Papers by Yin Zhu

49 papers
Rhetorical Device-Aware Sarcasm Detection with Counterfactual Data Augmentation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Sarcasm is a complex form of sentiment expression widely used in human daily life.
Approach: They propose a device-aware sarcasm dataset with counterfactually augmented data to capture its complexity.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that it is more balanced than zero-shot models.
LLatrieval: LLM-Verified Retrieval for Verifiable Generation (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models struggle with factual errors and often produce non-factual and fabricated content.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate text with supporting documents to enable the user to flexibly verify the answer.
Outcome: Experiments on ALCE show that LLatrieval significantly outperforms extensive baselines and achieves state-of-the-art results.
FanLoRA: Fantastic LoRAs and Where to Find Them in Large Language Model Fine-tuning (2024.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Lowrank adaptation and its variants introduce significant latency in multi-tenant settings, hindering their applications in the industry.
Approach: They propose a framework to fine-tune LoRA modules on a large-scale instruction tuning dataset.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing PEFT methods and significantly reduces inference latency.
Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Reasoning Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains, but how their safety benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored.
Approach: They propose a safety-aware reasoning paradigm that integrates a pivot token-based safety-based reasoning mechanism into LLMs’ generation process.
Outcome: The proposed model improves the safety of large language models against jailbreak queries while minimizing attacks and maintaining the original performance.
CoRanking: Collaborative Ranking with Small and Large Ranking Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Towards a Unified Multi-Dimensional Evaluator for Text Generation (2022.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks for natural language generation are dominated by similarity-based metrics.
Approach: They propose a multi-dimensional evaluator for natural language generation that integrates multiple dimensions into one evaluer.
Outcome: The proposed evaluator improves on three typical NLG tasks and improves with external knowledge.
Arbitrary Time Information Modeling via Polynomial Approximation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs lack rich inference patterns and the limited ability to model arbitrary timestamps continuously.
Approach: They propose a temporal knowledge graph-based temporal representation method that decomposes time information by polynomials and then enhances the model's capability to represent arbitrary timestamps flexibly.
Outcome: The proposed method can encode arbitrary time information or even unseen timestamps while capturing rich inference patterns and higher-arity relations of the knowledge base.
RAFFLES: Reasoning-based Attribution of Faults for LLM Systems (2026.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation frameworks focus on simple metrics and end-to-end outcomes, but they struggle with longer contexts.
Approach: They propose an offline evaluation architecture that incorporates iterative reasoning to evaluate the quality of the candidate faults and rationales of the Judge.
Outcome: The proposed architecture outperforms baseline evaluation frameworks with two datasets to identify step-level faults in multi-agent systems and ReasonEval datasets.
Domain Adaptation for Subjective Induction Questions Answering on Products by Adversarial Disentangled Learning (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to answer subjective questions about products are often imbalanced across product domains.
Approach: They propose a domain-adaptive model that integrates multiple viewpoints into a good answer by integrating these heterogeneous and inconsistent viewpoints.
Outcome: The proposed model integrates multiple viewpoints into a single answer span and is able to integrate them into the answer.
Knowledge-Selective Pretraining for Attribute Value Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for AVE are limited on rare attributes due to poor generalization ability.
Approach: They propose to leverage pretraining and transfer learning to address weaknesses in existing methods.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves new state-of-the-art performance without pretraining on rare attributes with limited training resources.
ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Infusing Disease Knowledge into BERT for Health Question Answering, Medical Inference and Disease Name Recognition (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to augment pre-trained language models with disease knowledge are lacking.
Approach: They propose a method to augment BERT-like pre-trained language models with disease knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on a suite of BERT models over three tasks.
Code over Words: Overcoming Semantic Inertia via Code-Grounded Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models struggle with semantic inertia, a problem that is often attributed to natural language encoding, which entangles descriptive semantics and logical rules, leading to persistent hallucinations of familiar physics despite explicit contradictory rules.
Approach: They propose a framework that decouples logical dynamics from visual priors via amortized theory induction and counterfactual contrastive alignment.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms expensive inference-time search methods in both efficiency and accuracy.
Towards Interpretable Tabular Reasoning: Enhancing LLM Reasoning on Tabular Data with Pre-Constructed Logic Graph (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Tabular data is used in fields such as finance and healthcare due to its heterogeneity and complexity.
Approach: They propose a Logic-Graph-Enhanced LLM Reasoning framework that integrates the strengths of tree-based models and LLMs to improve their interpretability.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms tree-based models and state-of-the-art LLMs on tabular prediction tasks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability.
STATE ToxiCN: A Benchmark for Span-level Target-Aware Toxicity Extraction in Chinese Hate Speech Detection (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies on Chinese hate speech detection lack span-level fine-grained annotations.
Approach: They construct a Span-level target-aware Toxicity Extraction dataset and evaluate existing models for Chinese hateful slang.
Outcome: The proposed dataset is the first span-level Chinese hate speech dataset and evaluates the ability of existing models to understand hate semantics.
Dialectical Structured Reasoning for Explainable Multimodal Fake News Detection (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing fake news detection models are opaque and lack deductive transparency . a framework for dialectical structured reasoning is proposed to address this limitation .
Approach: They propose a framework that model fake news detection as an explicit dialectical process over multimodal social context.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art while producing transparent explanations that mirror human reasoning process.
FormulaReasoning: A Dataset for Formula-Based Numerical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing datasets for numerical reasoning often lack explicit knowledge of formulas . current datasets do not provide process supervision information, resulting in incomplete reasoning .
Approach: They propose a benchmark for formula-based numerical reasoning with 5,324 questions . they provide annotations in English and Chinese and a formula database as an external knowledge source .
Outcome: The proposed model includes 5,324 questions requiring calculations grounded in external physics principles.
Agentic-R: Learning to Retrieve for Agentic Search (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

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.
PychoAgent: Psychology-driven LLM Agents for Explainable Panic Prediction on Social Media during Sudden Disaster Events (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Social media's rich information content and spatiotemporal granularity provide unique opportunities for emotion prediction and management.
Approach: They propose a Psychology-driven generative Agent framework for explainable panic prediction based on emotion arousal theory.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves panic emotion prediction performance by 13% to 21% compared to baseline models.
ZoomEye: Enhancing Multimodal LLMs with Human-Like Zooming Capabilities through Tree-Based Image Exploration (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in vision-language understanding but their visual input remains fixed throughout the reasoning process.
Approach: They propose a model-agnostic tree search algorithm tailored for vision-level reasoning that allows MLLMs to explore textual tokens while visual input remains fixed throughout reasoning process.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms strong large models such as GPT-4o on high-resolution benchmarks and improves performance on a series of elaborate high-level benchmarks.
CHROMIC: Chronological Reasoning Across Multi-Panel Comics (2026.eacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large-scale vision–language models have achieved remarkable progress on various reasoning tasks, but most studies focus on natural photographic images and pay limited attention to multi-panel visual narratives such as comics.
Approach: They propose a benchmark dataset for chronological reasoning in multi-panel comics that covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles.
Outcome: The proposed dataset covers six types of reasoning questions and spans both Western and Japanese comic styles.
Comprehensive Benchmarking of Long-Form Speech Generation in Diverse Scenarios (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation benchmarks for long-form speech are limited to limited domains, creating a significant gap with the diverse downstream applications.
Approach: They propose a benchmark that decomposes "long-form speech quality" into specific, disentangled dimensions.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark decomposes “long-form speech quality” into specific, disentangled dimensions.
StruNRAG: Evaluation of OCR-Induced Structural Noise on RAG Robustness (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluations of RAG systems ignore structural noise, authors say . complex layouts can cause OCR failures and disrupt semantic flow of text . advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption that fragments global context.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate RAG robustness against OCR-induced structural perturbations.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark systematically injects three categories of real-world structural noise into a bilingual dataset of 2,132 question-answer pairs . results show that advanced LLMs demonstrate robustness against local noise, but struggle to maintain reasoning capabilities under severe structural disruption .
CityCube: Benchmarking Cross-view Spatial Reasoning on Vision-Language Models in Urban Environments (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks focus on indoor or street settings, overlooking challenges of open-ended urban spaces.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to probe cross-view spatial reasoning capabilities of current VLMs in urban settings.
Outcome: The citycube benchmark examines the performance of current vision-language models in urban environments.
MTR-Suite: A Framework for Evaluating and Synthesizing Conversational Retrieval Benchmarks (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Sliding Windows Are Not the End: Exploring Full Ranking with Long-Context Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: LegalBench evaluated 20 LLMs in 162 legal tasks in 20 countries and jurisdictions.
Approach: They present a comprehensive evaluation of 21 popular Large Language Models and the first comparative analysis of the empirical results.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are based on the Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and are compared to 21 popular LLMs.
Automatic Prompt Optimization with “Gradient Descent” and Beam Search (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance as general purpose agents, but their abilities remain highly dependent on prompts which are hand written with onerous trial-and-error effort.
Approach: They propose an algorithm that uses numerical gradient descent to automatically improve prompts by rewriting vague task descriptions into more precise annotation instructions.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms previous methods and improves performance on three benchmark NLP tasks and the novel problem of LLM jailbreak detection.
MoPE: Mixture of Prefix Experts for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing zero-shot dialogue state tracking models suffer from domain transferring and partial prediction problems.
Approach: They propose to establish connections between similar slots in different domains to improve model transfer performance in unseen domains.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed model achieves the goal accuracy of 57.13% on MultiWOZ2.1 and 55.4.
Causal-Audit: Explicit and Auditable Graph-based Reasoning via Target-Aware Causal Chain Construction (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing LLM-based methods rely on implicit language-level reasoning, resulting in opaque causal assumptions and fragile predictions.
Approach: They propose an explicit and auditable causal reasoning framework for context-free intervention-based question answering that uses four modular stages rather than implicit end-to-end prediction.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing LLM-based methods while providing interpretable and auditable causal reasoning traces.
RLAE: Reinforcement Learning-Assisted Ensemble for LLMs (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing ensemble methods for ensembling large language models rely on fixed weighting strategies that fail to adapt to dynamic, context-dependent characteristics of LLMs.
Approach: They propose a framework that reformulates LLM ensemble through a Markov Decision Process.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by 3.3% on a diverse set of tasks while achieving lower time latency.
IAPT: Instance-Aware Prompt Tuning for Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for prompt tuning require many soft tokens to guarantee performance . large language models still require a large amount of GPU memory and computations to fine-tune .
Approach: They propose to use a parameter-efficient soft prompt generator to generate idiosyncratic soft prompts for each input instruction.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms the baselines with comparable tunable parameters and is more efficient than LoRA under the single-backbone multi-tenant setting.
An Explainable Toolbox for Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models (2022.emnlp-demos)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies evaluate VLP models by comparing the fine-tuned downstream task performance with the average downstream task accuracy.
Approach: They propose a toolbox for evaluating Vision-Language Pretraining (VLP) models.
Outcome: The proposed toolbox provides the preliminary datasets that deepen the image-texting ability of a VLP model.
3DRP-Net: 3D Relative Position-aware Network for 3D Visual Grounding (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: 3D visual grounding aims to localize the desired objects in a 3D point cloud by a free-form language description.
Approach: They propose a relation-aware framework which captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three benchmarks . it captures relative spatial relationships between objects and enhances object attributes .
Few-shot Temporal Pruning Accelerates Diffusion Models for Text Generation (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing acceleration methods for text generation ignore the importance of the distribution of sampling steps, resulting in slow sampling rates.
Approach: They propose a technique to accelerate diffusion models for text generation without additional training by using a Bayesian optimization approach.
Outcome: The proposed technique achieves 400x acceleration even with minimal sampling steps after down to less than 1 minute of optimization yielding a competitive performance even with minimum sampling steps.
LLMs + Persona-Plug = Personalized LLMs (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities in natural language understanding, generation, and reasoning.
Approach: They propose a plug-and-play LLM model that embeds a user-specific embedding for each individual by modeling her historical contexts through a lightweight plug-in user embedder module.
Outcome: Experiments on various tasks in the language model personalization (LaMP) benchmark show that the proposed model significantly outperforms existing personalized LLM approaches.
ATM: Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent System Makes a Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generator (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are proven to benefit a lot from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) due to noisy and fabricating content, it is inevitable that RAG systems are vulnerable to these noises and prone to respond incorrectly.
Approach: They propose to optimize retrieval-augmented generation (RGG) with an Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent system (ATM) ATM steers the Generator to have a robust perspective of useful documents for question answering with the help of an auxiliary Attacker agent.
Outcome: The proposed system improves the retrieval-augmented generator with an auxiliary Attacker agent and can discriminate useful documents amongst fabrications.
Unified Active Retrieval for Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing active retrieval methods struggle with handling various types of instructions.
Approach: They propose a unified active retrieval framework for retrieval-augmented generation . they propose to combine four orthogonal criteria into plug-and-play classification tasks .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on four representative types of user instructions on four types of instructions.
Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have explored using large language models to generate synthetic datasets . however, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data is inconsistent across different classification tasks.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to generate synthetic datasets to better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of LLM-generated synthetic data.
Outcome: The results show that subjectivity is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data.
Improving Pretrained Models for Zero-shot Multi-label Text Classification through Reinforced Label Hierarchy Reasoning (2021.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing zero-shot learning methods for multi-label text classification mostly learn a matching model between the feature space of text and the label space.
Approach: They propose to use a graph encoder to incorporate label hierarchies to learn effective label representations on the zero-shot multi-label text classification problem.
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms previous non-pretrained methods on the zero-shot multi-label text classification task.
Mutual Reinforcement of LLM Dialogue Synthesis and Summarization Capabilities for Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization (2025.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Empirical results demonstrate that our method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings.
Approach: They propose Mutual Reinforcing Data Synthesis (MRDS) within large language models to enhance few-shot dialogue summarization task.
Outcome: Empirical results show that the proposed method improves dialogue summarization, achieving a 1.5% increase in ROUGE scores and a 0.3% improvement in BERT scores in few-shot settings.
Learn to Relax with Large Language Models: Solving Constraint Optimization Problems via Bidirectional Coevolution (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Model (LLM)-based optimization has shown promise for autonomous problem solving, but most approaches cast LLMs as passive constraint checkers rather than proactive strategy designers.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end Automated Constraint Optimization method that tightly couples operations-research principles of constraint relaxation with LLM reasoning.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on three challenging COP benchmarks validate AutoCO’s consistent effectiveness and superior performance, especially in hard regimes where current methods degrade.
Target-based Sentiment Annotation in Chinese Financial News (2020.lrec-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using a large corpus of 8,314 target-level sentiment annotations, sentiment classification on multiple opinion aspects/targets level is unsatisfactory.
Approach: They propose to construct a large-scale target-based sentiment annotation corpus on Chinese financial news text.
Outcome: The proposed corpus has 8,314 target-level sentiment annotations on Chinese financial news text.
On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Diffusion Language Models with Early-Stage Calibration (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent studies have demonstrated that masked diffusion models (MDMs) can surpass autoregressive models (ARMs) in various tasks.
Approach: They propose a method to calibrate early token predictions without demonstration data by distilling an unnormalized target distribution into the original model.
Outcome: Experiments on math, planning, and RLHF tasks show that COPSD improves both effectiveness and efficiency, and further enhances performance when combined with supervised fine-tuning.
BioT5+: Towards Generalized Biological Understanding with IUPAC Integration and Multi-task Tuning (2024.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures.
Approach: They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data.
Outcome: The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences.
Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities but their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited.
Approach: They propose a parallel tool invocation framework that decomposes tasks into parallel tool-using subtasks while aggregating results for subsequent decisions.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves task performance while reducing token consumption and inference time.
VisLingInstruct: Elevating Zero-Shot Learning in Multi-Modal Language Models with Autonomous Instruction Optimization (2024.naacl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current MMLMs show impressive zero-shot abilities in multi-modal tasks, but their performance depends heavily on the quality of instructions.
Approach: They propose a novel approach to advancing multi-modal language models in zero-shot learning by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts through In-Context Learning.
Outcome: The proposed approach improves zero-shot performance in multi-modal tasks by evaluating and optimizing instructional texts.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations