Papers by Zhen He
Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs (2023.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Guangyi Liu, Zeyu Feng, Yuan Gao, Zichao Yang, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhen Li, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to composable text operations often require plug-and-play . a single LM can perform arbitrary text operation composition in the latent space . |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient approach for composable text operations in the latent space of text . they connect pretrained LMs to the laten space and adapt them to the space . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on existing methods in the latent space of text. |
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are gaining popularity due to their lack of knowledge hallucination and lack of a coherent model. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised quantized representation method to compress KG structural and semantic knowledge into discrete codes that align the format of language sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing unsupervised methods producing more distinguishable codes on KG link prediction and triple classification tasks. |
GCML: Gradient Coherence Guided Meta-Learning for Cross-Domain Emerging Topic Rumor Detection (2025.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing domain adaptation rumor detection methods ignore the data generalization differences and rely on a large amount of unlabeled target domain samples to achieve domain adaptation. |
| Approach: | They propose a Gradient Coherence guided Meta-Learning approach for emerging topics rumor detection that selectively learns more "generalizable" tasks that are more beneficial in adapting to the target domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on real-world datasets and significantly outperformed traditional methods on the in-domain condition. |
FC-Attack: Jailbreaking Multimodal Large Language Models via Auto-Generated Flowcharts (2025.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent research shows that multimodal large language models are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a jailbreak attack method based on auto-generated flowcharts . the flowchartings are then combined with a benign textual prompt to execute the attack . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves an attack success rate of up to 96% via images and 78% via videos across multiple MLLMs. |
Sparse Black-Box Multimodal Attack for Vision-Language Adversary Generation (2023.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing adversarial attacks using imperceptible perturbations are challenging to simulate . e-commerce product restrictions and hate speech monitoring are examples of such attacks . |
| Approach: | They propose a black-box adversarial attack that leverages sparse perturbations to simulate adversarials exhibited by illegal merchants in the black- box scenario. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing attacks and unimodal attacks by treating images and text in discrete space and outperforming existing models. |
Stepwise Perplexity-Guided Refinement for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Yingqian Cui, Pengfei He, Jingying Zeng, Hui Liu, Xianfeng Tang, Zhenwei Dai, Yan Han, Chen Luo, Jing Huang, Zhen Li, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Jiliang Tang, Qi He
| Challenge: | Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) however, the detailed reasoning process in CoT often incurs long generation times and high computational costs due to the inclusion of unnecessary steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to identify critical reasoning steps using perplexity as a measure of their importance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a better balance between reasoning accuracy and efficiency of CoT. |
Are We in the AI-Generated Text World Already? Quantifying and Monitoring AIGT on Social Media (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Social media platforms are experiencing a growing presence of AI-Generated Texts (AIGTs) however, the misuse of AIGTs could have profound implications for public opinion . |
| Approach: | They collect a dataset with 2.4M posts from 3 major social media platforms . they then construct a diverse dataset to train and evaluate AIGT detectors . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset analyzes 2.4M posts from 3 major social media platforms from 2022 to 2024 . it finds that Medium and Quora show marked increases in AAR . |
LLM-based Rumor Detection via Influence Guided Sample Selection and Game-based Perspective Analysis (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zhiliang Tian, Jingyuan Huang, Zejiang He, Zhen Huang, Menglong Lu, Linbo Qiao, Songzhu Mei, Yijie Wang, Dongsheng Li
| Challenge: | Existing methods for rumor detection on social media are limited by limited modeling capacity and insufficient training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose an SFT-based rumor detection model with Influence guided Sample selection and Game-based multi-perspective analysis to address these issues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing SOTA on three datasets. |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
Copied to clipboard
Siqi Bao, Huang He, Fan Wang, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang, Wenquan Wu, Zhihua Wu, Zhen Guo, Hua Lu, Xinxian Huang, Xin Tian, Xinchao Xu, Yingzhan Lin, Zheng-Yu Niu
| Challenge: | Experimental results show PLATO-XL achieves state-of-the-art results across multiple conversational tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to train PLATO-XL models with up to 11 billion parameters, trained on Chinese and English social media conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on multiple conversational tasks, verifying its potential as a foundation model of conversational AI. |
PersLEARN: Research Training through the Lens of Perspective Cultivation (2023.acl-demo)
Copied to clipboard
Yu-Zhe Shi, Shiqian Li, Xinyi Niu, Qiao Xu, Jiawen Liu, Yifan Xu, Shiyu Gu, Bingru He, Xinyang Li, Xinyu Zhao, Zijian Zhao, Yidong Lyu, Zhen Li, Sijia Liu, Lin Qiu, Jinhao Ji, Lecheng Ruan, Yuxi Ma, Wenjuan Han, Yixin Zhu
| Challenge: | PersLEARN is a tool designed to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives . junior researchers struggle to identify the perspectives reflected in the literature and struggle to develop their own viewpoints. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool to facilitate the cultivation of scientific perspectives by interacting with a prompt-based model and allowing students to develop their own perspectives explicitly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool outperforms baseline approaches across multiple domains of literature from different perspectives. |
TDEER: An Efficient Translating Decoding Schema for Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods to extract entities and relations from unstructured texts are difficult to handle due to the overlapping triple problem. |
| Approach: | They propose a translation decoding schema for joint extraction of entities and relations from unstructured texts to form factual triples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can handle the overlapping triple problem, and is 2 times faster than the state-of-the-art models. |
A General Framework to Enhance Fine-tuning-based LLM Unlearning (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
Jie Ren, Zhenwei Dai, Xianfeng Tang, Hui Liu, Jingying Zeng, Zhen Li, Rahul Goutam, Suhang Wang, Yue Xing, Qi He, Hui Liu
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to remove copyrighted and privacy-sensitive data from Large Language Models (LLMs) have been proposed to remove specific data from LLMs without requiring full retraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a general framework that enhances the utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing target data and suppressing related generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the unlearning and utility of fine-tuning-based methods by distinguishing the target data and suppressing related generations. |
How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Zidi Xiong, Yuping Lin, Wenya Xie, Pengfei He, Zirui Liu, Jiliang Tang, Himabindu Lakkaraju, Zhen Xiang
| Challenge: | In practice, memory designs vary widely across agents due to their diverse objectives and functionalities. |
| Approach: | They conduct an empirical study on how memory management choices impact the LLM agents’ behavior, especially their long-term performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that LLM agents display an experience-following property, which results in highly similar agent outputs. |
Query-Efficient Textual Adversarial Example Generation for Black-Box Attacks (2024.naacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing black-box attacks require thousands of queries on the target model, making them expensive in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a new approach that guides word substitutions using prior knowledge from the training set to improve the attack efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces query-free attack and guided search attacks by a factor of 10 500 . it improves transferability and generalization by the ensemble of the ABPens in NLP . |
Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)
Copied to clipboard
Guangyi Liu, Zichao Yang, Tianhua Tao, Xiaodan Liang, Junwei Bao, Zhen Li, Xiaodong He, Shuguang Cui, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Neural text generation models are typically trained by maximizing log-likelihood with the sequence cross entropy (CE) loss. |
| Approach: | They propose an Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss method which computes the matching loss of a target sequence with all n-grams in the generated sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the common CE loss and strong baselines on a wide range of tasks. |
Visual Question Decomposition on Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for question decomposition focus on unimodal language models, but question decomposing capability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has yet to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a finetuning dataset and a training objective for selective decomposition to enhance the model's question decomposing capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset shows that existing models struggle to produce high-quality sub-questions. |
OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems (2024.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Chaoqun He, Renjie Luo, Yuzhuo Bai, Shengding Hu, Zhen Thai, Junhao Shen, Jinyi Hu, Xu Han, Yujie Huang, Yuxiang Zhang, Jie Liu, Lei Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models have exceeded general human capabilities in various tasks. |
| Approach: | They present an Olympiad-level bilingual multimodal scientific benchmark featuring 8,476 problems from Olympiad level mathematics and physics competitions. |
| Outcome: | The best performing model, GPT-4V, attains an average score of 17.97% on OlympiadBench, with a mere 10.74% in physics, highlighting the benchmark rigor and the intricacy of physical reasoning. |
MONTROSE: LLM-driven Monte Carlo Tree Search Self-Refinement for Cross-Domain Rumor Detection (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing feature alignment methods are susceptible to task interference during training. |
| Approach: | MONTROSE is a cross-domain rumor detection method that generates high-quality synthetic data for the target domain and a domain-sharpness-aware approach to train models with these synthetic data. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that MONTROSE improves in cross-domain rumor detection. |
Federated Data-Efficient Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing federated learning (FL) uses all local data, causing excessive computational overhead and overfitting to local data. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated data-efficient instruction tuning approach which utilizes a representative subset of edge-side data to tune LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves Rouge-L on unseen tasks by 10.72% over the SOTA full-data instruction tuning methods while using less than 1.5% of the data samples. |
FocalOrder: Focal Preference Optimization for Reading Order Detection (2026.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fuyuan Liu, Dianyu Yu, He Ren, Nayu Liu, Xiaomian Kang, Delai Qiu, Fa Zhang, Genpeng Zhen, Shengping Liu, Liang Jiaen, null Weihuang, Yining Wang, Junnan Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing methods for document comprehension rely on uniform supervision, resulting in a performance degradation in the intermediate sections. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework driven by Focal Preference Optimization to detect reading order in document layouts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms competing baselines and surpasses large-scale general VLMs. |
Unveiling Privacy Risks in LLM Agent Memory (2025.acl-long)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM) agents store private user-agent interactions in memory for demonstrations, introducing new privacy risks for LLM agents. |
| Approach: | They propose an attack that extracts private information from memory under a black-box setting and propose a method that can be used to attack the agent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack is effective under a black-box setting and it is demonstrated on two representative agents. |
Curriculum Learning based Hierarchical Scoring and Analysis Framework for Question Answering Task Evaluation (2026.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation methods rely on rule-based matching with shallow semantic understanding or adopt LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that incur high cost and latency while offering limited error interpretability. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning based hierarchical framework for QA task evaluation that supports quick scoring and fine-grained error analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on quick scoring and error analysis tasks while being 25 faster. |
TimeTraveler: Reinforcement Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Forecasting (2021.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on reasoning at past timestamps to complete the missing facts, and there are only a few works of reasoning on known TKGs to forecast future facts. |
| Approach: | They propose a time-shaped reward method that captures historical knowledge graph snapshots and a new representation method for unseen entities to improve the inductive inference ability of the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on four benchmark datasets with higher explainability, less calculation, and fewer parameters when compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. |
TextHacker: Learning based Hybrid Local Search Algorithm for Text Hard-label Adversarial Attack (2022.findings-emnlp)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing textual adversarial attacks use gradient or prediction confidence to generate adversarials, making it hard to be deployed in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a textual adversarial attack that randomly perturbs lots of words to craft an adversarial example. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack outperforms existing hard-label attacks in terms of attack performance and adversary quality. |
PLATO-2: Towards Building an Open-Domain Chatbot via Curriculum Learning (2021.findings-acl)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | PLATO-2 is a high-quality open-domain chatbot that can generate one-to-many mappings and improve response quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a curriculum learning process to build a high-quality open-domain chatbot . they use a coarse-grained generation model and latent variables to train a generative model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on Chinese and English data and can generate diverse responses and select the best response. |