Papers by Yuqing Zhang
DORE: Document Ordered Relation Extraction based on Generative Framework (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing generative methods do not fit document-level relation extraction tasks where there are multiple entities and relational facts. |
| Approach: | They propose to generate a symbolic and ordered sequence from relation matrix which is easier to learn and introduce several negative sampling strategies to improve the performance with balanced signals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can improve the performance of the generative DocRE models on four datasets. |
An AMR-based Link Prediction Approach for Document-level Event Argument Extraction (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work has introduced Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) for Document-level Event Argument Extraction (Doc-level EAE) however, in these works AMR is used only implicitly, for instance, as additional features or training signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel AMR-based graph structure which uses graph neural networks to find event arguments from unstructured text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed graph structure outperforms the state-of-the-art models by 3.63pt and 2.33pt F1 and reduces inference time by 56%. |
An Empirical Study of Position Bias in Modern Information Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new evaluation framework is used to assess the extent and impact of position bias in information retrieval. |
| Approach: | They introduce a position-aware retrieval benchmark and a diagnostic metric to quantify position bias . they compare models with BM25, dense embedding models, ColBERT-style late-interaction models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates retrieval models for position bias from a worst-case perspective. |
A Top-down Neural Architecture towards Text-level Parsing of Discourse Rhetorical Structure (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Text-level discourse parsing of discourse rhetorical structure (DRS) is a fundamental research topic in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down neural architecture for text-level discourse parsing . they cast the parser as a recursive split point ranking task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed top-down approach is more suitable for text-level discourse parsing. |
Benchmarking Data Science Agents (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising data science aids, assisting humans in data analysis and processing. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation paradigm and benchmarks that assess the performance of data science agents throughout the entire data science lifecycle. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation paradigm streamlines dataset preparation, improves coverage, and expands benchmarking comprehensiveness. |
Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning with Pipelined Error-Mitigated Aggregation and Matrix-Wise Freezing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-tuning large language models often suffer from biased model aggregation and are hindered by significant communication and computation burden. |
| Approach: | They propose a Federated low-rank adaptation system for large language models that leverages pipelined error-mitigated model aggregation and adaptive matrix-wise parameter freezing to mitigate aggregations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves time-to-target by 2.17-8.48 on real-world datasets. |
LLMInit: A Free Lunch from Large Language Models for Selective Initialization of Recommendation (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Weizhi Zhang, Liangwei Yang, Wooseong Yang, Henry Peng Zou, Yuqing Liu, Ke Xu, Sourav Medya, Philip S. Yu
| Challenge: | Existing algorithms for collaborative filtering are limited by their computational demands and latency. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to integrate pre-trained LLM embeddings into CF models through selective initialization strategies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves recommendation performance while maintaining low computational costs. |
Token-Aware Editing of Internal Activations for Large Language Model Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize the behavior of large language models neglect misalignment discrepancies among tokens, resulting in deviant alignment direction and inflexible editing strength. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-aware editing approach to exploit the misalignment discrepancy among tokens to enhance activation probing and facilitate intervention. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on three alignment capabilities demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach surpassing baseline by 25.8% on the primary metric of truthfulness with minimal cost. |
A Multi-Modal Knowledge Graph for Classical Chinese Poetry (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies in classical Chinese poetry area focus on generation and analysis of poetry. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate the visual information of words in classical Chinese poetry into a multi-modal knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model bridges the semantic gap between two modalities and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the poetry-image retrieval task. |
SelfAug: Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Distribution Self-Alignment (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Yuqing Huang, Rongyang Zhang, Qimeng Wang, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, null Yiwu, Yao Hu, Xuyang Zhi, Guiquan Liu, Xin Li, Hao Wang, Enhong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
Empathy in Diversity: Personalized Depression and Anxiety Therapy via Dialogue State Tracking and Patient-Aware Planning (2026.acl-long)
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Xinwei Yang, Junyi Fan, Yuqing Liu, Jiaxuan Wang, Jiashuai Zhang, Hongru Liang, Wenqiang Lei, Yao Song
| Challenge: | Recent efforts have turned to large language models (LLMs) as therapeutic agents for psychological therapy tasks, yet robustness across diverse patients remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a realistic role-play protocol for evaluating therapeutic dialogue agents and a de-identified, expert-annotated corpus of therapist–patient dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on therapeutic outcomes and dialogue quality while improving conversational efficiency. |
Lexical Diversity-aware Relevance Assessment for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, yielding a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a Lexical Diversity-aware RAG method to address the biases in relevant information retrieval and utilization induced by lexical diversity. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks show the proposed method yields a 10.6% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA. |
NeLLCom-Lex: A Neural-agent Framework to Study the Interplay between Lexical Systems and Language Use (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Lexical semantic change has been investigated with observational and experimental methods, but observational methods cannot get at causal mechanisms. |
| Approach: | They introduce a neural-agent framework designed to simulate semantic change by first grounding agents in a real lexical system and then manipulating their communicative needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework simulates the evolution of a lexical system within a single generation by grounding agents in a real lexicon and manipulating their communicative needs. |
LeanK: Learnable K Cache Channel Pruning for Efficient Decoding (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to optimize the key-value (KV) cache include: (1) Eviction, which discards cache of less important tokens; (2) Selection, which retains the full KV cache but selectively reads relevant entries. |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-based method that prunes unimportant key (K) cache channels by leveraging static channel sparsity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LeanK reduces GPU memory and accelerates decoding without sacrificing accuracy. |
PhiloGPT: A Philology-Oriented Large Language Model for Ancient Chinese Manuscripts with Dunhuang as Case Study (2024.emnlp-main)
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Yuqing Zhang, Baoyi He, Yihan Chen, Hangqi Li, Han Yue, Shengyu Zhang, Huaiyong Dou, Junchi Yan, Zemin Liu, Yongquan Zhang, Fei Wu
| Challenge: | philology requires years of professional training in extensive knowledge memorization and manual textual retrieval. |
| Approach: | They curated the PhiloCorpus-ZH, a rich collec-tion of ancient Chinese texts spanning a millennium with 30 diverse topics, including firsthand folk copies. |
| Outcome: | The PhiloCorpus-ZH corpus facilitated the development of the first LLM tailored for discovering ancient Chinese manuscripts. |
Accelerating Prefilling via Decoding-time Contribution Sparsity (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing acceleration methods exploit attention score sparsity by estimating blocks with high attention scores and applying dynamic sparse attention. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which replaces dense attention with Triangle attention in a subset of layers to reduce the time needed to decode. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TriangleMix achieves near-lossless performance on long-context and long-constrast reasoning benchmarks while significantly improving efficiency. |
MLCopilot: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Solving Machine Learning Tasks (2024.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to automating ML are time-consuming and difficult to understand for human developers. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages large language models to develop ML solutions for novel tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the gap between machine intelligence and human knowledge by exploiting state-of-the-art large language models. |
MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application (2026.acl-long)
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Xueqing Peng, Lingfei Qian, Yan Wang, Ruoyu Xiang, Yueru He, Yang Ren, Mingyang Jiang, Vincent Jim Zhang, Yuqing Guo, Jeff Zhao, Huan He, Yi Han, Yun Feng, Yuechen Jiang, Yupeng Cao, Haohang Li, Yangyang Yu, Xiaoyu Wang, Penglei Gao, Shengyuan Lin, Keyi Wang, Shanshan Yang, Yilun Zhao, Zhiwei Liu, Peng Lu, Jerry Huang, Suyuchen Wang, Triantafillos Papadopoulos, Polydoros Giannouris, Efstathia Soufleri, Nuo Chen, Zhiyang Deng, Heming Fu, Yijia Zhao, Mingquan Lin, Meikang Qiu, Kaleb E Smith, Arman Cohan, Xiao-Yang Liu, Jimin Huang, Guojun Xiong, Alejandro Lopez-Lira, Xi Chen, Junichi Tsujii, Jian-Yun Nie, Sophia Ananiadou, Qianqian Xie
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of LLMs in finance are text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual and multimodal benchmark for evaluating LLMs in real financial contexts. |
| Outcome: | The first expert-annotated multilingual and multimodal benchmark is released . it evaluates 21 leading LLMs and shows they perform better in multilingual settings . |
CSL: A Large-scale Chinese Scientific Literature Dataset (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets centered around the English language restrict development of Chinese scientific NLP. |
| Approach: | They present a large-scale Chinese scientific literature dataset based on Chinese papers . they use semi-structured data as a natural annotation for many supervised NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can serve as a Chinese corpus and perform many supervised tasks. |
Regression Bugs Are In Your Model! Measuring, Reducing and Analyzing Regressions In NLP Model Updates (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using negative flips, we quantify, reduce and analyze regression errors in deep neural networks. |
| Approach: | They propose to quantify, reduce and analyze regression errors in NLP models by negative flips. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model update regression has a prevalent presence across tasks in the GLUE benchmark. |
Improving Prediction Backward-Compatiblility in NLP Model Upgrade with Gated Fusion (2023.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | a regression error during model upgrade often outweighs the benefits of accuracy gain . a novel method that promotes backward compatibility during model upgrades is proposed . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that promotes backward compatibility via learning to mix predictions between old and new models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and achieves negative flip rate reductions by 73.2% on two model upgrade scenarios. |
Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention (2025.acl-long)
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Jingyang Yuan, Huazuo Gao, Damai Dai, Junyu Luo, Liang Zhao, Zhengyan Zhang, Zhenda Xie, Yuxing Wei, Lean Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Yuqing Wang, Chong Ruan, Ming Zhang, Wenfeng Liang, Wangding Zeng
| Challenge: | Long-context modeling is crucial for next-generation language models, but high computational cost of standard attention mechanisms poses significant computational challenges. |
| Approach: | They propose a natively trained Sparse Attention mechanism that integrates algorithms with hardware-aligned optimizations to achieve efficient long-context modeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model maintains or exceeds Full Attention models across general benchmarks, long-context tasks, and instruction-based reasoning. |
Applying Contrastive Learning to Code Vulnerability Type Classification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to classification of vulnerabilities ignore their relationships and treat each class in isolation, resulting in non-scalable code vector representations. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework to bring vector representations of related CWEs closer together and use max-pooling to enable the model to handle longer vulnerability code inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 2.97%-17.90% on accuracy and 0.98%-22.27% on weighted-F1 with even better performance on higher-quality datasets. |
Discourse Parsing Enhanced by Discourse Dependence Perception (2022.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Top-down neural models still suffer from the top-down error propagation issue . previous studies gradually switch from feature-based machine learning methods to deep neural models . |
| Approach: | They propose a top-down framework that learns from discourse dependency and constituency parsing through one shared encoder and two independent decoders. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns from discourse dependency and constituency parsing through one shared encoder and two independent decoders on a Chinese discourse corpus. |
DAC-Bench: A Decision-Aware Benchmark for Compositional Mobile GUI Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on short, linear workflows and step-level accuracy, highlighting performance degradations. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision-aware benchmark with compositional tasks comprising 830 episodes and 11,345 action steps across 35 applications on Android and iOS. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show performance degradation and branch correctness issues in 7 different GUI agents. |
CoLLiE: Collaborative Training of Large Language Models in an Efficient Way (2023.emnlp-demo)
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Kai Lv, Shuo Zhang, Tianle Gu, Shuhao Xing, Jiawei Hong, Keyu Chen, Xiaoran Liu, Yuqing Yang, Honglin Guo, Tengxiao Liu, Yu Sun, Qipeng Guo, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly pivotal in a wide range of tasks . however, the resources required for training these models necessitate efficient solutions . |
| Approach: | They propose a library that facilitates collaborative training of large language models . they use 3D parallelism, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods and optimizers . |
| Outcome: | The proposed library has proven superior training efficiency in comparison with prevalent solutions in pre-training and fine-tuning scenarios. |
LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhuoshi Pan, Qianhui Wu, Huiqiang Jiang, Menglin Xia, Xufang Luo, Jue Zhang, Qingwei Lin, Victor Rühle, Yuqing Yang, Chin-Yew Lin, H. Vicky Zhao, Lili Qiu, Dongmei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to compress prompts only leverage unidirectional context, causing suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a task-agnostic prompt compression method that takes tokens from context . they use a Transformer encoder to capture all essential information needed for prompt compression . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is 3x-6x faster than existing prompt compression methods and faster than baselines. |
TokenShapley: Token Level Context Attribution with Shapley Value (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have strong capabilities in in-context learning, but verifying the correctness of their generated responses remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a token-level attribution method that combines Shapley value-based data attribution with KNN-based retrieval techniques to improve attribution accuracy. |
| Outcome: | TokenShapley outperforms state-of-the-art methods on four benchmarks . it achieves an 11–23% improvement in accuracy on the benchmarks. |
Plan, Verify and Switch: Integrated Reasoning with Diverse X-of-Thoughts (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) have been used to prompt different reasoning thoughts, such as Chain of Thought and Program of Though. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that prompts large language models with diverse reasoning thoughts by iterating between different prompting methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to generate multiple reasoning thoughts in 10 popular math reasoning datasets and is orthogonal to recent work that makes improvements on single reasoning methods and can generalise to logical reasoning domain. |
Endowing Neural Language Learners with Human-like Biases: A Case Study on Dependency Length Minimization (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Comparing the behavior of models with that of human learners can reveal which aspects affect the emergence of this preference. |
| Approach: | They propose to add three factors to the standard neural-agent language learning and communication framework to make the simulation more realistic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed conditions can contribute to a small but significant learning advantage for listeners of verb-initial languages. |
UCoder: Unsupervised Code Generation by Internal Probing of Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Jiajun Wu, Jian Yang, Wei Zhang, Linzheng Chai, Yuchi Ma, Ensheng Shi, Yuqing Ma, Zhoujun Li, Xianglong Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation tasks, but their effectiveness relies on supervised training with extensive labeled data and computational resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised method that leverages Internal Probing of Large language models for Code generation without any external corpus, even unlabeled code snippets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve competitive performance compared to supervised approaches while reducing the dependency on labeled data and computational resources. |