Papers by Xuejie Zhang
Domain Generalization via Switch Knowledge Distillation for Robust Review Representation (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for review representations of unseen or anonymous users are limited by their in-domain nature. |
| Approach: | They propose to use in-domain user and product information to generalize reviews . they use switch knowledge distillation to learn review representations for unseen users . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well for existing or anonymous unseen users. |
Topology-of-Question-Decomposition: Enhancing Large Language Models with Information Retrieval for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are constrained to chaining immediate reasoning steps and relying solely on parametric knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that activates retrieval only when necessary to improve answer accuracy. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed framework improves performance in knowledge-intensive tasks. |
SoftMCL: Soft Momentum Contrastive Learning for Fine-grained Sentiment-aware Pre-training (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for pre-training language models capture general language understanding but fail to distinguish affective impact of a particular context to a specific word. |
| Approach: | They propose a soft momentum contrastive learning method for fine-grained sentiment-aware pre-training that uses valence ratings as soft-label supervision instead of hard labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four sentiment-related tasks and the results are published online. |
Reasoning with Trees: Faithful Question Answering over Knowledge Graph (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in reasoning capabilities, yet they still face challenges in complex, multi-step reasoning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergistically integrates LLMs with knowledge graphs (KGs) to enhance reasoning performance and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark KGQA datasets and improves on the MCTS process. |
Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Dialogue State Tracking via Dual Low-Rank Adaptation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) involve embedding prompts into language models, but these methods have inherent limitations. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play architecture designed for zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) dual low-rank adaptation targets dialogue context processing and prompt optimization without incurring additional inference latency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms baseline methods on multi-domain datasets and the MultiWOZ dataset. |
Accelerating Inference for Pretrained Language Models by Unified Multi-Perspective Early Exiting (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing competitive methods to accelerate inference of pretrained language models are limited by their complexity and computational consumption. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified horizontal and vertical multi-perspective early exiting framework to accelerate inference of transformer-based models. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MPEE can achieve higher acceleration inference with competent performance than existing competitive methods. |
DuetSim: Building User Simulator with Dual Large Language Models for Task-Oriented Dialogues (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | User Simulators are used to train task-oriented dialogue systems . traditional training paradigms rely on human-engineered agendas resulting in generated responses that lack diversity and spontaneity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to generate diverse responses . they use two LLMs to generate and verify responses, which are preferred by users . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces responses that exhibit diversity and are preferred by human users. |
Investigating Dynamic Routing in Tree-Structured LSTM for Sentiment Analysis (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing deep neural network models such as LSTM and tree-LSTM have a bias problem where the words in the tail of a sentence are more heavily emphasized than those in the header. |
| Approach: | They propose a capsule tree-LSTM model that uses dynamic routing to build sentence representations by assigning different weights to nodes according to their contributions to prediction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and EmoBank datasets. |
Dual-Encoder Transformers with Cross-modal Alignment for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal aspect-based sentiment analysis (MABSA) aims to extract aspect terms from text and image pairs, and then analyze their corresponding sentiment. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-encoder transformer with cross-modal alignment to extract aspect terms from text and image pairs and then analyze their corresponding sentiments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing methods on two benchmarks. |
Graph Attention Network with Memory Fusion for Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies ignored the syntactic relationship between the aspect and its corresponding context words, leading the model to focus on syntaktically unrelated words mistakenly. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend the graph convolutional network by assigning different weights to edges of connected words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve on five datasets showing that it learns and exploits multiword relations and draws different weights of words to improve performance. |
Instruction Tuning with Retrieval-based Examples Ranking for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) identifies sentiment information related to specific aspects . previous studies have proposed using fixed examples for instruction tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose an instruction learning method with retrieval-based example ranking for ABSA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to existing models on three ABSA subtasks. |
DICA: Dual-Indicator Guided Contrastive Alignment in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal large language models may deviate from this pattern due to attention drift and underutilization of visual evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a Dual-Indicator Guided Contrastive Alignment (DICA) that tracks visual attention and output image correlations to improve visual grounding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing approaches and significantly reduces hallucinations. |
Knowledge Distillation with Reptile Meta-Learning for Pretrained Language Model Compression (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge distillation (KD) can transfer knowledge from the original model into a compact model to achieve model compression. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method with reptile meta-learning to facilitate the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark show the proposed method performs better than previous methods. |
MA-BERT: Learning Representation by Incorporating Multi-Attribute Knowledge in Transformers (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for incorporating external attribute knowledge into deep neural networks are concatenating multiple attributes to word/text representation or treating them as biases to adjust attention distribution. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-attribute BERT to incorporate external attribute knowledge into deep neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models and models on three benchmark datasets. |
FedID: Federated Interactive Distillation for Large-Scale Pretraining Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | federated learning (FL) is widely studied in user-related natural language processing (NLP) but its performance is faded by confirmation bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a decentralized learning paradigm that uses labeled data to rectify local models . they propose federated interactive distillation (FedID) to alleviate communication overhead . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves the best results in homogeneous and heterogeneously federated scenarios. |
Learning to Reason via Self-Iterative Process Feedback for Small Language Models (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing SLMs’ reasoning depend on costly external signals, resulting in SLM overly confident with limited supervision signals. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune and align SLMs using positive and negative feedback signals and introduce process supervision for rewards in preference alignment by sampling-based inference simulation and process reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Gemma-2B's performance on GSM8K and MBPP, and out-of-domain generalization capabilities on MMLU_Math and HumanEval. |
Improving Personalized Sentiment Representation with Knowledge-enhanced and Parameter-efficient Layer Normalization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on personalized sentiment classification consider document reviews as overall text unit and incorporate backgrounds (i.e., user and product information) Existing methods for personalized sentiment modeling have quadratic costs that increase with text length and heterogeneous mixes of background information and textual information. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-enhanced and parameter-efficient layer normalization model that leverages pretrained checkpoints and background information into transformer structures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to improve pretrained language models in document reviews and incorporate background information with parameter-efficient fine-tuning and knowledge injecting. |
Enhancing Semantics in Multimodal Chain of Thought via Soft Negative Sampling (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Chain of thought (CoT) is used for complex reasoning problems, but hallucinations are a problem in multimodal CoT. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to generate soft negative samples with different semantics to mitigate hallucinations in multimodal CoT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates hallucinations in multimodal CoT by using soft negative sampling. |