Papers by Yin Zhu
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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 . |
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| 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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 . |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |
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| 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. |