Papers by Zhecheng Sheng
Too Big to Fail: Larger Language Models are Disproportionately Resilient to Induction of Dementia-Related Linguistic Anomalies (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that the attention mechanism in transformer-based NLMs may present an analogue to the notions of cognitive and brain reserve. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional ablation method that masks attention heads to display degradation of similar magnitude to masking in smaller models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method exhibits properties attributed to the concepts of cognitive and brain reserve in human brain studies. |
BBScoreV2: Learning Time-Evolution and Latent Alignment from Stochastic Representation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive generative models are gaining traction in language tasks such as text generation and machine translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a likelihood-based evaluation metric that fits transformer-based model embeddings into a stochastic process and propose it as a probability-based metric. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model embeddings induce a "clustered-to-temporal ordered" mapping of language model representations in high-dimensional space, and this structure enhances performance on tasks such as temporal consistency evaluation and AI-generated content detection. |
Mitigating Confounding in Speech-Based Dementia Detection through Weight Masking (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained neural language models fine-tuned on AD transcripts perform well, but little research has explored the effects of the gender of the speakers represented by these transcripts. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Extended Confounding Filter and the Dual Filter to isolate and ablate weights associated with gender in dementia datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods overfit to training data distributions and disrupt gender-related weights, with the trade-off of slightly reduced dementia detection performance. |