Papers by Zheng Fang

44 papers
Model Composition for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for creating versatile MLLMs rely on joint training with paired instruction data, which is resource-intensive and challenging to extend to new modalities.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for multimodal large language models by reusing modality encoders and merging LLM parameters.
Outcome: The proposed model retains the modal understanding capabilities of each original model.
IntentCoding: Amplifying User Intent in Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: IntentCoding captures the influence of user intent by masking out the intent, and integrates seamlessly with existing decoding procedures.
Approach: They propose a decoding strategy that captures the influence of user intent by masking out the intent and applies a multi-strength ensemble mechanism to amplify the effect of user intention during generation.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly improves both constraint satisfaction and functional correctness compared to greedy decoding approaches.
Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach for Dialogue Policy Learning (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement learning (RL) is the main dialogue policy learning method in recent years.
Approach: They propose a Gaussian Process based Deep Dyna-Q approach to dialogue policy learning . they propose evaluating the quality of experiences generated by the world model using a discriminator .
Outcome: The proposed approach improves the effectiveness and efficiency of dialogue policy learning by 20% with fewer human-machine interactions.
KARPA: A Training-free Method of Adapting Knowledge Graph as References for Large Language Model’s Reasoning Path Aggregation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) are limited by step-by-step decision-making on KGs, or require fine-tuning or pre-training on specific KG.
Approach: They propose a framework that harnesses the global planning abilities of large language models (LLMs) for efficient and accurate KG reasoning.
Outcome: Extensive experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in KGQA tasks, delivering both high efficiency and accuracy.
DevEval: A Manually-Annotated Code Generation Benchmark Aligned with Real-World Code Repositories (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks are poorly aligned with real-world code repositories and are insufficient to evaluate the coding abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a repository-level benchmark named DevEval to evaluate LLMs' coding abilities in real-world code repositories.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that the LLMs perform better in real-world code repositories than existing benchmarks.
Spiral of Silence in Large Language Model Agents (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing theories of Spiral of Silence do not apply to large language models .
Approach: They propose an evaluation framework for examining SoS in large language models . they consider four controlled conditions that vary the availability of "History" and "Persona" signals .
Outcome: The proposed framework examines the SoS-like dynamics in large language models . it shows that history and persona together produce strong majority dominance .
StoryAnalogy: Deriving Story-level Analogies from Large Language Models to Unlock Analogical Understanding (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Analogy-making between narratives is crucial for human reasoning . despite its importance, there has been limited research on story analogies .
Approach: They construct a large-scale story-level analogy corpus with 24K story pairs . they find that the tasks are incredibly difficult for large language models such as ChatGPT .
Outcome: The proposed corpus contains 24K story pairs from diverse domains with human annotations on two similarities from the extended Structure-Mapping Theory.
SpatialWebAgent: Leveraging Large Language Models for Automated Spatial Information Extraction and Map Grounding (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Understanding and extracting spatial information from text is vital for a wide range of applications, says nielsen . inherent complexity of geographic expressions in natural language presents significant hurdles for traditional extraction methods.
Approach: They propose a system that leverages large language models to extract spatial information from natural language.
Outcome: SpatialWebAgent is designed to extract, standardize, and ground spatial information from natural language text directly onto maps.
DVI-DTM: Dual-View Representation Learning for Interpretable Short Text Dynamic Topic Modeling (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing dynamic topic modeling methods face semantic ambiguity and interpretation ambiguities when applied to short texts.
Approach: They propose a Dual-View representation learning-based Interpretable short text Dynamic Topic Model to address semantic ambiguity and interpretation ambiguities.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in topic alignment and dynamic topic quality metrics while producing highly interpretable topic descriptions.
EXPLAIN: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Entity Summary (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing document question answering methods reduce inference costs and input tokens.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation method that automatically extracts useful entities and generates summaries from documents.
Outcome: The proposed method surpasses baseline retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and long-context question answering (LC) methods achieve higher accuracy by processing entire documents, but at the cost of increased computational Corresponding authors.
SciAssess: Benchmarking LLM Proficiency in Scientific Literature Analysis (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks fail to adequately evaluate the proficiency of Large Language Models (LLMs) Existing standards do not cover the skills needed to evaluate LLMs in scientific literature analysis.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models in scientific literature analysis.
Outcome: SciAssess evaluates 11 LLMs on multiple tasks across scientific fields.
Benchmarking Foundation Models with Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Olympic-Level Physics Problem Solving (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: a new study examines the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with foundation models to enhance expert-level reasoning.
Approach: They introduce PhoPile, a high-quality multimodal dataset specifically designed for Olympiad-level physics.
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to solve Olympiad-level physics problems.
MaskTab: Scalable Masked Tabular Pretraining with Scaling Laws and Distillation for Industrial Classification (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Tabular data is high-dimensional, riddled with missing entries, and rarely labeled at scale.
Approach: They propose a unified pre-training framework for industrial-scale tabular data . MaskTab encodes missing values via dedicated learnable tokens .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms XGBoost and MaskTab-L on industrial-scale . it achieves +5.04% AUC and +8.28% KS over prior art under rigorous scaling .
EA-Agent: A Structured Multi-Step Reasoning Agent for Entity Alignment (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Entity alignment (EA) aims to identify entities across different knowledge graphs (KGs) that refer to the same real-world object.
Approach: They propose to use large language models to integrate semantic knowledge into EA to identify entities across different knowledge graphs that refer to the same object.
Outcome: The proposed agent outperforms existing methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three benchmark datasets.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Approach: They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base.
MASPO: Unifying Gradient Utilization, Probability Mass, and Signal Reliability for Robust and Sample-Efficient LLM Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing RLVR algorithms rely on rigid, uniform, and symmetric trust region mechanisms . current algorithms lack robustness, asymmetric signal reliability and inefficient gradient utilization .
Approach: They propose a framework to harmonize three dimensions of RLVR algorithms, a paper argues . a binary cutoff is used to discard valuable reinforcement signals, they argue .
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in evaluating a robust RLVR solution.
From log 𝜋 to 𝜋: Taming Divergence in Soft Clipping via Bilateral Decoupled Decay of Probability Gradient Weight (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Standard algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) enforce stability via "hard clipping" but relying on log-probability gradient yields divergent weights as probabilities vanish, destabilizing LLM training.
Approach: They propose a decoupled gradient policy optimization that uses a decay mechanism to decouple the probability of a boundary token.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms baselines on various mathematical benchmarks.
Retrieve-and-Sample: Document-level Event Argument Extraction via Hybrid Retrieval Augmentation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent studies show the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in many generative NLP tasks.
Approach: They investigate retrieval settings from the input and label distribution views . they further augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations sampled from event semantic regions .
Outcome: The proposed methods can augment document-level EAE with pseudo demonstrations . the methods can be used in generative NLP tasks such as dialogue response generation .
Disentangled Learning of Stance and Aspect Topics for Vaccine Attitude Detection in Social Media (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to detect vaccine attitudes on social media require abundant annotations and pre-defined aspect categories.
Approach: They propose a semi-supervised approach to detect vaccine attitudes on social media . they use an autoencoding architecture to learn from unlabelled data the topical information of the domain .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing aspect-based models on stance detection and tweet clustering.
Deep Differential Amplifier for Extractive Summarization (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to extract summary from document with a disproportionate ratio of selected and unselected sentences are far from human performance.
Approach: They propose a model that rebalances sentence-level extractive summarization by amplifying the semantic difference between each sentence and all other sentences and applying the residual unit as the second item of the differential amplifier to deepen the architecture.
Outcome: The proposed model performs competitively against state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.
CWTM: Leveraging Contextualized Word Embeddings from BERT for Neural Topic Modeling (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing topic models rely on bag-of-words (BOW) representations to capture word order information.
Approach: They propose a neural topic model that integrates contextualized word embeddings from BERT to learn the topic vector of a document without BOW information.
Outcome: The proposed model generates more coherent and meaningful topics compared to existing models while accommodating unseen words in newly encountered documents.
MuBench: Assessment of Multilingual Capabilities of Large Language Models Across 61 Languages (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing evaluation datasets lack cross-lingual alignment, leaving assessments of multilingual capabilities fragmented in both language and skill coverage.
Approach: They propose to use multilingual consistency as a complementary metric to assess performance bottlenecks and guide model improvement.
Outcome: The proposed model lacks cross-lingual alignment and language coverage gaps between state-of-the-art models.
A User-Centered, Interactive, Human-in-the-Loop Topic Modelling System (2023.eacl-main)

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Challenge: Recent research has demonstrated the value of user feedback, but there are still issues to consider, such as the difficulty in tracking changes and comparing different models.
Approach: They propose a human-in-the-loop topic modeling system that integrates users’ knowledge into the modelling process, enabling them to refine the model iteratively.
Outcome: The proposed system is based on a series of user studies to assess its performance in progressively more realistic applications.
Beyond Completion: A Foundation Model for General Knowledge Graph Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing foundation models for general knowledge graph reasoning have focused on their structural aspects, with most efforts restricted to in-KG tasks.
Approach: They propose a conditional encoding architecture that bridges the gap between textual and structural modalities, enabling seamless integration.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models on 28 datasets and is generalized to out-of-KG tasks.
Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent models have extended Corresponding Author. context lengths to millions of tokens while maintaining reasoning and comprehension capabilities.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate the ability of large language models to extract sequential information items from long contexts.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves maximum accuracy of 63.50% on six well-known LLMs.
Think before Go: Hierarchical Reasoning for Image-goal Navigation (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for image-goal navigation fail to extract informative visual cues, leading agents to wander around.
Approach: They propose a framework that decomposes image-goal navigation into high-level planning and low-level execution.
Outcome: The proposed method is superior to existing methods in both simulation and real-world environments.
PIG: Privacy Jailbreak Attack on LLMs via Gradient-based Iterative In-Context Optimization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to evaluate privacy leakage in LLMs use memorized prefixes or simple instructions to extract data, which well-aligned models can easily block.
Approach: They propose a framework targeting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that uses in-context learning to build a privacy context and iteratively updates it with three gradient-based strategies to elicit target PII.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) results on four white-box and two black-box LLMs.
ControlSpeech: Towards Simultaneous and Independent Zero-shot Speaker Cloning and Zero-shot Language Style Control (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Prior zero-shot TTS models only mimic the speaker’s voice without further control and adjustment capabilities while prior controllable TTS systems cannot perform speaker-specific voice generation.
Approach: They propose a style control module that captures codec representations corresponding to timbre, content, and style in a discrete decoupling codec space.
Outcome: The proposed system can fully clone the speaker's voice and perform speech-specific adjustment and control functions.
CLIO: Role-interactive Multi-event Head Attention Network for Document-level Event Extraction (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for document-level event extraction struggle due to two intrinsic challenges: nested arguments and multiple events.
Approach: They propose a role-interactive multi-event head attention network to solve two challenges . they map different events to multiple subspaces and then determine whether the current event exists .
Outcome: The proposed model improves on two widely used DEE datasets on the Internet.
QuASAR: A Question-Driven Structure-Aware Approach for Table-to-Text Generation (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for table-to-text generation fail to capture the structure of tabular data or rely on complex attention mechanisms, limiting their applicability.
Approach: They propose a question-driven self-supervised approach to enhance the model’s structural perception and representation capabilities by focusing on structure-related queries.
Outcome: The proposed model improves its model's structural perception and representation capabilities by guiding it to capture local and global table structures.
EasyInstruct: An Easy-to-use Instruction Processing Framework for Large Language Models (2024.acl-demos)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have improved performance across tasks and domains . instruction tuning is a crucial technique to enhance the capabilities of LLMs - but there is no standard open-source instruction processing framework available for the community .
Approach: They propose an open-source instruction tuning framework for Large Language Models that modularizes instruction generation, selection, prompting and their combination and interaction.
Outcome: The proposed framework is open-source and available on Github.
Disentangling Reasoning Logic to Resolve Explicit Knowledge Conflicts (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to resolve explicit knowledge conflicts are based on semantic decoding and auxiliary embedding.
Approach: They propose a framework that adjudicates conflicts by structuring the underlying logic.
Outcome: Experiments show that the proposed framework improves on existing models.
MIND: Multimodal Shopping Intention Distillation from Large Vision-language Models for E-commerce Purchase Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for acquiring large-scale intentions generate product-centric intentions without product images and incur high costs for scalability.
Approach: They propose a multimodal framework that allows Large Vision-Language Models to infer purchase intentions from multimodal product metadata and prioritize human-centric ones.
Outcome: The proposed framework shows that it is robust to different prompts and superior to previous methods.
IntentionQA: A Benchmark for Evaluating Purchase Intention Comprehension Abilities of Language Models in E-commerce (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches that distill intentions from LMs fail to generate meaningful and human-centric intentions applicable in real-world E-commerce contexts.
Approach: They propose a double-task multiple-choice question answering benchmark to evaluate LMs' comprehension of purchase intentions in E-commerce.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark consists of 4,360 carefully curated problems across three difficulty levels, constructed using an automated pipeline to ensure scalability on large E-commerce platforms.
ConvLab-2: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Dialogue Systems (2020.acl-demos)

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Challenge: ConvLab-2 inherits Convlab's framework but integrates more powerful dialogue models and supports more datasets.
Approach: They present ConvLab-2, an open-source toolkit that enables researchers to build task-oriented dialogue systems with state-of-the-art models and perform an end-to-end evaluation.
Outcome: The new tool inherits ConvLab's framework and extends it by integrating many recently proposed state-of-the-art dialogue models.
TEBNER: Domain Specific Named Entity Recognition with Type Expanded Boundary-aware Network (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to label data and identify entities require large amounts of manually annotated texts for training supervised models.
Approach: They propose a dictionary extension method which extracts new entities through the type expanded model.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art supervised systems on different types of datasets and surpasses supervised models.
Towards Scalable Lightweight GUI Agents via Multi-role Orchestration (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Advanced GUI agents suffer from prohibitive deployment costs on resource-constrained devices.
Approach: They propose a lightweight GUI agent with GUI-specific knowledge and task scalability . LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration .
Outcome: The proposed GUI agent LAMO-3B supports monolithic execution and MAS-style orchestration.
A Query-Driven Topic Model (2021.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Topic modeling is an unsupervised method for revealing the hidden semantic structure of a corpus.
Approach: They propose a query-driven topic model that allows users to specify a simple query in words or phrases and return query-related topics.
Outcome: The proposed model is particularly attractive when the query has a low occurrence in a text corpus, making it difficult for traditional topic models to identify relevant topics.
PerSphere: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Faceted Perspective Retrieval and Summarization (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization . they propose measurable metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval pipeline .
Outcome: The proposed system breaks free from information silos by combining two opposing claims . it can be used to extract multiple perspectives and improve performance on the platform .
SimpleDeepSearcher: Deep Information Seeking via Web-Powered Reasoning Trajectory Synthesis (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to deep search training lack high-quality training trajectories, prohibitive computational costs and lack of high-fidelity training data.
Approach: They propose a framework that synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating real user interactions in live web search environments.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality training data by simulating user interactions in live web search environments.
COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing datasets for Chinese instruction tuning are not well-aligned with Chinese users’ interaction patterns.
Approach: They propose to use Chinese instruction tuning datasets to improve instruction fine-tuning for Chinese users.
Outcome: The proposed dataset shows that Chinese models achieve competitive performance in diverse benchmarks.
Non-Autoregressive Chinese ASR Error Correction with Phonological Training (2022.naacl-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to correct ASR errors focus on fixed-length corrections, but rarely consider variable-length ones.
Approach: They propose a non-autoregressive method to correct Chinese ASR errors . they use phonological tokens to extend the source sentence for variable-length correction .
Outcome: The proposed method improves word error rate and speeds up inference by 6.2 times compared with the autoregressive model.
LIME: Less Is More for MLLM Evaluation (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing MLLM benchmarks and unified evaluation frameworks cannot accurately and efficiently reflect the ability of MLMLs.
Approach: They propose a semi-automated benchmark curated using a pipeline that filters out uninformative samples and eliminates answer leakage by focusing on tasks that require image-based understanding.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark reduces the number of samples by 76% and evaluation time by 77% while it can more effectively distinguish different models’ abilities.
ProMed: Shapley Information Gain Guided Reinforcement Learning for Proactive Medical LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing medical Large Language Models (LLMs) follow a reactive paradigm, risking diagnostic errors by answering before seeking sufficient details.
Approach: They propose a reinforcement learning framework that transitions LLMs toward a proactive paradigm, enabling them to ask clinically valuable questions before decision-making.
Outcome: Experiments on partial-information medical benchmarks show that ProMed outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.29% on average and delivers a 54.45% gain over the reactive paradigm.

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