Papers by Zhe Xu
We-Math: Does Your Large Multimodal Model Achieve Human-like Mathematical Reasoning? (2025.acl-long)
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Runqi Qiao, Qiuna Tan, Guanting Dong, MinhuiWu MinhuiWu, Chong Sun, Xiaoshuai Song, Jiapeng Wang, Zhuoma GongQue, Shanglin Lei, YiFan Zhang, Zhe Wei, Miaoxuan Zhang, Runfeng Qiao, Xiao Zong, Yida Xu, Peiqing Yang, Zhimin Bao, Muxi Diao, Chen Li, Honggang Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus more on end-to-end performance, but neglect the underlying principles of knowledge acquisition and generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark specifically designed to explore the problem-solving principles by decomposing 6.5K visual math problems into 10.9K step-level questions for evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers 6.5K visual math problems and 10.9K step-level questions spanning 5 layers of knowledge granularity and 67 hierarchical knowledge concepts. |
Document-Level Event Argument Extraction With a Chain Reasoning Paradigm (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Document-level event argument extraction aims to identify event arguments beyond sentence level, where a significant challenge is to model long-range dependencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a chain reasoning paradigm which captures long-range interdependence due to the chains’ compositional nature and generates decomposable first-order logic rules for reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms previous methods on two benchmarks and is robust enough to defend against adversarial attacks. |
TrInk: Ink Generation with Transformer Network (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zezhong Jin, Shubhang Desai, Xu Chen, Biyi Fang, Zhuoyi Huang, Zhe Li, Chong-Xin Gan, Xiao Tu, Man-Wai Mak, Yan Lu, Shujie Liu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for handwriting generation capture global dependencies and can generate high-quality handwritten samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer-based model for ink generation, TrInk, which captures global dependencies. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces character error rate and word error rate by 35.56% on the IAM-OnDB dataset compared to previous models. |
MC2: A Minimum-Coverage and Dataset-Agnostic Framework for Compositional Generalization of LLMs on Semantic Parsing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing research relies on dataset-specific designs or a large number of samples to improve compositional generalization of large language models (LLMs) . |
| Approach: | They propose a minimum-coverage framework that can help LLMs achieve compositional generalization by selecting and organizing samples that satisfy the primitive coverage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can improve compositional generalization on different parsing datasets in the minimum-coverage setting. |
MMedAgent: Learning to Use Medical Tools with Multi-modal Agent (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Binxu Li, Tiankai Yan, Yuanting Pan, Jie Luo, Ruiyang Ji, Jiayuan Ding, Zhe Xu, Shilong Liu, Haoyu Dong, Zihao Lin, Yixin Wang
| Challenge: | Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit limited generality and often fall short when compared to specialized models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal medical agent that picks the most suitable medical tools based on user inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent performs better than open-source models and the closed-source model, GPT-4o. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
Topic-Guided Variational Auto-Encoder for Text Generation (N19-1)
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Wenlin Wang, Zhe Gan, Hongteng Xu, Ruiyi Zhang, Guoyin Wang, Dinghan Shen, Changyou Chen, Lawrence Carin
| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our model outperforms its competitors on both unconditional and conditional text generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a topic-guided variational auto-encoder model for text generation that specifies a Gaussian mixture model and a neural topic module to generate sentences under the topic. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing variational auto-encoders on unconditional and conditional text generation, and can generate semantically-meaningful sentences with various topics. |
Discourse-Aware Neural Extractive Text Summarization (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that sentence-based extractive models result in redundant or uninformative phrases in the extracted summaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a discourse-aware neural summarization model that extracts sub-sentential discourse units as candidates for extractive selection on a finer granularity. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on popular summarization benchmarks. |
Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve self-correction performance of Large Language Models are based on intrinsic selfcorrectione, which allows the model to check and revise its selfgenerated answers without external feedback. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the self-correction capability into confidence and critique capabilities and a metric for overall self-corretion capability evaluation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms vanilla SFT and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. |
CLUE: A Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation Benchmark (2020.coling-main)
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Liang Xu, Hai Hu, Xuanwei Zhang, Lu Li, Chenjie Cao, Yudong Li, Yechen Xu, Kai Sun, Dian Yu, Cong Yu, Yin Tian, Qianqian Dong, Weitang Liu, Bo Shi, Yiming Cui, Junyi Li, Jun Zeng, Rongzhao Wang, Weijian Xie, Yanting Li, Yina Patterson, Zuoyu Tian, Yiwen Zhang, He Zhou, Shaoweihua Liu, Zhe Zhao, Qipeng Zhao, Cong Yue, Xinrui Zhang, Zhengliang Yang, Kyle Richardson, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing language evaluation benchmarks for English are limited to English . lack of such benchmarks makes it difficult to replicate success in other languages . |
| Approach: | They introduce a large-scale Chinese language understanding evaluation benchmark . the benchmark uses a set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models . |
| Outcome: | The first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark is released . the benchmark evaluates models across a wide range of tasks on original Chinese text . existing language evaluation benchmarks are mostly limited to English . |
Feedback Is The Key for Automated Survey Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a promising foundation for literature surveys, but guiding them to generate accurate, reliable content remains a fundamental challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a feedback-driven framework that incorporates feedback across three dimensions: outline feedback for structural clarity, citation feedback for evidence validation, and content feedback for readability and analytical depth. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves both citation and content quality, demonstrating feedback as the critical mechanism for automatic survey generation. |
Exploiting Intrinsic Multilateral Logical Rules for Weakly Supervised Natural Language Video Localization (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for WS-NLVL rarely consider complex temporal relations enclosing the language query, yielding illogical predictions. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method to exploit temporal relations and logical rules for WS-NLVL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to retrieve the moment corresponding to a language query in a video with only video-language pairs utilized during training. |
Bayesian Calibration of Win Rate Estimation with LLM Evaluators (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show the potential of using LLMs as evaluators for text quality evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose two methods to improve the accuracy of LLM evaluators by Bayesian inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the accuracy of the win rate estimation using LLMs . the proposed methods are based on six datasets covering story generation, summarization, and instruction following tasks . |
How to Make LMs Strong Node Classifiers? (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zhe Xu, Kaveh Hassani, Si Zhang, Hanqing Zeng, Michihiro Yasunaga, Limei Wang, Dongqi Fu, Ning Yao, Bo Long, Hanghang Tong
| Challenge: | Language Models (LMs) are increasingly challenging the dominance of domain-specific models, such as Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Graph Transformers (GTs). |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach that empowers off-the-shelf LMs to achieve performance comparable to state-of-the art (SOTA) GNNs on node classification tasks without requiring any architectural modifications. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing GNNs on node classification tasks and is open-source upon publication. |
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. |
Novel Slot Detection With an Incremental Setting (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Current dialogue systems face diverse user requests and rapid change domains, making quickly adapt to scenarios with previous unseen slot types becomes a major challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose an incremental novel slot detection task which separates the dialogue system to deal with novel types as two major phrases: 1) model discovers unknown slots; 2) training model to possess the capability to handle new classes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach overcomes catastrophic forgetting during the process of INSD and is highly effective. |
Fine-tuning LLMs with Cross-Attention-based Weight Decay for Bias Mitigation (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language processing tasks but often propagate societal biases from their training data, leading to discriminatory outputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that modifies the LLM architecture to mitigate bias by adjusting the attention weights of sensitive tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can handle multiple sensitive attributes and does not require full knowledge of sensitive tokens presented in the dataset. |
Language Model Based Text-to-Audio Generation: Anti-Causally Aligned Collaborative Residual Transformers (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models excel in text-to-audio generation, but lag behind diffusion models by a non-trivial margin. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates multiple isolated transformers with causal conditioning and anti-causal alignment via reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing LM-based and diffusion-based systems in audio synthesis. |
Addressing NER Annotation Noises with Uncertainty-Guided Tree-Structured CRFs (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named entity recognition datasets are notorious for their noisy nature due to annotation errors, inconsistencies, and subjective interpretations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that considers NER as a constituency tree parsing problem and uses a tree-structured Conditional Random Fields with uncertainty evaluation for integration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibits superb performance even in extreme scenarios with 90% annotation noise. |
Attention Basin: Why Contextual Position Matters in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are sensitive to the contextual position of information in input. |
| Approach: | They introduce Attention-Driven Reranking (AttnRank) which estimates a model’s intrinsic positional attention preferences using a small calibration set and reorders retrieved documents or few-shot examples to align the most salient content with these high-attention positions. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on multi-hop QA and few-shot in-context learning tasks show that AttnRank achieves substantial improvements across 10 large language models of varying architectures and scales, without modifying model parameters or training procedures. |
A Probabilistic Inference Scaling Theory for LLM Self-Correction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capability to refine their generated answers through self-correction, enabling continuous performance improvement over multiple rounds. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic theory to model the dynamics of accuracy change and explain performance improvements observed in multi-round self-correction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict accuracy curves and improve accuracy over multiple rounds. |
REACT: Representation Extraction And Controllable Tuning to Overcome Overfitting in LLM Knowledge Editing (2025.emnlp-main)
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Haitian Zhong, Yuhuan Liu, Ziyang Xu, Guofan Liu, Qiang Liu, Shu Wu, Zhe Zhao, Liang Wang, Tieniu Tan
| Challenge: | Large language model editing methods suffer from overfitting, where factual updates can propagate beyond their intended scope, overemphasizing the edited target even when it’s contextually inappropriate. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for precise and controllable knowledge editing that utilizes two-phase representations and a linear transformation to compute a directional "belief shift" vector. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly reduces overfitting across nearly all evaluation metrics and on COUNTERFACT and MQuAKE. |
Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to document-level relation extraction are difficult to establish direct connections between distant entity pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a global context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Network model which captures rich global context information of entities in a document. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures rich global context information of entities in a document. |
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)
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Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zihan Niu, Chonggang Lu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, Wei Lu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications. |
Embodied-Reasoner: Synergizing Visual Search, Reasoning, and Action for Embodied Interactive Tasks (2026.acl-long)
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Wenqi Zhang, Mengna Wang, Gangao Liu, Huixin Xu, Yiwei Jiang, Yongliang Shen, Guiyang Hou, Zhe Zheng, Hang Zhang, Xin Li, Jiajun Liu, Weiming Lu, Peng Li, Yueting Zhuang
| Challenge: | Recent advances in reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities on mathematical and coding tasks, but their effectiveness in embodied domains remains largely unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a reasoning model for interactive embodied tasks that synthesizes 9.3k coherent Observation-Thought-Action trajectories containing 64k ego-centric images and 90k diverse reasoning processes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing visual reasoning models by +9%, 24%, and +13% on long-horizon tasks. |
Fair RAG: End-to-End Fairness Across Retrieval and Generation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) can amplify demographic bias by generating skewed context . prior work treats fairness in retrieval or generation in isolation, leaving end-to-end fairness underexplored . |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline that jointly controls both retrieval and generation stages . large language models can handle a broad set of inference tasks, they argue . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline reduces retriever-side skew and achieves lowest generator-side disparity while preserving utility. |