Papers by Zhen Hu

41 papers
Composable Text Controls in Latent Space with ODEs (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: closed-ended question-based benchmarks struggle with saturation as newer models emerge . crowd-sourced leaderboards rely on costly and slow human judges .
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages collective intelligence from all large language models to evaluate each other.
Outcome: a new framework enables a democratic, pairwise evaluation of all large language models . it achieves 97% correlation with human judgements, while significantly reducing the cost.
Modalities Should Be Appropriately Leveraged: Uncertainty Guidance for Multimodal Chinese Spelling Correction (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Chinese spelling correction (CSC) aims to detect and correct spelling errors in Chinese texts.
Approach: They propose a framework that incorporates uncertainty into feature learning and correction stages . they propose to combine the uncertainty of multimodal features with model learning .
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on three public datasets.
E-NER: Evidential Deep Learning for Trustworthy Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Named entity recognition (NER) systems focus on improving model performance, ignoring the need to quantify model uncertainty.
Approach: They propose to introduce two uncertainty-guided loss terms to the conventional EDL and a series of uncertainty-guiding training strategies to solve these challenges.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves better OOV/OOD detection performance and generalization ability on OOV entities compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Semantic and Sentiment Dual-Enhanced Generative Model for Script Event Prediction (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to model event associations struggle with semantic ambiguity and embedding bias.
Approach: They propose a Semantic and Sentiment Dual-enhanced Generative Model to address these issues . it leverages two types of script event information to enhance the generative model .
Outcome: The proposed model captures both global and local sentiments of events through its sentiment awareness mechanism.
Attention-Guided Answer Distillation for Machine Reading Comprehension (D18-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to reading comprehension systems are vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
Approach: They propose to use knowledge distillation to transfer knowledge from an ensemble to a single model.
Outcome: The proposed methods outperform the teacher on adversarial datasets and NarrativeQA benchmarks.
Graph Enhanced Contrastive Learning for Radiology Findings Summarization (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for automating impression generation have limited the relationship between extra knowledge and the original findings.
Approach: They propose a framework for automating impression generation that exploits extra knowledge and original findings . they propose combining key words and their relations to extract critical information .
Outcome: The proposed framework exploits extra knowledge and the original findings in an integrated way . the state-of-the-art results on two datasets confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method .
Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model (2023.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, particularly with Chain-of-Thought-style prompts.
Approach: They propose a framework that repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search)
Outcome: The proposed framework repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monte Carlo Tree Search) it achieves optimum balance between exploration and exploitation, while achieving high-reward reasoning paths efficiently.
OpenDelta: A Plug-and-play Library for Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Pre-trained Models (2023.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing implementations that modify the code of the backbone PTMs and hard-code specific delta tuning methods for each PTM have limited the practicality and flexibility of delta tuning.
Approach: They propose an open-source library that provides a plug-and-play implementation of delta tuning methods for pre-trained models.
Outcome: The proposed methods eliminate the need to modify the backbone PTMs’ code, making OpenDelta compatible with different, even novel PTM.
Uncertainty-Aware Unlikelihood Learning Improves Generative Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing studies focus on what to generate but ignore what not to generate . a template-agnostic method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously .
Approach: They propose a template-agnostic method to control the token-level generation . they introduce Monte Carlo dropout to understand the built-in uncertainty of pre-trained language models .
Outcome: The proposed method boosts original learning and reduces mistakes simultaneously on four public datasets.
Improving Continual Relation Extraction through Prototypical Contrastive Learning (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Continual relation extraction (CRE) aims to extract relations towards the continuous and iterative arrival of new data, of which the major challenge is the catastrophic forgetting of old tasks.
Approach: They propose a Continual Relation Extraction framework with Contrastive Learning which is built with a classification network and a prototypical contrastive network to achieve incremental-class learning of CRE.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on two public datasets and proves its effectiveness on improving performance.
RealBench: A Chinese Multi-image Understanding Benchmark Close to Real-world Scenarios (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: RealBench is the first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset . the dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images .
Approach: They propose to create a Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset using 21 models . they use closed-source models that support multi-inputs as well as open-source visual and video models a .
Outcome: The first Chinese multimodal multi-image dataset contains 9393 samples and 69910 images.
Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization Enables Tuning-free Self-Alignment of Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Empirical evaluations on eight recent LLMs reveal that DRPO significantly enhances alignment performance, enabling base models to outperform their SFT/RLHF-tuned counterparts.
Approach: They propose a tuning-free approach to self-alignment called Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization (DRPO) it leverages a dynamic rewarding mechanism to identify and rectify alignment weaknesses .
Outcome: The proposed approach outperforms existing methods and is highly adaptable to various alignment challenges.
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question .
Approach: They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance .
Outcome: The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered .
TRUST: Towards Robust Social Bot Detection via Uncertainty-Guided Pseudo-Labeling and Graph Structure Purification (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing graph-based detection models are vulnerable to deceptive message propagation, where bots deliberately interact with legitimate users.
Approach: They propose a framework to mitigate deceptive message propagation by node-level uncertainty estimation and graph structure purification.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on three benchmark datasets and six GNN backbones on real-world social bots.
CSP:Code-Switching Pre-training for Neural Machine Translation (2020.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to train neural machine translation models are data-hungry and low-resource . et al., 2018; Radford e.t., 2019; Yang ee.,2019) proposes a new pre-training method for NMT .
Approach: They propose a new pre-training method which randomly replaces some words in the input sentence with their translation words in target language.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on unsupervised and supervised NMT models by making full use of monolingual corpora.
Distill, Fuse, Pre-train: Towards Effective Event Causality Identification with Commonsense-Aware Pre-trained Model (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to detect causal relationships in unstructured texts ignore trivial knowledge which may prejudice performance.
Approach: They propose a pipeline to build a commonsense-aware pre-trained model which integrates reliable task-specific knowledge from commonsens graphs.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline integrates reliable task-specific knowledge from commonsense graphs.
SpeechIQ: Speech-Agentic Intelligence Quotient Across Cognitive Levels in Voice Understanding by Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: SIQ quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models.
Approach: They propose a human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice) that quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models.
Outcome: The proposed framework quantifies voice understanding abilities and provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice.
LLMRouterBench: A Massive Benchmark and Unified Framework for LLM Routing (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language model (LLM) routing assigns each query to the best suitable model from an ensemble.
Approach: They introduce a large-scale benchmark and unified framework for LLM routing . they find that many routing methods exhibit similar performance under unified evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark provides comprehensive metrics for both performance-oriented and performance-cost trade-off routing.
Open-Domain Targeted Sentiment Analysis via Span-Based Extraction and Classification (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to target sentiment analysis are limited by huge search space and sentiment inconsistency.
Approach: They propose a span-based extract-then-classify framework to detect opinion targets . they propose pipeline, joint, and collapsed models to classify polarities .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms the sequence tagging baseline on three benchmark datasets.
Don’t Take It Literally: An Edit-Invariant Sequence Loss for Text Generation (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

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.
RECAL: Sample-Relation Guided Confidence Calibration over Tabular Data (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Various machine learning methods for tabular data lack accurate confidence estimation, which is needed for high-risk sensitive applications such as credit modeling and financial fraud detection.
Approach: They propose a general post-training confidence calibration framework to calibrate the confidence of current machine learning models by employing graph neural networks to model the relationships between different samples.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves the confidence estimation on tabular datasets by using graph neural networks to model the relationships between different samples.
OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

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.
DecorateLM: Data Engineering through Corpus Rating, Tagging, and Editing with Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) are pre-trained on vast datasets composed of billions of tokens harvested from diverse text sources.
Approach: They propose a data engineering method to refine the pretraining corpus through data rating, tagging and editing.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the quality of the pretraining corpus by enhancing 100 billion tokens of the training corpus.
MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) have advanced natural language processing, demonstrating exceptional reasoning, tool usage, and memory capabilities.
Approach: They propose a competition-based benchmark framework specifically designed to assess LLMs within multi-agent environments.
Outcome: The proposed framework enhances the LLMs’ abilities in navigating complex social and cognitive dimensions by over threefold between the strongest and weakest LLM models.
Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention for Chinese NER (2022.coling-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Named entity recognition (NER) is a computationally difficult task in Chinese since there is no natural delimiter between words in sentences.
Approach: They propose a data-driven Adaptive Threshold Selective Self-Attention mechanism to select the most relevant characters to enhance Transformer architecture for Chinese named entity recognition.
Outcome: Experiments on four benchmark Chinese NER datasets show the proposed mechanism improves performance.
Emotion Trajectory-aware Retrieval for Markov-driven Emotion Anticipation in LLM-based Emotional Support Conversation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing strategies focus on planning the next-turn dialogue strategies, while external strategy planners focus on generating empathetic responses.
Approach: They propose a Markov-driven emotion anticipation framework with emotion trajectory-aware retrieval for LLM-based ESC, which anticipates future emotion states to guide strategy planning and achieve sustained emotional support.
Outcome: The proposed framework can anticipate future emotions and achieve sustained emotional support on two datasets with two models.
A Multi-Type Multi-Span Network for Reading Comprehension that Requires Discrete Reasoning (D19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing models for reading comprehension and question answering do not support discrete reasoning abilities.
Approach: They propose a reading comprehension model that uses a multi-type answer predictor and a multiple-span extraction method to produce one or multiple text spans.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 79.9 F1 on the DROP hidden test set, creating new state-of-the-art results.
T 2 -NER: A Two-Stage Span-Based Framework for Unified Named Entity Recognition with Templates (2023.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Named Entity Recognition (NER) has evolved from flat to overlapped and discontinuous . NER is a text recognition task that recognizes mentions that represent entities in text .
Approach: They propose a two-stage span-based framework to solve a unified NER task using two stages . they extract entity spans, classify over all entity span pairs and combine them to train two stages.
Outcome: The proposed framework beats all the current competitive baselines on eight benchmark datasets, obtaining the best performance of unified NER.
CoPA: Benchmarking Personalized Question Answering with Data-Informed Cognitive Factors (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing LLMs rely on surface-level similarity or manual heuristics to evaluate personalization . Existing evaluation protocols for personalization are lacking sufficient data-driven validation.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to assess personalization by mining CIPDs to quantify individual preferences.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark provides a more comprehensive and discriminative standard than generic metrics.
Entropy-Aware Reshaping of Reinforcement Signals for Multi-Answer Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is a standard post-training paradigm for large language models.
Approach: They propose a framework that reshapes how learning signals are normalized and aggregated.
Outcome: Experiments on MCTACO and MMLU-Multi show that the proposed framework improves accuracy, training stability and cross-dataset transfer performance.
Trust Within? Seek Beyond? Knowledge Boundary Aware Policy Optimization for Agentic Search (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to augment large language models with external knowledge suffer from a lack of calibration regarding the model’s knowledge boundary.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly aligns retrieval decisions with quantified knowledge states.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms strong baselines while exhibiting reduced hallucination rates.
PathwiseRAG: Multi-Dimensional Exploration and Integration Framework (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing retrieval-augmented generation systems employ rigid retrieval strategies . static retrieval produces knowledge blind spots, missing connections between quantum algorithms and encryption vulnerabilities .
Approach: PathwiseRAG addresses these challenges through intent-aware strategy selection . it constructs a directed acyclic graph of interconnected sub-problems and explores multiple reasoning trajectories .
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves higher accuracy and better reliability than current systems.
KC-GenRe: A Knowledge-constrained Generative Re-ranking Method Based on Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Knowledge graph completion (KGC) is a critical task to predict missing facts among entities.
Approach: They propose a knowledge-constrained generative re-ranking method based on generative large language models for KGC that can predict missing facts among entities.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets and 9.0% and 11.1% compared to the previous methods.
Design First, Code Later: Aesthetically Pleasing Template-Free Slides Generation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to producing presentation slides rely on fixed templates or executable code . Existing methods rely only on predefined templates and emit executable codes .
Approach: They propose a hierarchical slides generation workflow DeepSlides that organizes slide design tasks without any predefined template or style.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on evaluated metrics and achieves superior performance in human preference evaluations.
GraphNarrator: Generating Textual Explanations for Graph Neural Networks (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Graph representation learning has garnered significant attention due to its broad applications in various domains, such as recommendation systems and social network analysis.
Approach: They propose to use a generative language model to map input-output pairs to explanations reflecting the model’s decision-making process to generate a model that generates pseudo-labels that capture the model's decisions from saliency-based explanations.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that GraphNarrator produces human-preferred explanations that are faithful, concise, and human-like.
Dr3: Ask Large Language Models Not to Give Off-Topic Answers in Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering (ODMHQA) is one of the most challenging tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Approach: They propose a mechanism that leverages the intrinsic capabilities of Large Language Models to judge whether the generated answers are off-topic.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces the occurrence of off-topic answers by nearly 13%, improving the performance in Exact Match (EM) by nearly 3% compared to the baseline method without the Dr3 mechanism.
Logical Structure as Knowledge: Enhancing LLM Reasoning via Structured Logical Knowledge Density Estimation (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing data-centric paradigms equate quality with factuality or diversity and ignore the internal logical complexity of training samples.
Approach: They propose a density-aware re-cognizing optimization strategy that prioritizes high-density logical samples to align training with the model's reasoning boundary.
Outcome: The proposed metric outperforms existing methods and improves reasoning performance without increasing total data volume.
Retrieve, Read, Rerank: Towards End-to-End Multi-Document Reading Comprehension (P19-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to answer reading comprehension tasks are inefficient since the input is re-encoded within each module.
Approach: They propose a unified question answering model that combines context retrieving, reading comprehension, and answer reranking to predict the final answer.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline model and achieves state-of-the-art results on two versions of TriviaQA and two variants of SQuAD.
Partial Order-centered Hyperbolic Representation Learning for Few-shot Relation Extraction (2025.coling-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for few-shot relation extraction are limited to labeled instances and rely on data labeling.
Approach: They propose a partial order-centered hyperbolic representation learning framework which imposes constraints on relations on instances by modeling partial order in hyperbolical space.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods on three benchmark datasets on 1-shot settings lacking relation descriptions.
NeKo: Cross-Modality Post-Recognition Error Correction with Tasks-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (2025.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to train a model on a mixture of domain datasets require separate correction language models.
Approach: They propose a multi-task correction MoE that trains experts to become an "expert" of speech-to-text, language-totext and vision-to text datasets by learning to route each dataset’s tokens to its mapped expert.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet on the Open ASR Leaderboard and reaches an average relative 5.0% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations