Papers by Xingshan Zeng
Prior Knowledge and Memory Enriched Transformer for Sign Language Translation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for sign language translation do not explore all of them . visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning are challenging . |
| Approach: | They propose a method which integrates auxiliary information into vanilla transformer for SLT . they use visual-textual context information and additional auxiliary knowledge of a word . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the understanding of sign language videos with visual and textual understanding and additional prior knowledge learning. |
Improving End-to-End Speech Processing by Efficient Text Data Utilization with Latent Synthesis (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Latent Synthesis is an efficient textual data utilization framework for end-to-end speech processing models . labeled speech data are scarcer and more expensive for collection compared to textual ones . |
| Approach: | They propose a textual data utilization framework for E2E speech processing models . they train a latent synthesizer to convert textual information into an intermediate latent representation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on low-resource speech recognition and spoken language understanding tasks. |
Learning When and What to Quote: A Quotation Recommender System with Mutual Promotion of Recommendation and Generation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing quotation recommendation system focuses on what to quote, but ignores whether or when to quote. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that learns to predict when to quote and what to quote jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significantly better performance than baselines on two datasets. |
Dynamic Online Conversation Recommendation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that assume static user interests are unable to capture the temporal aspects of user interactions and interest changes over time. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture to exploit changes of user interactions and interests over time to predict which discussions they are likely to enter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models that assume static user interests and handle future conversations that are unseen during training time. |
DIGAT: Modeling News Recommendation with Dual-Graph Interaction (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation methods lack effective news-user feature interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose to use news-graph and user-graph channels to enhance news encodings . they also propose to perform effective feature interaction between news and user graphs based on semantic-augmented graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph attention networks outperform existing NR methods on the benchmark dataset MIND. |
Stepwise Reasoning Checkpoint Analysis: A Test Time Scaling Method to Enhance LLMs’ Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing methods that use Chain-of-Thought suffer from path homogenization and inefficient use of intermediate results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that introduces checkpoints between reasoning steps to reduce path homogenization and create fault-tolerant mechanisms. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces path homogenization and creates fault-tolerant mechanism by utilizing high-quality intermediate results. |
Strategize Before Teaching: A Conversational Tutoring System with Pedagogy Self-Distillation (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Conversational tutoring systems (CTSs) aim to help students master educational material with natural language interaction in the form of a dialog. |
| Approach: | They propose to jointly predict teaching strategies and generate tutor responses accordingly to help students master educational material through dialog. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on three dialog tutoring datasets and is more realistic than previous models that generate responses given the strategies as input. |
Neural News Recommendation with Collaborative News Encoding and Structural User Encoding (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing news recommendation models encode news title and content separately without leveraging the structural correlation of user browsing histories to reflect user interests explicitly. |
| Approach: | They propose a news recommendation framework consisting of collaborative news encoding and structural user encode to enhance news and user representation learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of news recommendation on the MIND dataset. |
Continuity of Topic, Interaction, and Query: Learning to Quote in Online Conversations (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Quotations are crucial for successful explanations and persuasions in interpersonal communications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an encoder-decoder neural framework to continue the context with a quotation via language generation to capture latent topics, interactions with the dialogue history, and coherence to the existing contents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two large-scale datasets in English and Chinese and shows that topic, interaction, and query consistency are helpful to learn how to quote in online conversations. |
AdaTranS: Adapting with Boundary-based Shrinking for End-to-End Speech Translation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end speech translation (ST) models need large amount of training data to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose a shrinking mechanism to mitigate the length mismatch between speech and text features by predicting word boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves better performance on the MUST-C dataset, with higher inference speed and lower memory usage. |
RealTranS: End-to-End Simultaneous Speech Translation with Convolutional Weighted-Shrinking Transformer (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | End-to-end simultaneous speech translation (SST) is useful in many scenarios but has not been fully investigated. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end simultaneous speech translation model called RealTranS . they use interleaved convolution and unidirectional Transformer layers to downsample input speech . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on public and widely-used datasets in multiple latency settings. |
Learning to Edit: Aligning LLMs with Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Chuhan Wu, Wanjun Zhong, Xingshan Zeng, Jiahui Gao, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Ruiming Tang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing techniques rely on memorizing updated knowledge, impeding LLMs from effectively combining the new knowledge with their inherent knowledge when answering questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a Learning to Edit framework that equips LLMs with the ability to apply updated knowledge to input questions through a two-phase process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in knowledge editing tasks and compares it with four benchmarks and two LLM architectures. |
ACEBench: A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM Tool Usage (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Chen Chen, Xinlong Hao, Weiwen Liu, Xu Huang, Xingshan Zeng, Shuai Yu, Dexun Li, Yuefeng Huang, Xiangcheng Liu, Wang Xinzhi, Wu Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for evaluating LLMs’ tool usage face several limitations: limited evaluation scenarios, lacking assessments in real multi-turn dialogue contexts; narrow evaluation dimensions, with insufficient detailed assessments of how LLM use tools; and reliance on LLM or real API executions for evaluation, which introduces significant overhead. |
| Approach: | ACEBench is a benchmark for evaluating tool usage in Large Language Models . it categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
| Outcome: | ACEBench categorizes data into three primary types based on evaluation methodology: Normal, Special, and Agent. |
Microblog Conversation Recommendation via Joint Modeling of Topics and Discourse (N18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for recommendation focus on content of individual posts, but we exploit both context and user content and behavior preferences. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that captures conversational context and user content and behavior preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms methods that only model content without considering discourse on two Twitter datasets. |
Neural Conversation Recommendation with Online Interaction Modeling (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that only use lexical features and ignore past user interactions in online conversations are inadequate to identify and engage in online discussions. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically recommends conversations based on user's prior conversation behaviors by exploring deep semantic features that measure how a user’s preferences match an ongoing conversation’s context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two large-scale datasets from Twitter and Reddit showing that it incorporates deep semantic features that measure how a user’s preferences match an ongoing conversation’s context. |
KGA: A General Machine Unlearning Framework Based on Knowledge Gap Alignment (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent legislation of the "right to be forgotten" has led to the interest in machine unlearning . MU can be used to forget specific training instances as if they have never existed . |
| Approach: | They propose a general unlearning framework called KGA to induce forgetfulness . they propose several unlearning evaluation metrics with pertinence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on large-scale datasets and provides insight into unlearning for NLP tasks. |
ToolFlow: Boosting LLM Tool-Calling Through Natural and Coherent Dialogue Synthesis (2025.naacl-long)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can be enhanced by using supervised fine-tuning . however, access to fine-timing data can be limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a Graph-based Sampling strategy and a Planned-generation strategy to enhance the coherence between dialogues by using 8,000 synthetic dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves tool-calling performance comparable to or surpassing GPT-4 while maintaining strong general capabilities. |
FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)
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Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Wanjun Zhong, Liangyou Li, Fei Mi, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Wei Wang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. |
| Approach: | They propose a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models that adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can follow instructions with more constraints, and is deemed to have better instruction-following ability. |
Chain-of-Probe: Examining the Necessity and Accuracy of CoT Step-by-Step (2025.findings-naacl)
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Zezhong Wang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). |
| Approach: | They propose a method to probe changes in confidence during the model’s reasoning and prioritize answers with correct reasoning among multiple candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reveals that in a significant number of question-answer cases, CoT appears to be unnecessary and this necessity correlates with the simplicity of the task, defined by the reasoning steps required. |
Quotation Recommendation and Interpretation Based on Transformation from Queries to Quotations (2021.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Existing models of quotation recommendation ignore the relationship between quotations and queries. |
| Approach: | They propose a transformation matrix that directly maps quotations to quotation representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on two datasets in English and Chinese. |
Re-entry Prediction for Online Conversations via Self-Supervised Learning (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on re-entry prediction ignores conversation thread patterns and repeated engagement of target users. |
| Approach: | They propose to use conversation thread patterns to predict whether a user will come back to a conversation they once participated in to train a model on labels that are automatically derived from the data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms the state-of-the-art models on two social media datasets with fewer parameters and faster convergence. |
Planning, Creation, Usage: Benchmarking LLMs for Comprehensive Tool Utilization in Real-World Complex Scenarios (2024.findings-acl)
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Shijue Huang, Wanjun Zhong, Jianqiao Lu, Qi Zhu, Jiahui Gao, Weiwen Liu, Yutai Hou, Xingshan Zeng, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ruifeng Xu, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on simple synthesized queries that do not reflect real-world complexity, thereby offering limited perspectives in evaluating tool utilization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves LLMs’ ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios and eliminates the restriction of pre-defined toolset. |
Joint Effects of Context and User History for Predicting Online Conversation Re-entries (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting online conversation re-entry focus on modeling engagement patterns in ongoing conversations or ignoring the rich information in users' previous chatting history. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural framework with three main layers to model the conversation context and user history and their interactions with Twitter and Reddit to predict whether a user will return to a conversation they once participated in. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two large-scale Twitter and Reddit conversations, and achieves an F1 score of 61.1 on Twitter conversations. |
MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wai-Chung Kwan, Xingshan Zeng, Yuxin Jiang, Yufei Wang, Liangyou Li, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks focus on single-turn evaluations, overlooking the models’ capabilities in multi-turn interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the multi-turn conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs) by analyzing human-LLM conversations and constructing multi-turned queries for each category using GPT-4. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms open-source models in multi-turn tasks while retaining and recalling historical information. |
ACE-Router: Generalizing History-Aware Routing from MCP Tools to the Agent Web (2026.acl-long)
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Zhiyuan Yao, Zishan Xu, Yifu Guo, Zhiguang Han, Cheng Yang, Shuo Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing routers that use hardcoded tools are limited by scalability and generality bottlenecks. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline for training history-aware routers to empower precise navigation in large-scale ecosystems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline can train routers with dynamic context understanding to create the plug-and-play Light Routing Agent. |