Papers by Yequan Zhao
ChildMandarin: A Comprehensive Mandarin Speech Dataset for Young Children Aged 3-5 (2025.acl-long)
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Jiaming Zhou, Shiyao Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiabei He, Haoqin Sun, Hui Wang, Cheng Liu, Aobo Kong, Yujie Guo, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin, Yong Qin
| Challenge: | Automatic speech recognition systems have advanced significantly with models like Whisper, Conformer, and self-supervised frameworks such as Wav2vec 2.0. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Mandarin speech datasets to analyze pronunciation and tone of children aged 3 to 5 and evaluate their models on speaker verification (SV) They find that the datasets are more robust than those used by adult speech recognition systems and are open-source and available for all academic purposes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 41.25 hours of speech with carefully crafted manual transcriptions, collected from 397 speakers across various provinces in China, with balanced gender representation. |
QuZO: Quantized Zeroth-Order Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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Jiajun Zhou, Yifan Yang, Kai Zhen, Ziyue Liu, Yequan Zhao, Ershad Banijamali, Athanasios Mouchtaris, Ngai Wong, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are quantized to lower precision to reduce memory cost and latency in inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a quantized zeroth-order framework for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using low-precision forward passes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves comparable results to first-order methods in FP8 and superior accuracy in INT8 and INT4 training. |
Harmonizing the Past, Present, and Future: A Null-Space Constrained Region-Specific Method for Continual Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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Jinhui Chen, Shizhu He, Xingchang Yang, Huanxuan Liao, Yequan Wang, Xiangwen Liao, Wenhao Teng, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing continual learning paradigms prioritize instant performance through dense updates, leading to catastrophic forgetting and rapid exhaustion of model capacity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that preserves previously acquired knowledge and acquires new task-specific skills while preserving sufficient parameter capacity for subsequent adaptation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on the brain's functional partitioning and can be used to map tasks between specialized and generalist neurons. |
Break Through the Compression Bottleneck: From Theory to Practice (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing compression methods suffer from bottleneck issues when compression ratio is increased. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to combine low-rank decomposition and quantization methods to reduce the compression bottleneck. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computational and memory overhead of existing methods while maintaining model accuracy. |
Efficient Prior-Guided Reasoning for Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generation under Conflicts (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard paradigm for grounding Large Language Models (LLMs) however, performance degrades substantially when faced with noisy, outdated, or conflicting retrieved information. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that explicitly elicits the model’s parametric knowledge as prior information to guide reasoning on retrieved documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves robust performance across varying degrees of external inconsistency and noise. |
Improving Zero-shot LLM Re-Ranker with Risk Minimization (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are effective Query Likelihood Models, but their estimation is biased and the model's accuracy is poor. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which leverages Bayesian decision theory to quantify and mitigate this bias. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves re-ranking, especially in improving the Top-1 accuracy. |
Exploiting Contextual Knowledge in LLMs through đť’±-usable Information based Layer Enhancement (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to enhance the context-faithfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs) ignore the fundamental mechanism of how contextual information is processed within LLMs’ internal states. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that enhances the utilization of contextual knowledge within LLMs’ internal representations by employing V-usable information analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves context-faithfulness generation in Question-Answering tasks, particularly in scenarios involving unknown or conflicting contextual knowledge. |
Commonsense Knowledge Editing Based on Free-Text in LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing knowledge editing methods focus on editing triple-based facts such as entity-relation pairs and events (multiple triplets). |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Localization for Free-Text method which uses a Dynamics-aware Module to locate the parameter positions corresponding to commonsense knowledge and a knowledge editing module to update knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exploits the potential of the MLP and Attention layers and edits commonsense knowledge based on free-text. |
Discerning and Resolving Knowledge Conflicts through Adaptive Decoding with Contextual Information-Entropy Constraint (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing decoding methods for large language models (LLMs) are specialized in resolving knowledge conflicts and could inadvertently deteriorate performance in absence of conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive decoding method to discern whether knowledge conflicts occur and resolve them by a contextual information-entropy constraint decoding technique. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the model’s faithfulness to conflicting context and maintains high performance among non-conflicting contexts. |
EmotionTalk: An Interactive Chinese Multimodal Emotion Dataset With Rich Annotations (2026.findings-acl)
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Haoqin Sun, Jinghua Zhao, Xuechen Wang, Shiwan Zhao, Jiaming Zhou, Hui Wang, Xi Yang, Yequan Wang, Yonghua Lin
| Challenge: | Existing datasets face issues such as low quality, limited scale, and incomplete modalities, hindering model performance. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese multimodal datasets to capture authentic emotional interplay from 19 professional actors. |
| Outcome: | The EmotionTalk dataset spans 23.6 hours of dyadic conversations across diverse scenarios. |
Knowledgeable Parameter Efficient Tuning Network for Commonsense Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing commonsense question answering models incur prohibitive computation costs and poor interpretability . |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter efficient tuning network to pair PLMs with external knowledge for commonsense question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter integrates entity- and query-related knowledge at a small cost. |
Spectral Disentanglement: Rank-Aware Task Adaptation for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning in LLMs (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Continual Learning (CL) for Large Language Models faces a fundamental Stability-Plasticity Dilemma . Rank-Blindness enforces a single rank constraint across diverse tasks, leading to catastrophic forgetting of earlier tasks and underfitting on complex new ones. |
| Approach: | They propose a rank-spectrum-based rehearsal-free framework that explicitly disentangles knowledge into two orthogonal subspaces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a superior stability-plasticity balance compared to single-rank baselines. |