Papers by Zecheng Zhang
Improving Temporal Generalization of Pre-trained Language Models with Lexical Semantic Change (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve neural language models perform poorly on emerging data. |
| Approach: | They propose a lexical-level masking strategy to post-train a neural language model using static data from past years. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on two pre-trained language models, two classification tasks, and four benchmark datasets. |
Revealing and Mitigating the Local Pattern Shortcuts of Mamba (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that Mamba excels in tasks that involve localized key information but faces challenges with tasks that require handling distributed key information. |
| Approach: | They propose to introduce a global gate module into Mamba to address this problem by adding 4M extra parameters to the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms attention-based models on synthetic and synthetic tasks with only 4M extra parameters. |
IS-CoT: Breaking the Long-form Generation Collapse via Interleaved Structural Thinking (2026.acl-long)
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Zechen Sun, Yuyang Sun, Zecheng Tang, Juntao Li, Wenpeng Hu, Wenliang Chen, Zhunchen Luo, Guotong Geng, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing models with reasoning capabilities suffer from a severe length collapse in open-ended writing . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that embeds a dynamic plan-write-reflect cycle into the generation process and train a model with interleaved reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form benchmarks compared to other models on the same dataset. |
CRAB: Cross-environment Agent Benchmark for Multimodal Language Model Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Tianqi Xu, Linyao Chen, Dai-Jie Wu, Yanjun Chen, Zecheng Zhang, Xiang Yao, Zhiqiang Xie, Yongchao Chen, Shilong Liu, Bochen Qian, Anjie Yang, Zhaoxuan Jin, Jianbo Deng, Philip Torr, Bernard Ghanem, Guohao Li
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for MLM agents in interactive environments are limited by their focus on a single environment, lack of detailed and generalized evaluation methods, and the complexity of constructing tasks and evaluators. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-environment agent benchmark framework that integrates graph-based evaluation and task generation methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports multiple devices and can be easily extended to any environment with a Python interface. |
Can Diffusion Model Achieve Better Performance in Text Generation ? Bridging the Gap between Training and Inference ! (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text generation use a discrete data embedding module to map the data into the continuous space. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to bridge the gap between training and inference by mapping the discrete text into the continuous space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve 100 200 speedup with better performance on 6 generation tasks. |
DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward (2026.acl-long)
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Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang, Yixin Ji, Qianben Chen, Zhe Zhao, Kehai Chen, Juntao Li, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing preference-based reward modeling methods face a recursive dependency where each verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual RM that couples discriminative and generative reward models under a non-parametric meta-reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks and even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench. |
SAIS: Supervising and Augmenting Intermediate Steps for Document-Level Relation Extraction (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for relation extraction only implicitly learn to model relevant contexts and entity types while being trained for RE. |
| Approach: | They propose to explicitly teach the model to capture relevant contexts and entity types by supervising and augmenting intermediate steps (SAIS) for RE. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the runner-up method on three benchmarks by 5.04% . textual contexts and entity types are the major information sources that lead to the success of previous approaches. |
AVA: Attentive VLM Agent for Mastering StarCraft II (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing StarCraft II benchmarks rely on abstract state representations that deviate from human perception . Existing systems rely only on abstract representations, creating an artificial gap between how humans process battlefield information and limiting ecological validity of learned behaviors. |
| Approach: | They introduce AVACraft, the first multimodal benchmark environment for complex decision-making in StarCraft II. |
| Outcome: | The AVACraft benchmark supports both traditional and modern multi-agent reinforcement learning paradigms. |
CMD: a framework for Context-aware Model self-Detoxification (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of text detoxification fail to achieve a decent balance between effectiveness and generation quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a text detoxification framework that pays attention to both context and detoxification process. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on various LLMs show that the proposed framework can yield the best performance compared to baselines. |
Rethinking Negative Instances for Generative Named Entity Recognition (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) models are constrained by a pre-defined label set and require extensive human annotations, which limits their flexibility and adaptability to unseen tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Generative NER system that shows improved zero-shot performance across unseen entity domains by introducing contextual information and delineating label boundaries. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in zero-shot evaluation. |
L-CiteEval: A Suite for Evaluating Fidelity of Long-context Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Long-context models (LCMs) have seen remarkable advancements in recent years, facilitating tasks like long-document QA. |
| Approach: | They propose an out-of-the-box suite that can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed suite can assess both generation quality and fidelity in long-context understanding tasks. |
Open-ended Long Text Generation via Masked Language Modeling (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained autoregressive language models have dominated OPen-ended Long Text Generation (Open-LTG) however, the low inference efficiency of AR impedes their usability. |
| Approach: | They propose a representative iterative non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding strategy to improve inference efficiency for Open-LTG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate short text and collapse for long text modeling. |
Towards Complex Text-to-SQL in Cross-Domain Database with Intermediate Representation (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | IRNet synthesizes SQL queries in an end-to-end manner, but it yields unsatisfactory performance on public benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural approach called IRNet for complex and cross-domain Text-to-SQL. |
| Outcome: | IRNet achieves 46.7% accuracy on the Spider benchmark, a 19.5% improvement over state-of-the-art approaches. |