Papers by Zhe Feng
A Learnable Skill Combination Strategy for Multi-task Learning in Natural Language Understanding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a novel multi-task learning framework for domain-specific natural language understanding tasks addresses these limitations by combing multiple tasks into a single framework. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that decomposes the language model into modular skill components and employs a dynamic, learnable skill-combination mechanism to adaptively handle diverse tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses conventional multi-task learning approaches in performance. |
Multi-Step Generation of Test Specifications using Large Language Models for System-Level Requirements (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | System-level testing is a critical phase in the development of large, safety-dependent systems, such as those in the automotive industry. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-powered assistant to aid users in creating test specifications for system-level requirements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system reduces the effort required to derive test specifications by 30% in ROUGE-L. |
Learning to Classify Events from Human Needs Category Descriptions (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method outperforms baseline methods, producing substantially better precision. |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot learning method that generates weak labels and trains a classifier with weakly labeled data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on a human needs categorization task . it produces substantially better precision than baseline methods . |
A New Approach to Overgenerating and Scoring Abstractive Summaries (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Abstractive summarization is a learning objective to produce system outputs that resemble reference summaries on a word-to-word basis. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-staged strategy to generate multiple variants of the target summary and score and select admissible ones according to users’ needs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art on benchmark summarization datasets. |
ToolDreamer: Instilling LLM Reasoning Into Tool Retrievers (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing retrieval models rank tools based on similarity between query and tool description (TD) Existing tools are not conditioned to learn tool-to-tool relationships (middle). |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that conditions retrieval models to fetch tools based on hypothetical (synthetic) TD generated using an LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the performance of sparse and dense retrievers with and without training, showcasing its flexibility. |
DelucionQA: Detecting Hallucinations in Domain-specific Question Answering (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Mobashir Sadat, Zhengyu Zhou, Lukas Lange, Jun Araki, Arsalan Gundroo, Bingqing Wang, Rakesh Menon, Md Parvez, Zhe Feng
| Challenge: | Hallucination is a well-known phenomenon in text generated by large language models . state-of-the-art LLMs still have a number of weaknesses, including the tendency to generate hallucinatory statements without considering the factuality . |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset that captures hallucinations made by retrieval-augmented LLMs . they propose to use these methods to help detect hallucinosity in QA tasks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method captures hallucinations made by retrieval-augmented LLMs for QA tasks. |
D2PCM:A Multi-Turn Dialogue Dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Conventional interactive algorithms have predominantly treated memory as a contextual element, neglecting the nuanced cognitive processes involved in individualized memory encoding and retrieval. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn dialogue dataset with Personalized Contextual Memory to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide a comprehensive benchmark to facilitate advanced research on personalized memory processing. |
Low-resource Neural Machine Translation with Cross-modal Alignment (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing neural machine translation techniques rely on large monolingual corpus, which is costly for some low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-modal contrastive learning method to learn a shared space for all languages by additional visual modality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can learn cross-modal and cross-lingual alignment with small amount of image-text pairs and achieves significant improvements over the text-only baseline. |
Palette of Language Models: A Solver for Controlled Text Generation (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have revolutionized text generation with their remarkable capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine a single-attribute model with a discriminative model to achieve a combination strategy that incorporates positive correlation and attribute enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is adapted for single-attribute control scenario and achieves surpassing results. |
Guided by the Plan: Enhancing Faithful Autoregressive Text-to-Audio Generation with Guided Decoding (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) models excel at generating temporally coherent audio by producing tokens sequentially, yet they often falter in faithfully following complex textual prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight auxiliary model trained with a GAE-inspired objective to predict final instruction-following quality from partial generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 10 points improvement in CLAP score over baseline AR models while maintaining computational parity with best-of-N decoding. |
Improving Slot Filling in Spoken Language Understanding with Joint Pointer and Attention (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show the effectiveness of our slot filling model at addressing the OOV problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative neural network model for slot filling based on a sequence-to-sequence model and a pointer network. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is able to predict slot values on spoken language data. |
GLaRA: Graph-based Labeling Rule Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition (NER) models often need to be trained with many manual labels to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose to train named entity recognition systems using heuristic labeling rules . they create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an average improvement of +20% over the baseline on three NER datasets. |
Seeing the Whole Elephant: A Benchmark for Failure Attribution in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks rely on partially observable traces that capture only agent outputs . lack of full execution traces obscures many failure causes, authors argue . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that allows attribution under full execution observability . they find full traces improve attribution accuracy by up to 76.5% over a partial-observation counterpart . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves attribution accuracy by up to 76.5% over a partial-observation counterpart. |
LLM as a metric critic for low resource relation identification (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that small language models (SLMs) overfit in low resource situations . however, the gap between pre-training and fine-tuning leads to performance decay . |
| Approach: | They propose to combine large language models and LLM for relation identification by co-evolution . they propose to use a masked language model prompt to generate a relation identification task . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle low resource relation identification tasks with minimal overfitting . the proposed model provides essential background knowledge to assist training process . |
CoAug: Combining Augmentation of Labels and Labelling Rules (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks require large labeled datasets to perform well. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-augmentation framework that bootstraps predictions from each model to improve few-shot models and rule-augmentation models by bootstrapping them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong weak-supervision-based models by 6.5 F1 points . the proposed model can learn from limited labeled data and perform better on small datasets . |
Weakly Supervised Named Entity Tagging with Learnable Logical Rules (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for building entity tagging systems use weak supervision . previous methods focus on disambiguating entity types based on contexts and expert-provided rules . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that bootstraps high-quality logical rules to train a neural tagger in a fully automated manner. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms weakly supervised methods on three datasets . it rivals state-of-the-art supervised method with lexicon of over 2,000 terms . |
Learning to Leverage High-Order Medical Knowledge Graph for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Medical terms are difficult to understand and relations between medical entities become complicated. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage medical domain knowledge for extracting entities and relations for Chinese medical texts by building a heterogeneous graph based on medical knowledge graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is more effective than state-of-the-art methods on real Chinese medical texts. |