Papers by Zefan Cai
Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators (2024.acl-long)
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Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Zefan Cai, Dawei Zhu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks that use large language models as referees are insufficient for accurately assessing their alignment with human intent. |
| Approach: | They propose a calibration framework to address positional bias in large language models as evaluators by manually annotating the “win/tie/lose” outcomes of responses from ChatGPT and Vicuna-13B in the Vicun A Benchmark’s question prompt. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework alleviates evaluation bias, resulting in closer alignment with human judgments. |
LLM Critics Help Catch Bugs in Mathematics: Towards a Better Mathematical Verifier with Natural Language Feedback (2025.findings-acl)
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Bofei Gao, Zefan Cai, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Ce Zheng, Runji Lin, Keming Lu, Dayiheng Liu, Chang Zhou, Wen Xiao, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | Existing mathematical verifiers are trained with binary classification labels, which are not informative enough for the model to accurately assess the solutions. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language feedback-enhanced verifier that can validate the correctness of response generated by policy models by constructing automatically generated training data and a two-stage training paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed verifier significantly improves in verification and reinforcement learning and alleviates data-demanding problems of the reward model. |
MENTOR: Efficient Autoregressive Image Generation with Balanced Multimodal Control (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent text-to-image models achieve impressive visual quality but still face challenges in precise controllability, balancing multimodal inputs, and high training cost for multimodal image generation. |
| Approach: | They propose an autoregressive framework with a two-stage training paradigm for controllable multimodal image generation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on DreamBench++ and DreamBech show that the proposed framework achieves a strong balance between textual and visual guidance for controllable image generation. |
SANTA: Separate Strategies for Inaccurate and Incomplete Annotation Noise in Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition (DS-NER) is widely used in the supervised setting, but the context-free matching process and the limited coverage of knowledge bases introduce inaccurate and incomplete annotation noise respectively. |
| Approach: | They propose to handle two types of noise separately with Memory-smoothed Focal Loss and Entity-aware KNN to relieve the entity ambiguity problem caused by inaccurate annotation and a noise-tolerant loss to improve the model’s robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a new state-of-the-art on five public datasets. |
Mitigating Language-Level Performance Disparity in mPLMs via Teacher Language Selection and Cross-lingual Self-Distillation (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) yield impressive performance on cross-language tasks, yet significant performance disparities exist across different languages within the same mPLm. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the learned knowledge from well-performing languages to guide under-performing ones within the same mPLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it can guide under-performing languages while minimizing language-level performance disparities across different mPLMs. |
PCA-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal Large Language Models in Perception-Cognition-Action Chain (2024.findings-acl)
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Liang Chen, Yichi Zhang, Shuhuai Ren, Haozhe Zhao, Zefan Cai, Yuchi Wang, Peiyi Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang
| Challenge: | a new multimodal decision-making benchmark evaluates the integrated capabilities of multimodal large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal decision-making benchmark for evaluating MLLMs . they propose an automatic evaluation protocol to assess 10 prevalent ML models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves performance of multimodal large language models in three scenarios . the model is required to integrate multiple capabilities to make accurate decisions . |
Improving the Robustness of Distantly-Supervised Named Entity Recognition via Uncertainty-Aware Teacher Learning and Student-Student Collaborative Learning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) methods require a substantial quantity of high-quality annotation for training models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce the number of incorrect pseudo labels in self-training . they propose 'uncertainty-aware teacher learning' and 'student-student collaboration' |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art DS-NER denoising methods. |
DialogVCS: Robust Natural Language Understanding in Dialogue System Upgrade (2024.naacl-long)
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Zefan Cai, Xin Zheng, Tianyu Liu, Haoran Meng, Jiaqi Han, Gang Yuan, Binghuai Lin, Baobao Chang, Yunbo Cao
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language understanding are based on a well-defined intent 1 ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose to retrain the natural language understanding model as new data from real users are merged into existing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that the semantically entangled intents can be recognized with an automatic workflow. |
Improving Event Definition Following For Zero-Shot Event Detection (2024.acl-long)
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Zefan Cai, Po-Nien Kung, Ashima Suvarna, Mingyu Ma, Hritik Bansal, Baobao Chang, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches on zero-shot event detection train models on datasets annotated with known event types and prompt them with unseen event definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to train models to better follow event definitions by using an automatic generated Diverse Event Definition dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three open benchmarks on zero-shot event detection. |