Papers by Zhen Lin
Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| 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. |
CRITICTOOL: Evaluating Self-Critique Capabilities of Large Language Models in Tool-Calling Error Scenarios (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a number of tools are used to perform complex tasks, but the tool utilization process can cause errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a critique evaluation benchmark for tool learning that analyzes function-calling errors on tool evaluation benchmarks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed critique evaluation benchmark holds diverse tool-use errors with varying complexities, which better reflects real-world scenarios. |
Rationalizing Medical Relation Prediction from Corpus-level Statistics (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on predicting relations based on text corpus has focused on analyzing raw texts mentioning two entities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that can be used to rationalize medical relation prediction . they recall contexts associated with the target entities and recognize relational interactions between them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can achieve competitive predictive performance against a comprehensive list of neural baseline models, and present rationales to justify its prediction. |
Modalities Should Be Appropriately Leveraged: Uncertainty Guidance for Multimodal Chinese Spelling Correction (2024.lrec-main)
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| 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. |
CrowdAgent: Multi-Agent Managed Multi-Source Annotation System (2025.emnlp-demos)
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Maosheng Qin, Renyu Zhu, Mingxuan Xia, null Chenchenkai, Zhen Zhu, Minmin Lin, Junbo Zhao, Lu Xu, Changjie Fan, Runze Wu, Haobo Wang
| Challenge: | Recent approaches to annotate data focus on labeling, but lack holistic process control . a novel system that integrates task assignment, data annotation, and quality/cost management is needed . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent system that integrates task assignment, data annotation, and quality/cost management. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system automates human management by using a collaborative multi-agent system. |
A Semi-supervised Scalable Unified Framework for E-commerce Query Classification (2025.acl-industry)
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Chunyuan Yuan, Chong Zhang, Zhen Fang, Ming Pang, Xue Jiang, Changping Peng, Zhangang Lin, Ching Law
| Challenge: | Existing query classification methods rely on posterior click behavior to construct training samples, resulting in insufficient prior information for modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised scaleable unified framework that integrates enhanced modules to unify query classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models in offline and online A/B experiments. |
Bit-Flip Error Resilience in LLMs: A Comprehensive Analysis and Defense Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuhang Chen, Zhen Tan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Huaizhi Qu, Xinyu Zhao, Qi Lin, Yu Cheng, Andrew Kwong, Zhichao Cao, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Bit-flip errors (BFEs) are hardware faults where individual bits in memory or processing units are unintentionally flipped. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defense strategy to mitigate bit-flip errors (BFEs) they propose bfe protection and a self-correction mechanism to minimize performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategy minimizes performance degradation while significantly improving robustness against BFEs. |
ChartM3: A Multi-Stage Code-Driven Pipeline for Constructing Multi-Dimensional and Multi-Step Visual Reasoning Data in Chart Comprehension (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Currently, research on complex chart understanding tasks is limited . a pipeline for visual reasoning datasets addresses these limitations . |
| Approach: | They propose a code-driven pipeline for generating visual reasoning datasets . pipeline integrates retrieval-augmented generation to retrieve professional chart templates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline enhances chart diversity and data quality through model-based evaluation. |
UltraEval-Audio: A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Evaluation of Audio Foundation Models (2026.acl-demo)
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Qundong Shi, Jie Zhou, Biyuan Lin, Junbo Cui, Guoyang Zeng, Yixuan Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Xin Liu, Zhen Luo, Yudong Wang, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Existing evaluation frameworks for audio foundation models are heavily reliant on English, making it difficult to objectively assess models’ performance on Chinese. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified framework that supports 10 languages, 14 task categories, 24 models, and 36 benchmarks with one-command evaluation and real-time leaderboards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework supports 10 languages, 14 task categories, 24 models, and 36 benchmarks with one-command evaluation and real-time leaderboards. |
MTVQA: Benchmarking Multilingual Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (2025.findings-acl)
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Jingqun Tang, Qi Liu, Yongjie Ye, Jinghui Lu, Shu Wei, An-Lan Wang, Chunhui Lin, Hao Feng, Zhen Zhao, Yanjie Wang, Yuliang Liu, Hao Liu, Xiang Bai, Can Huang
| Challenge: | Text-Centric Visual Question Answering (TEC-VQA) is a text-centric visual task understanding tool. |
| Approach: | They introduce a benchmark that features human expert annotations across 9 languages . they prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks prioritize the text in question-answer pairs while disregarding visual text in images. |
AdamMeme: Adaptively Probe the Reasoning Capacity of Multimodal Large Language Models on Harmfulness (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that assess mLLMs on harmful meme understanding are inaccurate and lack accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that adaptively probes the reasoning capabilities of mLLMs . their framework systematically reveals the varying performance of different target mllms a . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework systematically reveals the performance of different target mLLMs. |
Evaluating Saliency Explanations in NLP by Crowdsourcing (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | a crowdsourced method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP is proposed . saliencies are difficult for humans to understand, and can cause psychological harm . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP by crowdsourcing . they recruited 800 crowd workers and empirically evaluated seven salience methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method evaluates saliency methods on two datasets using crowdsourced data . it shows that the results are comparable to existing methods on NLP and CV fields . |
PLATO-XL: Exploring the Large-scale Pre-training of Dialogue Generation (2022.findings-aacl)
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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)
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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. |
How Memory Management Impacts LLM Agents: An Empirical Study of Experience-Following Behavior (2026.acl-long)
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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. |
MAgIC: Investigation of Large Language Model Powered Multi-Agent in Cognition, Adaptability, Rationality and Collaboration (2024.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
AutoFigure-Edit: Generating Editable Scientific Illustrations via Reference-Guided Styling (2026.acl-demo)
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Zhen Lin, Qiujie Xie, Minjun Zhu, Shichen Li, QiYao Sun, Enhao Gu, Yiran Ding, Ke Sun, Fang Guo, Panzhong Lu, Zhiyuan Ning, Yixuan Weng, Yue Zhang
| Challenge: | Existing automated systems for scientific illustrations are limited in editability, stylistic controllability, and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end system that generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific text while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates fully editable scientific illustrations from long-form scientific texts while enabling flexible style adaptation through user-provided reference images. |
UniCorn: Towards Self-Improving Unified Multimodal Models through Self-Generated Supervision (2026.acl-long)
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Zhen Fang, Ruiyan Han, XinYu Sun, Yuchen Ma, Ziheng Wang, Yu Zeng, Zehui Chen, Lin Chen, Wenxuan Huang, Wei-Jie Xu, Yi Cao, Feng Zhao
| Challenge: | Unified Multimodal Models have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal comprehension, but a gap persists in their ability to translate internal knowledge into faithful and controllable synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-improvement framework that partitions a single UMM into three collaborative roles: Proposer, Solver, and Judge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on TIIF, DPG, CompBench and UniCycle benchmarks. |
SafeChain: Safety of Language Models with Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Capabilities (2025.findings-acl)
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Fengqing Jiang, Zhangchen Xu, Yuetai Li, Luyao Niu, Zhen Xiang, Bo Li, Bill Yuchen Lin, Radha Poovendran
| Challenge: | Emerging large reasoning models (LRMs) leverage long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to enhance their reasoning capabilities. |
| Approach: | They conduct a systematic study of LRM safety using human annotations to assess their safety. |
| Outcome: | The proposed safety measures are compared to state-of-the-art models on strong and wildjailbreak datasets. |
PathwiseRAG: Multi-Dimensional Exploration and Integration Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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| 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. |
ScratchEval: Are GPT-4o Smarter than My Child? Evaluating Large Multimodal Models with Visual Programming Challenges (2025.naacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large multimodal models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive code generation capabilities, primarily evaluated through image-to-code benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a visual programming reasoning benchmark based on Scratch, a block-based visual programming language widely used in children’s programming education. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the visual programming ability of large multimodal models by integrating visual elements and embedded programming logic. |
Thinking Beyond the Local: Multi-View Instructed Adaptive Reasoning in KG-Enhanced LLMs (2026.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models adopt query-driven iterative reasoning from a local perspective, limiting efficiency and accuracy for complex multi-hop tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-view instructed adaptive reasoning of LLM on Knowledge Graphs that allows LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model overcomes the limitations of local exploration by enabling LLMs to plan, evaluate, and adapt reasoning paths from a global perspective. |
Contextualized Sequence Likelihood: Enhanced Confidence Scores for Natural Language Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Currently, the most commonly used confidence score is the likelihood of the generated sequence . different tokens should be weighted differently depending on the context. |
| Approach: | They propose to assign different weights to various tokens using attention values elicited from the base LLM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the confidence of the predicted sequence probability by assigning weights to tokens based on attention values elicited from the base model. |
Unleashing Low-Bit Inference on Ascend NPUs: A Comprehensive Evaluation of HiFloat Formats (2026.acl-industry)
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Pengxiang Zhao, Hui-Ling Zhen, Xing Li, Han Bao, Weizhe Lin, Zhiyuan Yang, Yu Zi Wei, Xin Wang, Mingxuan Yuan, Xianzhi Yu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Low-bit floating-point formats like MXFP and NVFP4 offer new opportunities for precision and efficiency. |
| Approach: | They evaluate HiFloat (HiF8 and HiF4), a family of floating-point formats tailored for Ascend NPUs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed formats excel with high-variance data and are compatible with state-of-the-art quantization frameworks. |
NeKo: Cross-Modality Post-Recognition Error Correction with Tasks-Guided Mixture-of-Experts Language Model (2025.acl-industry)
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Yen-Ting Lin, Zhehuai Chen, Piotr Zelasko, Zhen Wan, Xuesong Yang, Zih-Ching Chen, Krishna C Puvvada, Ke Hu, Szu-Wei Fu, Jun Wei Chiu, Jagadeesh Balam, Boris Ginsburg, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Chao-Han Huck Yang
| 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. |