Papers by Zhang Chuang
SHIFT: Selected Helpful Informative Frame for Video-guided Machine Translation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Video-guided machine translation (VMT) aims to improve translation quality by integrating contextual information from paired short video clips. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play framework for video-guided machine translation with multimodal large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of MLLMs while reducing computational cost. |
OpenEval: Benchmarking Chinese LLMs across Capability, Alignment and Safety (2024.acl-demos)
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Chuang Liu, Linhao Yu, Jiaxuan Li, Renren Jin, Yufei Huang, Ling Shi, Junhui Zhang, Xinmeng Ji, Tingting Cui, Liutao Liutao, Jinwang Song, Hongying Zan, Sun Li, Deyi Xiong
| Challenge: | a rapid development of Chinese large language models poses big challenges for efficient LLM evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation testbed that benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
| Outcome: | The evaluation platform OpenEval benchmarks Chinese LLMs across capability, alignment and safety. |
Search Augmented Instruction Learning (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Hongyin Luo, Tianhua Zhang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been significantly improved by instruction fine-tuning, but still lack transparency and the ability to utilize up-to-date knowledge and information. |
| Approach: | They propose a search-augmented instruction learning model which grounds the language generation and instruction following abilities on complex search results generated by in-house and external search engines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms plain LLMs on zero-shot language tasks and can generate both natural and programming languages following natural language guidance and requests. |
QaDialMoE: Question-answering Dialogue based Fact Verification with Mixture of Experts (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on fact verification focuses on news, tables and Wikipedia passages. |
| Approach: | They propose a question-answering dialogue based fact verification with mixture of experts that exploits questions and evidence effectively in the verification process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms previous approaches on three benchmark datasets and achieves state-of-the-art results. |
From Imitation to Discrimination: Progressive Curriculum Learning for Robust Web Navigation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Text-based web agents offer computational efficiency for autonomous web navigation, yet they lack discrimination capabilities to reject plausible but incorrect elements in densely populated pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses a text-based web agent to learn to discriminate against incorrect elements in densely populated HTML and a training curriculum to synthesize diverse cross-domain tasks with strict verification. |
| Outcome: | Empirical evaluation shows that the model performs better than open-source models with 58.7% step success rate. |
Your Language Model May Think Too Rigidly: Achieving Reasoning Consistency with Symmetry-Enhanced Training (2025.findings-acl)
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Yihang Yao, Zhepeng Cen, Miao Li, William Han, Yuyou Zhang, Emerson Liu, Zuxin Liu, Chuang Gan, Ding Zhao
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that enhances LLMs’ awareness of symmetry in query variations and propose syMmetry-ENhanceD (MEND) data augmentation. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments on logical and arithmetic reasoning tasks show that the proposed approach improves model robustness at the knowledge extraction stage through query augmentation. |
Tailored Primitive Initialization is the Secret Key to Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that automatically discovers thinking token patterns with reasoning primitives and curates SFT datasets to prepare LLMs for RL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms baseline methods on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks on RL tasks. |
Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning (2024.findings-naacl)
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Tianhua Zhang, Jiaxin Ge, Hongyin Luo, Yung-Sung Chuang, Mingye Gao, Yuan Gong, Yoon Kim, Xixin Wu, Helen Meng, James Glass
| Challenge: | Existing methods for surfacing symbolic reasoning capabilities are limited to narrow tasks . arithmetic computations are unnatural to perform in pure language space, and hence present difficulties for LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a natural language embedded program framework for solving symbolic reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on strong baselines across math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following tasks. |
Confidence-Calibrated Small-Large Language Model Collaboration for Cost-Efficient Reasoning (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have superior reasoning capabilities compared to small language models, but incur substantially higher inference costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that cascades an LLM with an SLM to achieve a balance between accuracy and cost in complex reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system improves the SLM’s reasoning ability and confidence calibration across diverse datasets and model backbones. |
DiffCSE: Difference-based Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings (2022.naacl-main)
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Yung-Sung Chuang, Rumen Dangovski, Hongyin Luo, Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, Marin Soljacic, Shang-Wen Li, Scott Yih, Yoon Kim, James Glass
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that finetuning pretrained models with contrastive learning makes it possible to learn good sentence embeddings without labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose an unsupervised contrastive learning framework for learning sentence embeddings . they use a masked language model to mask out the edited sentence . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SimCSE on semantic textual similarity tasks by 2.3 absolute points. |
Masked Language Models Know Which are Popular: A Simple Ranking Strategy for Commonsense Question Answering (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Empirical results show that pre-trained language models can improve the typical answer generation of GLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a ranking strategy that exploits WordNet to train a ranker that picks out the most popular answers for commonsense questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed ranking strategy is tested on a commonsense question answering (QA) dataset and on negative samples from WordNet. |
Achieving binary weight and activation for LLMs using Post-Training Quantization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for quantizing large language models suffer from performance degradation when weights are quantized to 1 bit. |
| Approach: | They propose a post-training quantization framework with W(1+1)A(14) configuration . they propose utilizing Hessian-aware fine-grained grouping along with an EM-based quantization scheme . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM quantization baselines on W2A4 across multiple tasks. |
PAMN: Multi-phase Correlation Modeling for Contrast-Enhanced 3D Medical Image Retrieval (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current 3D medical imaging models focus on spatial features, neglecting phase-specific progression detailed in clinical reports. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that fuses imaging phases with clinical text to enhance 3D medical image retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on a phase-series dataset of 12,230 hospital CT scans. |
A Decoupled Multi-Agent Framework for Complex Text Style Transfer (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text style transfer struggle with complex styles . existing models perform well on simple styles like sentiment and formality . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent self-check framework that includes a large language model as a planner for disentangling subtasks and expert agents for executing the subtask. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves style strength and content preservation on simple and complex style datasets. |
Instruct-of-Reflection: Enhancing Large Language Models Iterative Reflection Capabilities via Dynamic-Meta Instruction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches involve models iterating and improving their previous responses based on internal reflection ability or external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose a reflection framework that leverages meta-thoughts and self-consistency to enhance the iterative reflection capability of Large LanguageModels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves an average improvement of 10.1% over established baselines in mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks, highlighting its efficacy and applicability. |
Optimal Transport Guided Correlation Assignment for Multimodal Entity Linking (2024.findings-acl)
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Zefeng Zhang, Jiawei Sheng, Zhang Chuang, Liangyunzhi Liangyunzhi, Wenyuan Zhang, Siqi Wang, Tingwen Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods to link ambiguous mentions to entities in multimodal knowledge graphs rely on partial correlations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages multi-element correlations to bridge modality gap and enable fine-grained semantic matching by exploiting correlation between multimodal features and entities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models and confirms the effectiveness of the proposed method. |
WenetSpeech-Wu: Datasets, Benchmarks, and Models for a Unified Chinese Wu Dialect Speech Processing Ecosystem (2026.findings-acl)
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Chengyou Wang, Mingchen Shao, Jingbin Hu, Zeyu Zhu, Hongfei Xue, Bingshen Mu, Xin Xu, Xingyi Duan, Binbin Zhang, Zhu Pengcheng, Chuang Ding, Xiaojun Zhang, Hui Bu, Lei Xie
| Challenge: | despite its linguistic significance, the Wu dialect of Chinese has long been hindered by the lack of large-scale speech data, standardized evaluation benchmarks, and publicly available models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use WenetSpeech-Wu as a large-scale, multi-dimensionally annotated open-source speech corpus for the Wu dialect of Chinese. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset includes 8,000 hours of speech data and strong open-source models . the proposed dataset is competitive and empirically validated . |
LogicPoison: Logical Attacks on Graph Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2026.acl-long)
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Yilin Xiao, Jin Chen, Qinggang Zhang, Yujing Zhang, Chuang Zhou, Longhao Yang, Lingfei Ren, Xin Yang, Xiao Huang
| Challenge: | Graph-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (GraphRAG) enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) however, traditional RAG attacks are difficult to pose an effective threat to GraphRAg systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack framework that targets logical reasoning rather than injecting false contents into GraphRAG systems by grounding their responses in structured knowledge graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art attacks on GraphRAG systems in both effectiveness and stealth. |
LBLLM: Lightweight Binarization of Large Language Models via Three-Stage Distillation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for implementing large language models are limited by high computational and memory requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight binarization framework that achieves effective W(1+1)A4 quantization through a novel three-stage quantization strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on W2A4 quantization settings across languages. |
Beyond Sentence-level Labels: Integrating Conversational Context and Personal Experience for Natural Emotional Expression (2026.findings-acl)
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Haiyang Sun, Chenyang Le, Wei Wang, Leying Zhang, Chuang Li, Bing Han, Chenda Li, Mengxiao Bi, Yanmin Qian
| Challenge: | Existing systems rely on sentence-level labels, which fails to capture the subtle nuances of human affect. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large-scale, context-aware speech corpus derived from multi-speaker audiobooks to generate a speech that is human-like. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods in terms of emotional expression accuracy and naturalness. |
UNO-DST: Leveraging Unlabelled Data in Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) ignore unlabelled data in the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform zero-shot dialogue state tracking into few-shot DST by utilising unlabelled data via joint and self-training methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves joint goal accuracy by 8% on general language models in zero-shot scenarios, and can be used in many domains. |
ReasonerRank: Redefining Language Model Evaluation with Ground-Truth-Free Ranking Frameworks (2025.findings-acl)
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Jiamu Zhang, Jiayi Yuan, Andrew Wen, Hoang Anh Duy Le, Yu-Neng Chuang, Soo-Hyun Choi, Rui Chen, Xia Hu
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted across real-world applications . traditional evaluations rely on expensive, domain-specific ground-truth labels . obtaining labeled data is expensive, time-consuming, and often requires domain expertise . |
| Approach: | They propose a ground-truth-free evaluation framework focused on reasoning consistency and instruction following. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing label-free methods, including majority voting, triplet ranking, and peer-review approaches. |
SemStamp: A Semantic Watermark with Paraphrastic Robustness for Text Generation (2024.naacl-long)
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Abe Hou, Jingyu Zhang, Tianxing He, Yichen Wang, Yung-Sung Chuang, Hongwei Wang, Lingfeng Shen, Benjamin Van Durme, Daniel Khashabi, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | Existing watermarked generation algorithms employ token-level designs and are vulnerable to paraphrase attacks. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence-level watermarking algorithm that uses locality-sensitive hashing to partition the semantic space of sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm is more robust than the existing state-of-the-art method on paraphrasers and domains, while posing only minor degradations to SemStamp. |
Steering LLM Thinking with Budget Guidance (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing budget control methods for large language models are inadequate for long reasoning . budget guidance can be used to control reasoning length without fine-tuning . |
| Approach: | They propose a budget guidance method that models a Gamma distribution over remaining thinking length during next-token generation and uses it to guide generation in a soft, token-level manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves up to 26% accuracy gain on the MATH-500 benchmark compared to baseline methods while maintaining competitive accuracy with only 63% of the thinking tokens used by the full-thinking model. |