Papers by Yuchen Zhuang
MedAdapter: Efficient Test-Time Adaptation of Large Language Models Towards Medical Reasoning (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have improved generation and reasoning capabilities compared to traditional BERT-sized models due to massive number of parameters and extensive pre-training on vast textual corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified post-hoc adapter for test-time adaptation of large language models . they propose to fine-tune only a small BERT-sized adapter to rank candidate LLMs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed adapter improves performance on four biomedical tasks without requiring computational resources or sharing data with third parties. |
BMRetriever: Tuning Large Language Models as Better Biomedical Text Retrievers (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Ran Xu, Wenqi Shi, Yue Yu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yanqiao Zhu, May Dongmei Wang, Joyce Ho, Chao Zhang, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Developing effective biomedical retrieval models is important for excelling at knowledge-intensive biomedically tasks but still challenging due to the lack of sufficient publicly annotated biomedic data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a series of dense retrievers for enhancing biomedical retrieval via unsupervised pre-training on large biomedically corpora, followed by instruction fine-tuning on a combination of labeled datasets and synthetic pairs. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 5 biomedical tasks across 11 datasets confirm the performance of the retrieval model on various biomedically demanding tasks. |
Calibrated Language Model Fine-Tuning for In- and Out-of-Distribution Data (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models suffer from severe miscalibration for both in-distribution and out-of-difference data due to over-parameterization. |
| Approach: | They propose a regularized method to improve in-distribution and out-of-distance calibrations by using on-manifold regularization and off-manfold regularisation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods for text classification in terms of expectation calibration error, misclassification detection, and OOD detection on six datasets. |
Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training (2025.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Yuchen Zhuang, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Xin Liu, Kewei Cheng, Sanket Lokegaonkar, Yifan Gao, Qing Ping, Tianyi Liu, Binxuan Huang, Zheng Li, Zhengyang Wang, Pei Chen, Ruijie Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Nasser Zalmout, Priyanka Nigam, Bing Yin, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs often rely on complex prompting or extensive fine-tuning to introduce new capabilities while preserving strong generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale pre-training corpus to enhance LLM agents' capabilities . they use 103B agent-specific data encompassing 76,537 APIs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training corpus outperforms open-source LLMs and commercial LLM agents on three agent benchmarks. |
EHRAgent: Code Empowers Large Language Models for Few-shot Complex Tabular Reasoning on Electronic Health Records (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Wenqi Shi, Ran Xu, Yuchen Zhuang, Yue Yu, Jieyu Zhang, Hang Wu, Yuanda Zhu, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang, May Dongmei Wang
| Challenge: | EHRAgent enables clinicians to interact with EHRs using natural language . reliance on rule-based conversion systems often necessitates additional training or effort from data engineers. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model agent that generates and executes code in natural language to facilitate clinicians in directly interacting with EHRs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 29.6% in success rate on three real-world EHR datasets. |
WorkForceAgent-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLM-based Web Agents via Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-eacl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing web agents relying on supervised fine-tuning struggle with generalization and robustness due to insufficient reasoning capabilities when handling the inherently dynamic nature of web interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a large language model-empowered web agent that trains using a rule-based reinforcement learning framework to enhance single-step reasoning and planning for business-oriented web navigation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent outperforms baseline LLM-based agents on the WorkArena benchmark by 10.26–16.59%. |
HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Hierarchical text classification is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification . the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-generation-based framework that uses language models to encode dynamic text representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses existing methods while handling data and mitigating class imbalance. |
ReSel: N-ary Relation Extraction from Scientific Text and Tables by Learning to Retrieve and Select (2022.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Our proposed method extracts N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that decomposes the task into two stages . they propose modal query and modal entity selection . their results show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on three scientific information extraction datasets. |
DORM: Preference Data Weights Optimization for Reward Modeling in LLM Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
Rongzhi Zhang, Chenwei Zhang, Xinyang Zhang, Liang Qiu, Haoming Jiang, Yuchen Zhuang, Qingru Zhang, Hyokun Yun, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Tuo Zhao, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to align large language models with human preferences are noisy and varying in importance of preference samples. |
| Approach: | a new method enhances reward modeling by learning to dynamically weigh preference data. |
| Outcome: | a new method improves the performance of large language models with human preferences . it initializes data importance and iteratively refines them to maximize validation performance. |
Towards Effective and Efficient Multi-Agent Language Model Systems: Foundations, Prospects, and Applications (2026.acl-tutorials)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Multi-agent systems powered by large language models still face challenges . tutorial focuses on three core components to build effective and efficient systems . |
| Approach: | This tutorial introduces recent advances in building effective and efficient multi-agent LLM systems . it focuses on three core components: model distillation, dynamic routing, memory- and compute efficient serving . |
| Outcome: | This tutorial introduces state-of-the-art techniques for building efficient and efficient multi-agent LLM systems . it covers coordination and communication among agents, crucial for collective performance . |
ReGen: Zero-Shot Text Classification via Training Data Generation with Progressive Dense Retrieval (2023.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that large pretrained language models can generate training data with no task-specific or cross-task data. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-enhanced framework to create training data from a general-domain unlabeled corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4.3% gain over baselines and saves 70% of time compared with baselines using large language models. |
Knowledge-Infused Prompting: Assessing and Advancing Clinical Text Data Generation with Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Ran Xu, Hejie Cui, Yue Yu, Xuan Kan, Wenqi Shi, Yuchen Zhuang, May Dongmei Wang, Wei Jin, Joyce Ho, Carl Yang
| Challenge: | Clinical natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield that requires the extraction, analysis, and interpretation of unstructured clinical text. |
| Approach: | They propose a model which infuses knowledge into clinical text generation with LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance across 8 clinical NLP tasks and 18 datasets by 7.7%-8.7% on average. |
RAM-EHR: Retrieval Augmentation Meets Clinical Predictions on Electronic Health Records (2024.acl-short)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing deep learning models for EHRs rely on knowledge from a single source and do not capture the semantic information for medical codes. |
| Approach: | They propose a Retrieval AugMentation pipeline to augment clinical prediction on EHRs . they use multiple knowledge sources to convert them into text and use consistency regularization to capture complementary information from patient visits and summarized knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on two EHR datasets show that RAM-EHR improves clinical prediction tasks. |
AnalyticKWS: Towards Exemplar-Free Analytic Class Incremental Learning for Small-footprint Keyword Spotting (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Keyword spotting (KWS) is a useful mechanism to identify spoken commands in voice-enabled systems, but catastrophic forgetting is causing models to lose their ability to recognize earlier keywords. |
| Approach: | They propose an exemplar-free method that updates model parameters without revisiting earlier data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing continual learning methods on a variety of datasets and settings. |
Triad: A Framework Leveraging a Multi-Role LLM-based Agent to Solve Knowledge Base Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances with LLMs have shown promising results across various tasks, but their use in answering questions from knowledge bases remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that utilizes an LLM-based agent with multiple roles for KBQA tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the LC-QuAD and YAGO-QA benchmarks yielding F1 scores of 11.8% and 20.7%, respectively. |
RAG in the Wild: On the (In)effectiveness of LLMs with Mixture-of-Knowledge Retrieval Augmentation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances large language models by integrating external knowledge retrieved at inference time. |
| Approach: | They evaluate RAG systems using MassiveDS, a large-scale datastore with mixture of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. |
POLYIE: A Dataset of Information Extraction from Polymer Material Scientific Literature (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Jerry Cheung, Yuchen Zhuang, Yinghao Li, Pranav Shetty, Wantian Zhao, Sanjeev Grampurohit, Rampi Ramprasad, Chao Zhang
| Challenge: | SciIE datasets for polymer materials are lacking for this class of materials . POLYIE is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . |
| Approach: | They propose a SciIE dataset for polymer materials that uses entity annotations from 146 full-length articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles . it presents challenges due to diverse lexical formats of entities and ambiguity between entities . |