Papers by Zhengzhong Liu
Efficient (Soft) Q-Learning for Text Generation with Limited Good Data (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) is the predominant method for training text generation models. |
| Approach: | They propose a new RL formulation for text generation from the soft Q-learning perspective using path consistency learning to combine the best of on-/off-policy updates and learn effectively from sparse reward. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms MLE and previous RL methods in a wide range of tasks. |
Decentralized Arena: Towards Democratic and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Yanbin Yin, Kun Zhou, Zhen Wang, Xiangdong Zhang, Yifei Shao, Shibo Hao, Yi Gu, Jieyuan Liu, Somanshu Singla, Tianyang Liu, Eric P. Xing, Zhengzhong Liu, Haojian Jin, Zhiting Hu
| 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. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Does RLVR Extend Reasoning Boundaries? Investigating Capability Expansion in Vision-Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that RLVR amplifies behaviors inherent to the pre-training distribution rather than inducing new capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for RLVR that extends the spatial reasoning boundary . they use a mapping framework where the difficulty is precisely regulated by path length and number of turns . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework extends the spatial reasoning boundary on two real-world navigation benchmarks. |
Token Level Routing Inference System for Edge Devices (2025.acl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been gaining in performance but deployment in edge devices faces significant hurdles due to their high computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a collaborative decoding system that allows small models to perform on-device inference while selectively consulting a cloud-based large model for critical token generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 60% performance gain on CommonsenseQA using a 0.5B model on an M1 MacBook, with under 7% of tokens generation uploaded to the large model in the cloud. |
Linear Steerability in Language Models: When It Emerges and How It Evolves (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for steering language models reveals how concepts become linearly separable as training progresses . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to analyze steerability in language models by using hidden state and representation analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reveals how steerability evolves over training . concepts become linearly separable as training progresses, the framework shows . |
Graph Based Decoding for Event Sequencing and Coreference Resolution (C18-1)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we study two types of relation between events in text documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based decoding algorithm that is applicable to both tasks . they propose ES and EH to solve the event coreference problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed decoding algorithm beats a strong temporal-based, oracle-informed baseline. |
A Data-Centric Framework for Composable NLP Workflows (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengzhong Liu, Guanxiong Ding, Avinash Bukkittu, Mansi Gupta, Pengzhi Gao, Atif Ahmed, Shikun Zhang, Xin Gao, Swapnil Singhavi, Linwei Li, Wei Wei, Zecong Hu, Haoran Shi, Xiaodan Liang, Teruko Mitamura, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems involve interoperation among multiple components . a wealth of NLP toolkits exist ( 4), such as spaCy, DKPro, CoreNLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified open-source framework that supports fast development of NLP workflows . framework includes processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation . |
| Outcome: | The framework offers processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, and is extensible . it is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, Forte and Stave . |
A Two-Step Approach for Implicit Event Argument Detection (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2015) only consider local arguments in the same sentence of the event trigger. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the implicit event argument detection task into two sub-problems . they propose to use argument head-word detection and head-to-span expansion to reduce the number of candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than a strong sequence labeling baseline. |
Automatic Event Salience Identification (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for analyzing salience of discourse units are inadequate . authors propose two saliency detection models based on discourse relations . |
| Approach: | They propose two salience detection models based on discourse relations that capture complex interactions between discourse units. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the strong frequency baseline and improve the feature based model by a large margin. |
Compression, Transduction, and Creation: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Natural Language Generation (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Natural language generation (NLG) tasks have complex nature and require manual evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unifying perspective based on the nature of information change in NLG tasks . they propose 'information alignment' metrics that can be used to evaluate different aspects of NLG . |
| Outcome: | The proposed metrics achieve stronger or comparable correlations with human judgement compared to state-of-the-art metrics in diverse tasks. |
ASDOT: Any-Shot Data-to-Text Generation with Pretrained Language Models (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to data-to-text generation require limited training examples . a data-based approach is based on a set of pre-trained language models with optional finetuning. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-to-text generation task that makes use of any given (or no) examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves on baselines on a dataset with zero/few/full-shot settings. |