Papers by Zequn Zhang
Generative-to-Discriminative Test-Time Adaptation via Manifold-Aware Diffusion and Bayesian Distillation (2026.findings-acl)
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Boyun Zhang, Zequn Xie, Fangming Feng, Zihan Zhang, Yongbo He, Chuxin Wang, Sihang Cai, Tao Jin, Qifei Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing discriminative approaches suffer from "confident but wrong" failure mode, blindly adapting to OOD noise leading to error accumulation. |
| Approach: | They propose a TTA framework that harmonizes the robustness of generative diffusion models with the efficiency of discriminative regression networks via Bayesian Diffusion Distillation (BDD). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces MAE from 0.6872 to 0.5673 and boosts binary accuracy by 5.81 percentage points (reaching 57.33%) it also reduces the MAE of the MOSI to SIMS shift and achieves an 11.18-point gain over the baseline. |
Graphine: A Dataset for Graph-aware Terminology Definition Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Lack of large-scale terminology definition dataset hinders definition generation . lack of precise terminology definitions poses great challenges in scientific communication . |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale terminology definition dataset Graphine that exploits the graph structure of terminologies to generate graph-aware text generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models by exploiting graph structure of terminologies. |
From Schema to State: Zero-Shot Scheme-Only Dialogue State Tracking via Diverse Synthetic Dialogue and Step-by-Step Distillation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing research classifies zero-shot, scheme-only DST into two main types: the cross-domain scenario and the zero-schemaonly setting. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot, scheme-only approach that generates synthetic dialogues that balance diversity with schema alignment and distills knowledge from a large language model into a smaller model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance under zero-shot, scheme-only situation and generalizes effectively to few-shot scenarios. |
Guide the Many-to-One Assignment: Open Information Extraction via IoU-aware Optimal Transport (2023.acl-long)
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Kaiwen Wei, Yiran Yang, Li Jin, Xian Sun, Zequn Zhang, Jingyuan Zhang, Xiao Li, Linhao Zhang, Jintao Liu, Guo Zhi
| Challenge: | Open Information Extraction (OIE) aims to extract structured information from text without the limitations of close ontology. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assign ground truth labels to parallelly generated tuple proposals . they leverage intersection-over-union (IoU) as assignment quality measurement . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art models on three benchmarks. |
MolXPT: Wrapping Molecules with Text for Generative Pre-training (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that Generative pre-trained Transformers (GPT) have great success in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified language model of text and molecules pre-trained on SMILES wrapped by text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines of molecular property prediction on MoleculeNet and performs comparably to the best model in text-molecule translation while using less than half of its parameters. |
SciCustom: A Framework for Custom Evaluation of Scientific Capabilities in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yiyang Gu, Junwei Yang, Junyu Luo, Ye Yuan, Bin Feng, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Kaili Liu, Bohan Wu, Qi Shi, Haoran Li, Beier Xiao, Zhiping Xiao, Xiao Luo, Weizhi Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Zequn Liu, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing evaluations of large language models fail to reflect fine-grained capabilities . existing benchmarks are manually curated or domain-generic, limiting scalability and alignment with real use cases. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific scientific capabilities in LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals fine-grained differences in scientific capabilities that standard benchmarks overlook . it allows custom construction of benchmarks from large-scale scientific data to evaluate application-specific capabilities in LLMs. |
Trigger is Not Sufficient: Exploiting Frame-aware Knowledge for Implicit Event Argument Extraction (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract event arguments focus on learning pair-wise information between arguments and the given trigger. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to extract event-related arguments from a given event frame-level scope. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the RAMS dataset. |
Pathway2Text: Dataset and Method for Biomedical Pathway Description Generation (2022.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Neural text generation is a novel technique to describe biomedical pathways without manually curation. |
| Approach: | They propose a new dataset Pathway2Text which contains 2,367 pairs of biomedical pathways and textual descriptions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on both Graph2Text and Text2Graph tasks and can be used as a benchmark for biomedical named entity recognition. |
A Span-level Bidirectional Network for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is a new fine-grained sentiment analysis task . recent studies have focused on solving aspects term extraction, opinion term extraction and aspect-level sentiment classification tasks individually or in combination of two subtasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a span-level bidirectional network which utilizes all possible spans as input and extracts triplets from spans bidirectionally. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods and improves performance . it can extract triplets of aspect terms, sentiments, and opinion terms from review sentences . |
DPDV: Dual-Pathway and Dual-View Representation Learning for Bridging Information Asymmetry in Text-Video Retrieval (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for text-based person anomaly search fail to address the pose-semantic gap . asymmetric cross-modal information poses a challenge to accurately establishing retrieval relationships . |
| Approach: | They propose a video retrieval framework that partitions visual features into two categories based on relevance to the text query and performs effective interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves leading retrieval performance on five benchmark datasets. |
Narrative Order Aware Story Generation via Bidirectional Pretraining Model with Optimal Transport Reward (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing storytelling systems suffer from insufficient understanding of event correlations and inadequate awareness of event temporal order. |
| Approach: | They propose a narrative order aware framework to generate coherent stories with flashbacks . they propose 'bidirectional pretraining model with Optimal Transport Reward' to improve quality . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates coherent stories with flashbacks with a novel optimal transport reward. |
MetaFill: Text Infilling for Meta-Path Generation on Heterogeneous Information Networks (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing meta-path generation methods cannot fully exploit rich textual information in HINs. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-infilling-based approach to generate meta-paths from textual information in HINs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can classify edges in the zero-shot setting, where existing methods cannot generate meta-paths. |
Event Causality Extraction via Implicit Cause-Effect Interactions (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have not exploited the interactions between the cause and effect event that could provide crucial clues for causality reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose an Implicit Cause-Effect interaction framework which captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures the implicit intra- and inter-event interactions by incorporating the privileged information (ground truth event types and arguments) for reasoning. |
Rectifying the Emotional Flow: Aligning Priors and Dynamic Guidance for High-Arousal Text-to-Speech (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing systems suffer from linguistic collapse when pursuing high intensity or fail to meet target emotional levels. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference framework that introduces a neutral prosody bias and a uniform Classifier-Free Guidance that distorts the acoustic manifold, leading to artifacts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior linguistic accuracy and expressiveness without model retraining. |
Knowledge Association with Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embeddings (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge graphs (KGs) depend on high embedding dimensions and hierarchical structures to achieve expressiveness. |
| Approach: | They propose a hyperbolic relational graph neural network for KG embedding and capture knowledge associations with a high-dimensional transformation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on entity alignment and type inference show the proposed method is effective and efficient. |
Learning to Customize Model Structures for Few-shot Dialogue Generation Tasks (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training generative models with minimal corpus are difficult . fine-tuning distinguishes tasks from parameter perspective but ignores model-structure perspective . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that can customize a unique dialogue model for each task in the few-shot setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on two datasets in task consistency, response quality, diversity and consistency. |