Papers by Zekun Zhang
Detoxifying Large Language Models via Knowledge Editing (2024.acl-long)
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Mengru Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Ziwen Xu, Zekun Xi, Shumin Deng, Yunzhi Yao, Qishen Zhang, Linyi Yang, Jindong Wang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) are limiting, but knowledge editing can be effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a baseline method to detoxify Large Language Models (LLMs) they propose supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces toxicity of large language models with one instance of tuning . it reduces the toxicity, while minimizing the toxins, the authors show . |
OmniThink: Expanding Knowledge Boundaries in Machine Writing through Thinking (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zekun Xi, Wenbiao Yin, Jizhan Fang, Jialong Wu, Runnan Fang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable progress in machine writing such as open domain long-form generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-thinking machine writing framework that emulates the human-like process of iterative expansion and reflection to improve the knowledge density of generated articles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the knowledge density of generated articles without compromising metrics such as coherence and depth. |
Preference-Aware Memory Update for Long-Term LLM Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for integrating long-term memory do not provide dynamic and personalized memory refinement. |
| Approach: | They propose a long-term memory update mechanism that enables dynamic and personalized memory refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed mechanism improves the performance of LLM-based agents in five tasks. |
Guiding Medical Vision-Language Models with Diverse Visual Prompts: Framework Design and Comprehensive Exploration of Prompt Variations (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current vision-language models lack the ability to focus on specific areas designated by humans . a new framework that integrates medical entity extraction, visual prompt generation, and dataset adaptation is proposed to improve visual prompt-guided fine-tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use visual prompts to guide and enhance formation of region-specific attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art large vision-language models on medical datasets. |
SimPBL: A Multi-Agent Framework for Project-Based Learning (2026.acl-long)
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Daniel Zhang-Li, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Binglin Liu, Shangqing Tu, Zijun Yao, Hao Peng, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Zhanxin Hao, Ye He, Zekun Li, Jiangyi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Xin Cong, Zhiyuan Liu, Huiqin Liu, Yu Zhang, Juanzi Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs provide partial assistance without modeling these roles, and overly comprehensive help can reduce learner autonomy. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent that provides adaptive scaffolding from interaction logs and collaborator agents that support project work through boundary-aware collaboration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves learner examination scores by 14% . it is based on a multi-agent framework with an orchestrator agent . |
Unsupervised Abstractive Meeting Summarization with Multi-Sentence Compression and Budgeted Submodular Maximization (P18-1)
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Guokan Shang, Wensi Ding, Zekun Zhang, Antoine Tixier, Polykarpos Meladianos, Michalis Vazirgiannis, Jean-Pierre Lorré
| Challenge: | a novel graph-based framework for abstractive meeting speech summarization is developed . instead of grammatical, well-segmented sentences, the input is made of often ill-formed and ungrammatically ungrammatized text fragments called utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based framework for abstractive meeting speech summarization that is fully unsupervised and does not rely on annotations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on the state-of-the-art on the AMI and ICSI corpus. |
Beyond Self-Report: Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap in Critical Thinking Assessment via Interpretable Multi-Agent System (2026.acl-long)
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Zekun Li, Jifan Yu, Haoxuan Li, Ye He, Daniel Zhang-Li, Shangqing Tu, Joy Jia Yin Lim, Yikun Jiang, Jiaxin Yuan, Yu Zhang
| Challenge: | Accurate assessment of critical thinking is limited by the Intention Behavior Gap in psychology . evaluators that measure self-reported competence are limited by multiagent architectures . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that operationalizes cognitive assessment into an interpretable multi-agent workflow with Assessment Chain-of-Thought. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aligns better with human expert ratings than gold-standard inventories on large-scale simulations and human participants. |
WebWalker: Benchmarking LLMs in Web Traversal (2025.acl-long)
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Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Yong Jiang, Zhenglin Wang, Zekun Xi, Runnan Fang, Linhai Zhang, Yulan He, Deyu Zhou, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess the ability of LLMs to perform web traversal by using an explore-critic paradigm. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mimics human-like web navigation through an explore-critic paradigm and demonstrates the effectiveness of RAG combined with WebWalker in real-world scenarios. |
A Dual-Phase Self-Evolution Framework for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing strategies to optimize LLMs through pretraining fail to enhance domain cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-phase self-evolution framework that integrates user preference adaptation and domain-specific competence to optimize LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Supervised Fine-Tuning, Preference Optimization, and Memory-Augmented baselines on general NLP benchmarks and long-term dialogue tasks. |
EasyEdit: An Easy-to-use Knowledge Editing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)
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Peng Wang, Ningyu Zhang, Bozhong Tian, Zekun Xi, Yunzhi Yao, Ziwen Xu, Mengru Wang, Shengyu Mao, Xiaohan Wang, Siyuan Cheng, Kangwei Liu, Yuansheng Ni, Guozhou Zheng, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from knowledge cutoff or fallacy issues, which means they are unaware of unseen events or generate text with incorrect facts owing to outdated/noisy data. |
| Approach: | They propose an easy-to-use knowledge editing framework for Large Language Models that allows users to easily edit updated knowledge and adjust undesired behavior while minimizing the impact on unrelated inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses traditional fine-tuning in terms of reliability and generalization. |
Less Is More: Domain Adaptation with Lottery Ticket for Reading Comprehension (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing domain adaptation paradigms for reading comprehension require large amounts of annotation data to achieve the desired task performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a few-shot domain adaptation paradigm for reading comprehension . they introduce self-attention attribution to weigh parameters and refine the lottery subnetwork . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the full model fine-tuning adaptation on four out of five domains with a small amount of data available for adaptation. |
CC-Tuning: A Cross-Lingual Connection Mechanism for Improving Joint Multilingual Supervised Fine-Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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Yangfan Ye, Xiaocheng Feng, Zekun Yuan, Xiachong Feng, Libo Qin, Lei Huang, Weitao Ma, Yichong Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Yunfei Lu, Xiaohui Yan, Duyu Tang, Dandan Tu, Bing Qin
| Challenge: | Existing fine-tuning approaches that focus on English-centric training corpora often introduce implicit cross-lingual alignment, overlooking the potential for more profound, latent-level cross-linguistic interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual fine-tuning paradigm that explicitly establishes a cross-lingual connection mechanism at the latent level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms vanilla SFT and offers a strong latent-level alternative to data-level augmentation methods. |
SynWorld: Virtual Scenario Synthesis for Agentic Action Knowledge Refinement (2025.acl-short)
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Runnan Fang, Xiaobin Wang, Yuan Liang, Shuofei Qiao, Jialong Wu, Zekun Xi, Ningyu Zhang, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Using Large Language Models (LLMs)-based agents can enhance their understanding of environments and tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows agents to synthesize possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and perform Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine their action knowledge in the current environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes possible scenarios with multi-step action invocation within the action space and performs Monte Carlo Tree Search exploration to refine action knowledge in the current environment. |
Mobile-R1: Towards Interactive Capability for VLM-Based Mobile Agent via Systematic Training (2026.acl-long)
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Jihao Gu, Qihang Ai, Yingyao Wang, Pi Bu, Jingxuan Xing, Yue Cao, Zekun Zhu, Wei Jiang, Ziming Wang, Yingxiu Zhao, Ming-Liang Zhang, Jun Song, Yuning Jiang, Bo Zheng
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to training agents for visual-language models trap them in local optima, hindering exploration and error correction with the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a hierarchical training recipe that bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |
| Outcome: | The proposed training recipe bridges atomic action execution and strategic task completion. |