale unsupervised pre-training techniques with Apache MXNet and GluonNLP. |
| Outcome: | This hands-on tutorial examines the challenges of scaling these models and algorithms effectively with Apache MXNet and GluonNLP. |
Temporal Working Memory: Query-Guided Segment Refinement for Enhanced Multimodal Understanding (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xingjian Diao, Chunhui Zhang, Weiyi Wu, Zhongyu Ouyang, Peijun Qing, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Multimodal foundation models have demonstrated significant success in tasks such as visual captioning, question answering, and image-text retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a specialized cognitive module, temporal working memory, which selectively retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The module retains task-relevant information across temporal dimensions, ensuring that critical details are preserved throughout the processing of video and audio content. |
Learning Sparsity for Effective and Efficient Music Performance Question Answering (2025.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing Music AVQA methods rely on dense and unoptimized representations, leading to inefficiencies in the isolation of key information, reduction of redundancy, and prioritization of critical samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a sparse learning framework specifically designed for Music AVQA to address these challenges. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces training time by 28.32% while maintaining accuracy while maintaining state-of-the-art performance on the Music AVQA datasets. |
Knowing More, Acting Better: Hierarchical Representation for Embodied Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Modern embodied AI uses multimodal large language models as policy models, predicting actions from final-layer hidden states. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical action probing method that aggregates representations from all layers, mirroring the brain's multi-level organization. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that hierarchical probing improves on last-layer embodied models and achieves a 46.6% success rate and a 62.5% gain in spatial reasoning tasks. |
Music Audio-Visual Question Answering Requires Specialized Multimodal Designs (2026.findings-acl)
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Wenhao You, Xingjian Diao, Wenjun Huang, Chunhui Zhang, Keyi Kong, Weiyi Wu, Chiyu Ma, Zhongyu Ouyang, Tingxuan Wu, Ming Cheng, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Music audio-visual question answering presents unique challenges with dense audio-visual content, intricate temporal dynamics, and the need for domain-specific knowledge. |
| Approach: | They analyze Music AVQA datasets and analyze their results to identify key design patterns . they propose concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures are critical for success in Music AVQA, the authors argue . they suggest concrete future directions for incorporating musical priors . |
Addressing Overthinking in Large Vision-Language Models via Gated Perception-Reasoning Optimization (2026.findings-acl)
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Xingjian Diao, Zheyuan Liu, Chunhui Zhang, Weiyi Wu, Keyi Kong, Lin Shi, Kaize Ding, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Prior work has attempted to mitigate this issue by using adaptive reasoning strategies, but these methods overlook a fundamental bottleneck: visual perception failures. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-reasoning controller that dynamically routes computation among three decision paths at each generation step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms slow-thinking methods while producing shorter responses. |
MASSW: A New Dataset and Benchmark Tasks for AI-Assisted Scientific Workflows (2025.findings-naacl)
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Xingjian Zhang, Yutong Xie, Jin Huang, Jinge Ma, Zhaoying Pan, Qijia Liu, Ziyang Xiong, Tolga Ergen, Dongsub Shim, Honglak Lee, Qiaozhu Mei
| Challenge: | Scientific innovation is driven by detailed workflows, which include critical steps such as contextualizing literature, generating ideas, validating ideas, and planning new research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to extract five key aspects from scientific publications to optimize scientific workflows. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes more than 152,000 peer-reviewed publications from 17 leading computer science conferences spanning the past 50 years. |
Learning Musical Representations for Music Performance Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for audio-visual learning fail to consider the distinctive characteristics of instruments and music. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate multimodal interactions within the context of music data and annotate and release rhythmic and music sources in the current music datasets to enable the model to learn music characteristics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn music characteristics from the current music datasets and align its predictions with the temporal dimension. |
SoundMind: RL-Incentivized Logic Reasoning for Audio-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Xingjian Diao, Chunhui Zhang, Keyi Kong, Weiyi Wu, Chiyu Ma, Zhongyu Ouyang, Peijun Qing, Soroush Vosoughi, Jiang Gui
| Challenge: | Recent large language models have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities, but their extension to the audio modality remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-based reinforcement learning algorithm to equip LALMs with robust reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm improves on the SoundMind benchmark. |
What Makes a Good Curriculum? Disentangling the Effects of Data Ordering on LLM Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Curriculum learning (CL) orders data corpus by difficulty, but prior work employs disparate difficulty metrics and training setups. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that decomposes curriculum difficulty into five dimensions: Problem Difficulty, Model Surprisal, Confidence Margin, Predictive Uncertainty and Decision Variability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework decomposes curriculum difficulty into five dimensions . the results show that no curriculum strategy dominates universally . |
Automated Few-Shot Classification with Instruction-Finetuned Language Models (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing few-shot learning approaches combine language models with prompts, but they often require domain knowledge and substantial guesswork. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to eliminate the need for handcrafted prompts by generating two distinct, semantically meaningful class descriptions and a selection mechanism via cross-validation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods over 12 datasets, spanning 8 classification tasks. |