Papers by Xu Zou

42 papers
BIPro: Zero-shot Chinese Poem Generation via Block Inverse Prompting Constrained Generation Framework (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: generative pre-trained models face challenges on constrained writing tasks like poem generation . brian mccartney: BIPro improves the zero-shot generation quality on constricted writing tasks .
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages two block inverse prompting methods to improve the quality of constrained writing tasks.
Outcome: BIPro significantly improves the quality of Chinese poem generation without priming or training.
Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards suffer from limited exploration diversity and inefficient reasoning.
Approach: They propose a method that rewards concise and correct reasoning while penalizing unnecessarily long reasoning chains.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on Qwen and Llama models validate the effectiveness and efficiency of ROSE.
Learning to Match Representations is Better for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog System (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing systems for task-oriented dialogue lack belief states as supervisory signals.
Approach: They propose a method for knowledge retrieval driven by matching representations . they use a matching signal extractor to extract matching representation between contexts and entities .
Outcome: Experiments on three standard benchmarks show that the proposed method performs better than existing approaches.
MAIN-RAG: Multi-Agent Filtering Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RAG systems struggle with the quality of retrieval documents, causing performance degradation and reducing performance.
Approach: They propose a training-free RAG framework that leverages multiple LLM agents to collaboratively filter and score retrieved documents.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing RAG frameworks in QA benchmarks and shows superior answer consistency and answer accuracy over baseline methods.
SecureWebArena: A Holistic Security Evaluation Benchmark for LVLM-based Web Agents (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing security benchmarks only cover user-level prompts and environmental threats . however, these models are vulnerable to pop-up attacks and prompt injections .
Approach: They propose a security benchmark that covers a set of six attack vectors that span both user-level and environment-level manipulations.
Outcome: The proposed security benchmarks cover a set of six real-world web environments with 2,970 adversarial trajectories and a multi-layered evaluation protocol dissecting agent failures across internal reasoning, behavioral execution, and task outcomes.
LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing algorithms for collaborative filtering are limited by their computational demands and latency.
Approach: They propose a framework to integrate pre-trained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs.
Accelerating Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling via Targeted Knowledge Distillation (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing non-autoregressive Spoken Language Understanding models suffer from multi-modality problem . current methods have little prior knowledge about the reference during inference .
Approach: They propose a Targeted Knowledge Distillation Framework (TKDF) for multi-intent SLU that utilizes the knowledge distillation method to improve the performance.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on two public multi-intent datasets while speeding up by over 4.5 times.
Leveraging Contrastive Learning and Knowledge Distillation for Incomplete Modality Rumor Detection (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing rumor detection models neglect the semantic coherence between text and image components in multimodal posts . Existing models neglect incomplete modalities in single modal posts, such as missing text or images .
Approach: They propose a framework for incomplete modality rumor detection that captures semantic consistency between text and image pairs while enhancing model generalization to incomplete modalities within individual posts.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two English and two Chinese benchmark datasets for rumor detection in social media.
MMAC: A Multilingual, Multimodal Alignment Framework for Cultural Grounding Evaluation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models lack cultural alignment across modalities and languages . a new framework to assess cultural awareness across linguistics and languages is needed .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates tri-modally aligned cultural benchmarks and a five-dimensional evaluation protocol to assess cross-country awareness disparities.
Outcome: The proposed framework assesses cultural awareness disparities across modalities and languages . it is the first dataset aligned at the input level across text, image, and speech .
Are We Using the Right Benchmark: An Evaluation Framework for Visual Token Compression Methods (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to accelerate inference in Multimodal Large Language Models have focused on visual token compression.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.
Outcome: The proposed evaluation framework leverages downsampling as a discriminator to denoise existing benchmarks.
From Implicit Exploration to Structured Reasoning: Guideline and Refinement for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models rely on implicit exploration, which leads to unstable reasoning paths and lack of error correction.
Approach: They propose a framework that shifts from implicit exploration to structured reasoning through guideline and refinement.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the Big-Bench Hard benchmark.
Towards Understanding Omission in Dialogue Summarization (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for dialogue summarization are far from satisfactory . omission is a major factor in affecting the quality of summarizing, but few studies have explored the problem .
Approach: They propose a dataset that provides high-quality omission labels for dialogue summarization . they propose to use this dataset to detect omitted dialogue utterances .
Outcome: The proposed dataset improves summarization quality by providing ground-truth omission labels . the proposed dataset and codes are publicly available .
FacLens: Transferable Probe for Foreseeing Non-Factuality in Fact-Seeking Question Answering of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing non-factuality detection methods require response generation, which incurs significant computational overhead.
Approach: They propose a lightweight model called Factuality Lens which effectively probes hidden representations of fact-seeking questions for the NFP task.
Outcome: The proposed model is able to probe hidden representations of fact-seeking questions and reduce development costs.
GAM: Hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory for LLM Agents (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current unified stream-based memory systems facilitate context updates but remain vulnerable to interference from transient noise.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical Graph-based Agentic Memory framework that explicitly decouples memory encoding from consolidation to resolve conflict between rapid context perception and stable knowledge retention.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art benchmarks on LoCoMo and LongDialQA.
Incorporating Image Matching Into Knowledge Acquisition for Event-Oriented Relation Recognition (C18-1)

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Challenge: Event relation recognition is a challenging language processing task because the query events are selected from different paragraphs in a document or even different documents, so there is lack of explicit clue.
Approach: They propose to use image processing to acquire similar event instances and use image matching to approximate calculation between events.
Outcome: The proposed model performs comparable to CNN while slightly better than LSTM on the ACE-R2 corpus.
OEE-CFC: A Dataset for Open Event Extraction from Chinese Financial Commentary (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing corpora with unconventional entities serving as event arguments lack rich multi-events and shared arguments.
Approach: They develop an open event template that includes 21 event argument roles and an open corpus supporting open event extraction.
Outcome: The proposed corpus includes 17,469 events, 44,221 arguments, 3,644 complex arguments, and 5,898 shared arguments.
What are the Generator Preferences for End-to-end Task-Oriented Dialog System? (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve the accuracy of entity retrieval are not effective.
Approach: They propose a framework that improves the performance of task-oriented dialogue systems by obtaining fine-grained matching information between contexts and entities and extracting the entity attribute shift matrix as preference signals.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods and improves the quality of the dialogue.
Model Unlearning via Sparse Autoencoder Subspace Guided Projections (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing unlearning strategies lack interpretability or fail to provide robust defense against adversarial prompts.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages SAE features to drive targeted updates in the model’s parameter space.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces harmful knowledge accuracy by 3.22% compared to baselines and improves adversarial robustness under jailbreak prompts.
Rethinking Multiple-Choice Questions for RLVR: Unlocking Potential via Distractor Design (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to RLVR use multiple-choice questions as verifiable rewards . however, not all tasks provide reliable verification .
Approach: They propose a framework that actively constructs high-quality distractors to block elimination shortcuts and promote deep reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models.
EduBench: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Diverse Educational Scenarios (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks that focus on knowledge-intensive tasks do not reflect diverse educational scenarios.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that incorporates 9 major scenarios and 4,000 educational contexts.
Outcome: The proposed model performs comparable to state-of-the-art large models on the test set.
Incorporating Fine-grained Events in Stock Movement Prediction (D19-51)

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Challenge: Existing studies mainly adopt coarse-grained events, which loses the specific semantic information of diverse event types.
Approach: They propose to use a finance event dictionary to extract fine-grained events from finance news to train a neural model that uses the extracted events as the distant supervised label to train stock prediction.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baselines and has good generalizability.
Adversarial Feature Adaptation for Cross-lingual Relation Classification (C18-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for relation classification exploit monolingual data due to lack of annotated data in other languages.
Approach: They propose an adversarial feature adaptation approach for cross-lingual relation classification using a generative adversarial network.
Outcome: The proposed approach yields an improvement of 5.7% over the state-of-the-art.
FCM: A Fine-grained Comparison Model for Multi-turn Dialogue Reasoning (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing neural dialogue models only capture syntactic and semantic information, but fail to model the logical consistency between the dialogue history and the generated response.
Approach: They propose a fine-grained comparison model to capture syntactic and semantic information and then compare each candidate's representation with the whole history to obtain a history consistency representation.
Outcome: The proposed model obtains higher ranking scores than baseline models on two public dialogue datasets.
DMN: A Compositional Framework for Jailbreaking Multimodal LLMs with Multi-Image Inputs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing jailbreak methods only use a single image, restricting the attack space . Existing frameworks only use single image to distribute harmful requests across multiple images .
Approach: They propose a compositional jailbreak framework that leverages Distributed instruction, Multimodal evidence and a Number chain task to fully enhance the jailbreak performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves attack success rates of over 90% on GPT-4o, Gemini-2.5-pro and Claude Sonnet 4 .
Adaptive Bridge between Training and Inference for Dialogue Generation (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that our model can achieve a significant improvement in terms of metric-based evaluation and human evaluation compared with the state-of-the-art exposure bias approaches.
Approach: They propose a novel adaptive switching mechanism which automatically transits between ground-truth learning and generated learning regarding the word-level matching score.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on Chinese and English reddit datasets compared with state-of-the-art models on the word-level matching score.
Bridging SFT and RL: Dynamic Policy Optimization for Robust Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing unified optimization strategies overlook the statistical conflict between these distinct gradient signals.
Approach: They propose a framework to reduce bias-variance trade-offs in Large Language Models . they propose DYPO, which leverages intrinsic group dynamics to significantly reduce RL gradient variance .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms traditional pipelines on reasoning benchmarks and out-of-distribution tasks.
Question Directed Graph Attention Network for Numerical Reasoning over Text (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Numerical reasoning requires both natural language understanding and arithmetic computation.
Approach: They propose a graph representation for the context of the passage and question needed for numerical reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves remarkable results in benchmark datasets such as DROP.
Relevance Is a Guiding Light: Relevance-aware Adaptive Learning for End-to-end Task-oriented Dialogue System (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to training task-oriented dialogue systems struggle with the Distractive Attributes Problem (DAP) Existing methods struggle to deal with false but similar knowledge (hard negative entities)
Approach: They propose a two-stage training framework that eliminates hard negatives step-by-step and aligns retrieval with generation.
Outcome: The proposed method eliminates hard negatives step-by-step and aligns retrieval with generation.
MultiCapCLIP: Auto-Encoding Prompts for Zero-Shot Multilingual Visual Captioning (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for supervised visual captioning require large scale of images or videos paired with descriptions in a specific language.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot approach that generates captions for different scenarios without labeling . they use concept prompts to retrieve concepts and auto-encode them to learn writing styles .
Outcome: The proposed approach generates captions for different scenarios and languages without labeled vision-caption pairs.
CH-SIMS: A Chinese Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Dataset with Fine-grained Annotation of Modality (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: Existing studies in multimodal sentiment analysis only use unified multimodal annotations, which do not reflect the independent sentiment of single modalities.
Approach: They propose a Chinese single- and multi-modal sentiment analysis dataset with multimodal and independent unimodal annotations that can be used to study the interaction between modalities.
Outcome: The proposed methods achieve state-of-the-art performance and learn more distinctive unimodal representations.
Text2Mem: A Unified Memory Operation Language for Memory Operating System (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing memory frameworks lack a formal, executable specification for memory control.
Approach: They propose a unified memory operation language that standardizes translation of natural-language instructions into reliable execution.
Outcome: The proposed language standardizes translation of natural-language instructions into reliable execution.
MMUnlearner: Reformulating Multimodal Machine Unlearning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent advances in machine learning (MU) have enabled the selective removal of private or sensitive information encoded within deep neural networks.
Approach: They propose to "reformulate" the task of multimodal MU in the era of MLLMs by preserving only the visual patterns associated with a given entity while preserving the corresponding textual knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses baselines that finetuned MLLMs with VQA data directly through Gradient Ascent (GA) or Negative Preference Optimization (NPO), across all evaluation dimensions.
Position: LLMs Can be Good Tutors in English Education (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent efforts to integrate large language models into English education lack adaptability to language learning.
Approach: They argue that large language models can be effective tutors in English education . they encourage interdisciplinary research to explore these roles, fostering innovation and risks .
Outcome: The proposed models can play three critical roles: 1) as data enhancers, 2) as task predictors, 3) as agents, enabling personalized and inclusive education.
EngiBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Engineering Problem Solving (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on well-defined or abstract reasoning and fail to capture real-world engineering problems.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical benchmark to evaluate large language models on engineering problems.
Outcome: The proposed model performs well under well-defined conditions and is based on three levels of difficulty and covers diverse engineering subfields.
Zero-Shot Open-Schema Entity Structure Discovery (2026.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods based on large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on predefined entity attribute schemas or annotated datasets, often leading to incomplete extraction results.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to entity structure extraction that does not require any schema or annotated datasets.
Outcome: Experiments show that ZOES improves LLMs’ ability to extract more complete entity structures across three different domains, showcasing both the effectiveness and generalizability of the method.
Aligning Cross-Lingual Entities with Multi-Aspect Information (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs that represent entities in different languages are not covered by existing systems.
Approach: They propose two ways to embed entities from multilingual knowledge graphs into the same vector space, where equivalent entities are close to each other.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly outperforms existing systems on two benchmark datasets.
CLFFRD: Curriculum Learning and Fine-grained Fusion for Multimodal Rumor Detection (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing multimodal rumor detection models overlook sample difficulty and order when training . Existing models overlook text-level difficulty, image-level and multimodal difficulty when training samples .
Approach: They propose a curriculum learning framework that uses fine-grained fusion to detect rumors . they propose fusion-based methods that combine text and images to enhance semantic cohesion .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on English and Chinese benchmark datasets.
QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights.
Approach: They propose a query-focused task where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored table summary.
Outcome: The proposed method improves existing baselines on table-to-text generation and large language models by concatenating generated facts to the model input.
QueryAttack: Jailbreaking Aligned Large Language Models Using Structured Non-natural Query Language (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to bypass security defenses of large language models (LLMs) are not effective, but QueryAttack can be jailbroken.
Approach: They propose a framework to examine generalizability of safety alignment by translating malicious queries into structured non-natural query languages.
Outcome: The proposed framework can achieve high attack success rates and jailbreak various defense methods on mainstream LLMs.
Token-level Preference Self-Alignment Optimization for Multi-style Outline Controllable Generation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing attempts to outline generation are limited by response pair requirements and substantial computation costs.
Approach: They propose a token-level preference self-alignment optimization for outline controllable generation that extends the Bradley-Terry model from pair-wise to list-wise comparison.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods by 19.28% in performance while requiring only 56.25% training time.
FinHEAR: Human Expertise and Adaptive Risk-Aware Temporal Reasoning for Financial Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models often overlook key behavioral patterns underlying human financial behavior.
Approach: FinHEAR is a multi-agent framework for human expertise and Adaptive Risk-aware reasoning.
Outcome: FinHEAR outperforms baseline models in trend forecasting and decision-making.
Rethinking Skip Connection with Layer Normalization (2020.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to solve the optimization problem of deep neural networks are not linear, but can be used as a modulating mechanism between the input and output.
Approach: They propose to use skip connection to adjust the scale of the input and output to improve the performance.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves performance and convergence of deep neural networks and can be applied to machine translation and image classification datasets.

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