Papers by Xinyu Zhu

40 papers
Question Answering as Programming for Solving Time-Sensitive Questions (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable intelligence in question answering.
Approach: They propose to reframe the Question Answering task as Programming to overcome this limitation by leveraging LLMs' superior ability in understanding both natural language and programming language.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves on time-sensitive question answering datasets by 14.5% over baselines.
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Listwise ranking based on Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art performance in Information Retrieval (IR) however, their effectiveness often depends on LLMs with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing, leading to substantial efficiency bottlenecks.
Approach: They propose a Collaborative Ranking framework (CoRanking) for LLM-based listwise ranking based on large language models with massive parameter scales and computationally expensive sliding window processing.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces ranking latency by approximately 70% while improving effectiveness compared to the standalone large reranker.
Aligning Large Language Models via Fully Self-Synthetic Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) require expensive human-annotated datasets and proprietary models like GPT-4 to annotate preference pairs.
Approach: They propose a self-synthetic framework for LLM alignment where all training data, including prompts (i.e., user queries), responses, and preferences, are generated by the model itself.
Outcome: The proposed framework enhances the model’s chat capabilities on standard benchmarks like AlpacaEval 2.0 while maintaining strong performance on downstream objective tasks.
MuTIS: Enhancing Reasoning Efficiency through Multi Turn Intervention Sampling in Reinforcement Learning (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for training large reasoning models with long chain-of-thought (CoT) are limited by the number of parameters and the complexity of the model.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages multi-turn interventions to produce concise reasoning chains and demonstrates strong scalability.
Outcome: The proposed framework breaks the accuracy-efficiency trade-off by producing concise reasoning chains and demonstrating strong scalability on 7B models.
MentalSeek-Dx: Towards Progressive Hypothetico-Deductive Reasoning for Real-world Psychiatric Diagnosis (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Mental health disorders represent a burgeoning global public health challenge . lack of ecological validity and fine-grained diagnostic supervision limits their utility .
Approach: They propose a medical-specialized LLM trained to internalize clinical reasoning process through supervised trajectory construction and curriculum-based reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art with only 14B parameters, establishing a clinically grounded framework for reliable psychiatric diagnosis.
ToolBeHonest: A Multi-level Hallucination Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Currently, tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) only achieve total scores of 45.3 and 37.0, respectively, on a scale of 100.
Approach: They propose a multi-level diagnostic process to assess the LLM's hallucinations through two perspectives: depth and breadth.
Outcome: The proposed diagnostic process assesses the hallucinations of large language models through two perspectives: depth and breadth.
Hence, Socrates is mortal: A Benchmark for Natural Language Syllogistic Reasoning (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: SylloBase is a benchmark for syllogistic reasoning, a critical capability widely required in natural language understanding tasks, such as text entailment and question answering.
Approach: They propose to use a benchmark to learn syllogistic reasoning on a set of templates and to use them to generate and understand slogisms.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers a complete taxonomy of syllogism reasoning patterns, and contains both automatically and manually constructed samples.
Employing Discourse Coherence Enhancement to Improve Cross-Document Event and Entity Coreference Resolution (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing work on cross-document coreference resolution focuses on within-document events and entities, but cross-doc mentions lack such critical contexts.
Approach: They propose a task to enhance the discourse coherence between two cross-document mentions by adding coherent texts to a document to form a new coherent document.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three popular datasets.
Unleashing LLM Reasoning Capability via Scalable Question Synthesis from Scratch (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited due to the proprietary nature of the data.
Approach: They propose a data synthesis method that generates large-scale mathematical reasoning datasets using lightweight 7B-scale models.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing open-source datasets in both in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations and shows improvements in code reasoning tasks.
How to Enhance Causal Discrimination of Utterances: A Case on Affective Reasoning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models excel at capturing semantic correlations within utterance embeddings but fail to determine specific causal relationships.
Approach: They propose to incorporate i.i.d. noise terms into conversation process to build a structural causal model . they propose to use unstructured conversation data to facilitate deep learning .
Outcome: The proposed approach can be implemented in unstructured conversation data and a synthetic dataset that includes i.i.d. noise.
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing rerankers perform poorly in complex ranking scenarios due to the scarcity of reasoning-intensive training data.
Approach: They propose an automated reasoning-intensive training framework which generates high-quality training labels from training queries and passages.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly and achieves much lower latency than the pointwise reranker.
AutoConv: Automatically Generating Information-seeking Conversations with Large Language Models (2023.acl-short)

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Challenge: Existing research on information-seeking conversations is stymied by the lack of training data.
Approach: They propose to use autoconv for synthetic conversation generation to capture the characteristics of the information-seeking process and fine tune an LLM with a few human conversations to generate synthetic conversations with high quality.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two commonly-used datasets and alleviates the dependence on human annotation.
TCPO: Thought-Centric Preference Optimization for Effective Embodied Decision-making (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing post-SFT methods for embodied AI are constrained by sparse rewards and action-only optimization, resulting in low sample efficiency, poor consistency, and model degradation.
Approach: They propose to integrate Thought-Centric Preference Optimization (TCPO) into embodied decision-making by transforming sparse reward signals into richer step sample pairs.
Outcome: The proposed approach achieves an average success rate of 26.67% in the ALFWorld environment, and a 6% improvement over RL4VLM.
An Unsupervised Method for Building Sentence Simplification Corpora in Multiple Languages (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to build parallel sentence simplification corpora are limited . SS is used to rephrase sentences into simpler forms for those with cognitive disabilities .
Approach: They propose to build SS corpora from large-scale bilingual translation corpors using a parallel approach.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the existing methods on WikiLarge and achieves state-of-the-art results.
Zero-Shot Learners for Natural Language Understanding via a Unified Multiple Choice Perspective (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to zero-shot learning are format-agnostic and can address new learning tasks without additional training.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for zero-shot learning that is format agnostic and compatible with any format and applicable to a list of language tasks.
Outcome: The proposed model shows state-of-the-art performance on several benchmarks and produces satisfactory results on tasks such as text classification and commonsense reasoning.
Quantifying Semantic Emergence in Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) focus on coarse-grained text, not providing interpretations for the behavior of finergrained tokens.
Approach: They propose a quantitative metric to measure large language models’ ability to extract semantics from input tokens.
Outcome: The proposed metric compares the entropy reduction observed for a sequence of tokens and individual tokens.
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints.
Approach: They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly.
Outcome: The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives.
Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing retrievers for single-turn retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) rely on similarity-based retrievers, but similar passages are not always useful for final answer generation.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented-generation retriever that integrates reasoning with retrieval . they use local query-passage relevance and global answer correctness to measure passage utility .
Outcome: The proposed retriever outperforms existing retrievers on QA benchmarks on seven single-hop and multi-hop searches.
Position IDs Matter: An Enhanced Position Layout for Efficient Context Compression in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to compress context information ignore holistic contextual dependencies.
Approach: They propose a method that adjusts position encodings to minimize the distance between context tokens and special tokens.
Outcome: Enhanced Position Layout (EPL) improves compression of context information in large language models.
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing conversational retrieval benchmarks suffer from costly, sparse human annotation or rigid, unnatural automated heuristics.
Approach: They propose a framework for auditing, synthesizing, and benchmarking conversational retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework is based on three LLM-based auditors and a multi-agent system . it mimics production-style challenges (hard topic switching, verbosity) and offers superior discriminative power.
IIET: Efficient Numerical Transformer via Implicit Iterative Euler Method (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: High-order numerical methods enhance performance in tasks like NLP but introduce a performance-efficiency trade-off due to increased computational overhead.
Approach: They propose an iterative implicit Euler Transformer which simplifies high-order numerical methods by iterating implicit Eule.
Outcome: The proposed method improves accuracy and reduces inference overhead by 55% while retaining 99.4% of the original task accuracy.
Parenting: Optimizing Knowledge Selection of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Parameter Decoupling and Tailored Tuning (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for integrating internal and external knowledge lack effective control mechanisms for generating hallucinations and dealing with outdated knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness.
Outcome: The proposed framework decouples, identifies, and purposefully optimizes parameter subspaces related to adherence and robustness.
Incorporating Temporal Coherence to Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches focus on enhancing semantic coherence between event mentions, but they overlook the critical aspect of temporal coherency.
Approach: They propose a Temporal Cohorence-driven event coreference framework that explicitly models temporal constraints by constructing a temporal event graph and a GNN to resolve conflicts.
Outcome: Experiments on the ECB+, GVC, WEC, and ECb+META datasets show that CohTP outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for listwise passage ranking use sliding window approach, which is inefficient as it requires repetitive and serialized processing.
Approach: They propose a listwise label construction approach and importance-aware learning objective for full ranking.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods in listwise ranking tasks.
FaStFact: Faster, Stronger Long-Form Factuality Evaluations in LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Prior evaluation pipelines fail to evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs due to inefficiency and costly human assessment.
Approach: They propose a fast and strong evaluation pipeline that can evaluate factuality of long-form LLMs . they propose 'faStFact' to reduce cost of web searching and inference calling .
Outcome: The proposed evaluation pipeline achieves highest alignment with human evaluation and efficiency among existing baselines.
Dialogue is Better Than Monologue: Instructing Meidcal LLMs via Strategic Conversations (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: Existing tuning methods for medical AI models are monologue-based . existing benchmarks are based on licensing exams or research articles .
Approach: They propose a benchmark to expose limitations of monologue-based tuning for medical AI models . they use a large dialogue dataset to capture stepwise diagnostic reasoning .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms monologue-tuned models on a medical question answering task and improves accuracy on standard medical QA benchmarks.
Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution on Discourse Structure (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms several baselines and achieves the competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines.
Approach: They propose to use discourse rhetorical structure constructor to construct tree structures to represent documents and a multi-layer perceptron to capture similarities of event mention pairs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves competitive performance with the start-of-the-art baselines.
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability.
Approach: They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard.
Outcome: The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets.
Forgetting Curve: A Reliable Method for Evaluating Memorization Capability for Long-Context Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods, tasks and benchmarks to measure model’s effective memory length are limited.
Approach: They propose a method called forgetting curve to measure the memorization capability of long-context models.
Outcome: The proposed method is robust to the tested corpus and experimental settings, and can be applied to any model size.
SIV-Bench: A Video Benchmark for Social Interaction Understanding and Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have been lacking due to the rich nature of social interaction.
Approach: They propose a video benchmark to evaluate MLLMs' capabilities across social scene understanding, social state reasoning, and social dynamics prediction.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks evaluate MLLMs' capabilities across social scene understanding, social state reasoning, and social dynamics prediction tasks.
Coarse-to-Fine: Hierarchical Multi-task Learning for Natural Language Understanding (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods to learn downstream tasks by stitches skill block lack rationality and interpretation.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical framework with a coarse-to-fine paradigm for generalized text representations from the large-scale corpus.
Outcome: The proposed model learns basic language properties from all tasks and boosts performance on relevant tasks.
MedVerse: Efficient and Reliable Medical Reasoning via DAG-Structured Parallel Execution (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent advances in large reasoning models have broadened the capabilities of medical artificial intelligence.
Approach: They propose a reasoning framework for complex medical inference that reformulates medical reasoning as a parallelizable directed acyclic graph process based on Petri Net theory.
Outcome: The proposed reasoning framework improves strong general-purpose LLMs by up to 8.9%.
Mirror: Multiple-perspective Self-Reflection Method for Knowledge-rich Reasoning (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) struggle with knowledge-rich problems without external resources.
Approach: They propose a Multiple-perspective self-reflection method that allows LLMs to reflect from multiple-perceptive clues, achieved through a heuristic interaction between a Navigator and a Reasoner.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to other self-reflection methods on five reasoning datasets.
MemTR: Enhancing Tool-Calling Reliability via Uncertainty-Triggered FFN-Space Retracing (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing tool-calling methods rely on costly tool-use training data or only constrain syntax, leaving tool selection and argument value errors largely unsolved.
Approach: They propose a method that decodes tool evidence from the tool library and mixes it into the output at the uncertain layer.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces tool calling failures by 2%–9% with only 1%–2% runtime overhead.
MPBoCo: Multimodal Prompt-based Boundary-enhanced Continual Framework for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods struggle to balance real-time adaptability and computational efficiency in continual learning scenarios.
Approach: They propose a Continual Multimodal Entity and Relation Joint Extraction task and a Multimodal Prompt-based Boundary-enhanced Continuum framework that stores task-specific knowledge via learnable multimodal prompts.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods in real-world scenarios by 5.5% and 7.2%.
Enhancing LLM-Based Social Bot via an Adversarial Learning Framework (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Social media platforms provide an ideal testbed for large language models that exhibit human-like behavior.
Approach: They propose an LLM-based social **Bot that enhances human-like generative capabilities through an adversarial learning framework.
Outcome: The proposed framework generates human-like content aligned with diverse user profiles . it exhibits strong social responsiveness, more accurately modeling opinion dynamics .
Solving Math Word Problems via Cooperative Reasoning induced Language Models (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) can be used to solve math word problems, but they lack fast adaptivity as humans.
Approach: They propose a cooperative reasoning-induced PLM for solving the math word problem . they use system 1 as the generator and system 2 as the verifier to generate reasoning paths .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on several mathematical reasoning datasets and achieves 9.6% improvement over baselines.
Dr3: Ask Large Language Models Not to Give Off-Topic Answers in Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (ODMHQA) is one of the most challenging tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Approach: They propose a mechanism that leverages the intrinsic capabilities of Large Language Models to judge whether the generated answers are off-topic.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the occurrence of off-topic answers by nearly 13%, improving the performance in Exact Match (EM) by nearly 3% compared to the baseline method without the Dr3 mechanism.
Escaping the Echo Trap: On Credit Assignment Failure in Multi-turn LLM Self-Reflection (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for multi-turn self-reflection are limited by the Echo Trap problem . the model is limited by its inherent capabilities and repeats earlier reflections to preserve reward signals .
Approach: They propose a tree-structured extension of GRPO for multi-turn self-reflection which enables more accurate advantage estimation.
Outcome: The proposed method mitigates behavior collapse and improves performance across benchmarks.
HoLLMwood: Unleashing the Creativity of Large Language Models in Screenwriting via Role Playing (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Generative AI has demonstrated unprecedented creativity in the field of computer vision, yet such phenomena have not been observed in the realm of literary creation.
Approach: They propose a framework for unleashing the creativity of large language models (LLMs) they assign LLMs to different roles involved in real-world scenario, they write .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in terms of coherence, relevance, interestingness and overall quality on automatically generated screenplays.

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