Papers by Yingjie Zhang
Dynamic Parallel Tree Search for Efficient LLM Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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Yifu Ding, Wentao Jiang, Shunyu Liu, Yongcheng Jing, Jinyang Guo, Yingjie Wang, Jing Zhang, Zengmao Wang, Ziwei Liu, Bo Du, Xianglong Liu, Dacheng Tao
| Challenge: | Recent methods focus on search accuracy while overlooking computational efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose a parallelism framework that dynamically optimizes reasoning path in inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves efficiency by 2-4 on average while maintaining or even surpassing existing reasoning algorithms in accuracy. |
Benchmarking and Improving Large Vision-Language Models for Fundamental Visual Graph Understanding and Reasoning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for enhancing understanding and reasoning abilities in graphbased tasks focus on specific graph types or tasks, posing challenges in designing versatile systems suitable for various tasks and graphs across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware fine-tuning framework to enhance LVLMs with structure learning abilities through three self-supervised learning tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive evaluations on 14 LVLMs reveal that LVLs are weak in basic graph understanding and reasoning tasks, particularly those concerning relational or structurally complex information. |
CSTree-SRI: Introspection-Driven Cognitive Semantic Tree for Multi-Turn Question Answering over Extra-Long Contexts (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP), particularly in single-turn question answering (QA) on short-text. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that captures logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintains coherence of multi-turn Questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to capture logical correlations across chunks of ELC and maintain coherence of multi-turn Questions. |
SHARP: Self-adaptive Harmful Category-aware Prompt Generation for Black-box Jailbreaking (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreak ignore the semantic differences between categories of harmful questions, leading to inconsistent success rates and reduced overall attack effectiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a category-aware jailbreak framework that incorporates the semantic category of harmful questions into prompt generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves attack success rates and category alignment and achieves better cross-category robustness compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) baselines. |
SAFER: A Controllable Safeguard for LLMs against Backdoor Attacks (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing inference-time defenses lack explicit control over false acceptance rate (FAR) existing inference time defenses aim to mitigate poisoned inputs but lack explicit FAR control . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides explicit control over false acceptance rate without prior knowledge of backdoor samples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing inference-time defenses on three benchmark datasets . it provides explicit and provable control over false acceptance rate without prior knowledge of backdoor samples . |
ZeroStance: Leveraging ChatGPT for Open-Domain Stance Detection via Dataset Generation (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Until recently, zero-shot stance detection was limited to in-domain tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for stance detection that trains a model that can generalize well to unseen targets across multiple domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method generalizes well to unseen targets across multiple domains over baselines on most benchmarks. |
Enhancing Argument Structure Extraction with Efficient Leverage of Contextual Information (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Argument structure extraction (ASE) aims to identify the discourse structure of arguments within documents. |
| Approach: | They propose an Efficient Context-aware ASE model that fully exploits contextual information by augmenting modeling capacity and augmenting training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can extract argumentative discourse structure from documents and reduce reliance on specific words or less informative sentences. |
JOLT-SQL: Joint Loss Tuning of Text-to-SQL with Confusion-aware Noisy Schema Sampling (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models have improved Text-to-SQL methods . however, they still face challenges such as complex multi-stage pipelines and poor robustness to noisy schema information. |
| Approach: | They propose a single-stage SFT framework that optimizes schema linking and SQL generation via a unified loss. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the Spider and BIRD benchmarks show that JOLT-SQL achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy among comparable-size open-source models. |
XAL: EXplainable Active Learning Makes Classifiers Better Low-resource Learners (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for active learning rely on model uncertainty or disagreement to pick unlabeled data, leading to over-confidence in superficial patterns and lack of exploration. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a bi-directional encoder and a uni-directional decoder to generate and score an explanation for low-resource text classification. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on 9 strong baselines on six datasets and can generate explanations for its predictions. |
CascadeFix: Multi-Location Program Repair via Cascading Planning and Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automating program repair face insufficient bug dependency modeling and inadequate global repair planning when addressing semantically complex multi-location bugs. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-location automatic repair method via cascading planning and generation . they propose to model dependencies among bugs and cluster them to ensure rationality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method resolves 84 multi-location bugs, achieving a 31% improvement over current methods. |
CtrlNews: LLM-based Multi-Agent Controllable News Writing via Knowledge Gravitational Field (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current approaches to news writing rely on superficially retrieved information and oversimplified knowledge enumeration resulting in shallow, repetitive, and unordered outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based multi-agent controllable news writing framework called CtrlNews . they propose a fine-grained viewpoint control mechanism to regulate bias, emotion, and exaggeration attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simulates expert questioning through automated role assignment and question generation followed by a three-layer hierarchical gravitational graph iteratively refined via expansion-reflection cycles. |
SynGraph: A Dynamic Graph-LLM Synthesis Framework for Sparse Streaming User Sentiment Modeling (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Traditional sentiment analysis methods focus on static reviews, failing to capture temporal relationship between user sentiment rating and textual content. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic graph-based framework that addresses data sparsity in streaming reviews. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces data sparsity by categorizing users into mid-tail, long-tail and extreme scenarios and incorporating LLM enhancements within a dynamic graph-based structure. |
Beyond Surface Alignment: Rebuilding LLMs Safety Mechanism via Probabilistically Ablating Refusal Direction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models . current safety alignment methods have insufficient safety alignment depth and unrobust internal defense mechanisms. |
| Approach: | a new safety alignment framework is developed to overcome jailbreak attacks . the framework forces the model to dynamically rebuild its refusal mechanisms from jailbreak states . |
| Outcome: | a new safety alignment framework reduces attack success rates by approximately 95% on four open-source LLM families and six representative attacks. |
A Rationale-centric Counterfactual Data Augmentation Method for Cross-Document Event Coreference Resolution (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing state-of-the-art event coreference resolution systems rely on spurious and spurious associations in the input mention pair text. |
| Approach: | They propose a rationale-centric counterfactual data augmentation method that leverages the debiasing capability of counterfact data haussed by LLM-in-the-loop to mitigate spurious association while emphasizing causation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on three popular cross-document benchmarks and demonstrates robustness in out-of domain scenarios. |
Intra-Event and Inter-Event Dependency-Aware Graph Network for Event Argument Extraction (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not build dependency information among event argument roles . Existing methods do not learn the interactions between different roles based on event structure . |
| Approach: | They propose an intra-event and inter-e event dependency-aware graph network to model dependencies between roles . they use event structure as the fundamental unit to construct role dependencies within events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the ACE05, RAMS, and WikiEvents datasets. |
PCBERT: Parent and Child BERT for Chinese Few-shot NER (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve model performance on few-shot or zero-shot datasets are not effective for Chinese few- shot NER. |
| Approach: | They propose a prompt-based Parent and Child BERT for Chinese few-shot NER to train an annotating model on high-resource datasets and then discover more implicit labels on low-resourced datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used on Weibo and other Chinese NER datasets and it is shown to be effective in few-shot learning. |
THCM-CAL: Temporal-Hierarchical Causal Modelling with Conformal Calibration for Clinical Risk Prediction (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to risk prediction from EHRs handle structured diagnostic codes and unstructured narrative notes separately. |
| Approach: | They propose a Temporal-Hierarchical Causal Model with Conformal Calibration . they construct a multimodal causal graph where nodes represent clinical entities from two modalities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model infers three clinically grounded interactions from textual propositions and ICD codes mapped to textual descriptions. |
Pro-Woman, Anti-Man? Identifying Gender Bias in Stance Detection (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Gender bias has been widely observed in NLP models, which can perpetuate harmful stereotypes and discrimination. |
| Approach: | They construct a dataset to measure gender bias in stance detection using 36k samples . they find that all models are gender-biased and prone to classify sentences that contain male nouns as Against and those with female noun as Favor . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that all models are gender-biased and prone to classify sentences that contain male nouns as Against and those with female noun as Favor. |
WebCoderBench: Benchmarking Web Application Generation with Comprehensive and Interpretable Evaluation Metrics (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Web applications (web apps) are a key arena for large language models to demonstrate their code generation capabilities and commercial potential. |
| Approach: | a new benchmark for large language models (LLMs) is designed to provide real-world user requirements and generalizable evaluation metrics. |
| Outcome: | a new benchmark for large language models (LLMs) provides a real-world, generalizable, and interpretable evaluation score . the benchmark measures user requirements, expression styles and human-preference-aligned weights . a web application can be used to demonstrate its commercial potential, authors say . |
Learning to Generalize for Cross-domain QA (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for QA are hampered by increased training costs . current methods suffer significant performance degradation when applied to out-of-domain examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that combines prompting methods and linear probing with fine-tuning strategy, which does not entail additional cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with an average increase in F1 score of 4.5%-7.9%. |
Task Calibration: Calibrating Large Language Models on Inference Tasks (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive zero-shot performance on inference tasks, however, they may suffer from spurious correlations between input texts and output labels, which limits their ability to reason based purely on general language understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot and inference-only calibration method inspired by mutual information which recovers LLM performance through task reformulation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed calibration method improves on 13 benchmarks and prompt templates and can be integrated with other calibration methods. |
PerSphere: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Faceted Perspective Retrieval and Summarization (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization . they propose measurable metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval pipeline . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system breaks free from information silos by combining two opposing claims . it can be used to extract multiple perspectives and improve performance on the platform . |
Detecting RAG Extraction Attack via Dual-Path Runtime Integrity Game (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems augment large language models with external knowledge, but introduce a critical security vulnerability: Knowledge Base Leakage. |
| Approach: | They propose a runtime defense mechanism inspired by stack canaries in software security . canaryRAG embeds carefully designed canary tokens into retrieved chunks and reformulates RAG extraction defense as a dual-path runtime integrity game. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can detect and prevent RAG Knowledge Base Leakage in real time . it can be integrated into arbitrary RAG pipelines without retraining or structural modifications . |
CmEAA: Cross-modal Enhancement and Alignment Adapter for Radiology Report Generation (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automatic radiology report generation suffer from data bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that connects a vision encoder with a frozen large language model by using a cross-modal enhancement and alignment adapter. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on IU X-Ray and MIMIC-CXR datasets. |