Papers by Zhengtao Yu
Noise-robust Cross-modal Interactive Learning with Text2Image Mask for Multi-modal Neural Machine Translation (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on multi-modal neural machine translation focus on visual information, but text and image may not match exactly, and visual noise is often ignored. |
| Approach: | They propose a noise-robust multi-modal interactive fusion approach with cross-modal relation-aware mask mechanism for MNMT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art scores in all En-De, En-Fr and En-Cs translation tasks. |
Leveraging Unit Language Guidance to Advance Speech Modeling in Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)
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Yuhao Zhang, Xiangnan Ma, Kaiqi Kou, Peizhuo Liu, Weiqiao Shan, Benyou Wang, Tong Xiao, Yuxin Huang, Zhengtao Yu, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Existing textless speech-to-speech translation models have two main challenges: 1) learning cross-modal features and 2) learning alignment of difference languages in long sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose a unit language to overcome two main modeling challenges . they propose task prompt modeling to utilize the unit language in guiding the modeling process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language improves over a strong baseline and achieves comparable performance to models trained with text. |
“In-Dialogues We Learn”: Towards Personalized Dialogue Without Pre-defined Profiles through In-Dialogue Learning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to personalized dialogue generate pre-defined profiles that are time-consuming and labor-intensive to create. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that leverages dialogue history to characterize personas without pre-defined profiles. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves BLEU and ROUGE scores on three datasets and human evaluations further validate the proposed method. |
A Mixed-Language Multi-Document News Summarization Dataset and a Graphs-Based Extract-Generate Model (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing research on news summarization focuses on single-language single-document (SLSD), single-linguistic multi-document or cross-language multi-doc (CLSD) however, in real-world scenarios, news articles often involve multiple documents in different languages, i.e., mixed-language MLMD. |
| Approach: | They propose a mixed-language multi-document news summarization dataset with four different languages and 10,992 source document cluster and target summary pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset contains four different languages and 10,992 source document cluster and target summary pairs. |
Non-parallel Accent Transfer based on Fine-grained Controllable Accent Modelling (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing accent transfer methods rely on parallel data or speech recognition models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use mutual information learning to disentangle accent features and control the accent of the generated speech during the inference time. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior performance to baseline models in accentedness and audio quality. |
3R: Enhancing Sentence Representation Learning via Redundant Representation Reduction (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to improve sentence representations lack fine-grained guidance on reducing redundant information. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that dynamically identifies redundant information from a dimensional perspective and trains the SRL model to redistribute semantics on different dimensions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves sentence representations on seven semantic text similarity benchmarks. |
Layer-aware Dual-directional Modulation for Low-resource Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in Machine Translation (MT) however, a performance gap persists between high-resource and low-resourced languages due to imbalanced pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise metric to quantify the activation divergence between high- and low-resource languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard LoRA fine-tuning on Chinese-to-seven low-resource language translations. |
Semantic Relation-aware Difference Representation Learning for Change Captioning (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to describe semantic change in images with distractors are difficult to learn . |
| Approach: | They propose a semantic relation-aware difference representation learning network to explicitly learn the difference representation in the existence of distractors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on CLEVR-Change and Spot-the -Diff datasets. |
Bypassing Neural Evaluations for Fast Audio Editing via Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation (2026.findings-acl)
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Xiaoqian Liu, Zhengkun Ge, Jianjin Wang, Haoran Zhang, Yuan Ge, Kaiyan Chang, Chen Xu, Tong Xiao, Zhengtao Yu, Linfeng Zhang, JingBo Zhu
| Challenge: | Recent advances in audio diffusion models have significantly improved text-to-audio editing via inversion techniques, but these models typically rely on dense, fixed-step sampling trajectories to maintain structural integrity. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic Adaptive Trajectory Extrapolation framework that accelerates inversion-based editing process by dynamically evaluating only the most critical generative phases. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves a 3.9 speedup with negligible loss in fidelity. |
On the Emotion Understanding of Synthesized Speech (2026.acl-long)
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Yuan Ge, Haishu Zhao, AoKai Hao, Junxiang Zhang, Bei Li, Xiaoqian Liu, Chenglong Wang, Jianjin Wang, Bingsen Zhou, Bingyu Liu, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing models for emotion understanding do not capture fundamental features of synthesized speech. |
| Approach: | They evaluate emotion recognition models on synthesized speech using SER models and generative models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can't generalize to synthesized speech because of speech token prediction . generative models tend to infer emotion from textual semantics while ignoring paralinguistic cues. |
Can Large Language Models Mine Interpretable Financial Factors More Effectively? A Neural-Symbolic Factor Mining Agent Model (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing factor mining models are inefficient and inefficient, resulting in a significant challenge to extract interpretable factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that integrates the strengths of both neural and symbolic models for factor mining. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model surpasses the SOTA RankIC and RankICIR in predicting S&P 500 returns on real-world stock market data. |
Multilingual Generative Retrieval via Cross-lingual Semantic Compression (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual retrieval still face cross-lingual identifier misalignment and identifiere inflation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that unifies semantically equivalent multilingual keywords into shared atoms to align semantics and compresses the identifier space. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves cross-lingual alignment and reduces redundancy. |
Memory-enhanced Large Language Model for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing via Deep Hierarchical Syntax Understanding (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our approach can significantly improve the parsing accuracy of all baseline models, leading to new state-of-the-art results. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep hierarchical syntax understanding approach to improve the cross-lingual semantic memory capability of large language models by implicitly aligning linguistic knowledge between source and target languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the cross-lingual semantic memory capability of large language models by combining implicit multi-task fine-tuning and explicit label bank guiding. |
Decoupling Mixture-of-Graphs: Unseen Relational Learning for Knowledge Graph Completion by Fusing Ontology and Textual Experts (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) fail in unseen relation representations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use three kinds of graphs to obtain unseen relation representations . they propose to decouple mixture-of-graph experts (DMoG) for unseened relations learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on unseen relation representations. |
Does Large Language Model Contain Task-Specific Neurons? (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehensively handling various types of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for task-specific neuron localization based on Causal Gradient Variation with Special Tokens (CGVST) this method identifies task- specific neurons by concentrating on the most significant tokens during task processing, eliminating redundant tokens and minimizing interference from non-essential neurons. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can locate task-specific neurons across eight public tasks. |
Rˆ3Net:Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network for Change Captioning (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on change captioning uses a natural language sentence to describe disagreement between two images. |
| Approach: | They propose a Relation-embedded Representation Reconstruction Network to distinguish real change from clutter and irrelevant changes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on two public datasets. |
Breaking Consensus Bias: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning for Machine Translation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing RL approaches for MT face fixed references or the production of homogeneous references leading to mode collapse in unsupervised settings. |
| Approach: | They propose an Entropy-Driven Unsupervised RL framework for machine translation that leverages entropy for supervision construction and self-evolution. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms supervised and unsupervised baselines in multiple language pairs. |
GRPO-Guided Modality Selection Enhanced LoRA-Tuned LLMs for Multimodal Emotion Recognition (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) aims to identify speakers’ emotional states by utilizing text, audio, and visual modalities. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive modality selection framework for multimodal emotion recognition in conversation that integrates all available modalities into one . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on multimodal dialogue datasets and is available at https://github.com/youflyaway/Modality-Selection-Enhanced-LoRA-Tuned-LLMs. |
SPS: Steering Probability Squeezing for Better Exploration in Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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Yifu Huo, Chenglong Wang, Ziming Zhu, Shunjie Xing, Peinan Feng, Tongran Liu, Qiaozhi He, Tian Hua Zhou, null Changxiaojia, JingBo Zhu, Zhengtao Yu, Tong Xiao
| Challenge: | Reinforcement learning (RL) training typically improves single-sample success rates but limited exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories. |
| Approach: | They propose a training paradigm that interleaves conventional RL with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) they propose 'Steering Probability Squeezing' to enhance exploration without external supervision . |
| Outcome: | The proposed training paradigm improves Pass@k and improves exploration of diverse reasoning trajectories without external supervision. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion from Pretrained Language Models with Knowledge Constraints (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multilingual knowledge graph completion do not align with mKGC tasks because of their English-centric bias. |
| Approach: | They propose to use multilingual pretrained language models to solve queries in different languages by reasoning a tail entity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the previous SOTA on Hits@1 and Hits @10 by 12.32% and 16.03% on public datasets. |
Representation Alignment and Adversarial Networks for Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have improved dependency parsing accuracy in resource-rich languages . however, the accuracy drops sharply when the model is transferred to low-resource language . |
| Approach: | They propose a representation alignment and adversarial model to filter out useful knowledge from rich-resource language and ignore useless ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the benchmark datasets by 1.37 LAS and 1.34 UAS. |
Activation-Guided Local Editing for Jailbreaking Attacks (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs) are limited and produce incoherent or unreadable inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose a two-stage framework that performs a one-shot, scenario-based generation of context and rephrases the original malicious query to obscure its harmful intent. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art Attack Success Rate, with gains of up to 37.74% over the strongest baseline, and excellent transferability to black-box and large-scale models. |
Multilingual Knowledge Graph Completion via Efficient Multilingual Knowledge Sharing (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing MKGC research ignores the shareability of cross-lingual knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual knowledge Graph Completion framework that leverages multilingual shared knowledge to significantly enhance performance through two components: Knowledge-level Grouped Mixture of Experts (KL-GMoE) and Iterative Entity Reranking (IER). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves improvements of 5.47%, 3.27%, and 1.01% in the Hits@1, Hits @3, and Hits_10 metrics, respectively, compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) MKGC method. |