Papers by Zhenhua Dong
CART: A Generative Cross-Modal Retrieval Framework With Coarse-To-Fine Semantic Modeling (2025.acl-long)
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Minghui Fang, Shengpeng Ji, Jialong Zuo, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Jieming Zhu, Xize Cheng, Xiaoda Yang, Wenrui Liu, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Cross-modal retrieval tasks are used to retrieve data from one modality or another based on a query from another modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative cross-modal retrieval framework based on coarse-to-fine semantic modeling . they propose combining K-Means and RQ-VAE to discretize multimodal data into token sequences that support autoregressive generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves excellent performance and efficiency in multimodal retrieval tasks. |
Expectation Confirmation Preference Optimization for Multi-Turn Conversational Recommendation Agent (2025.findings-acl)
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Xueyang Feng, Jingsen Zhang, Jiakai Tang, Wei Li, Guohao Cai, Xu Chen, Quanyu Dai, Yue Zhu, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled the development of Conversational Recommendation Agents (CRAs). |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-turn preference optimization paradigm that leverages Expectation Confirmation Theory to explicitly model the evolution of user satisfaction throughout multi-turned dialogues. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm eliminates the significant sampling overhead of existing MTPO methods while ensuring the optimization process drives meaningful improvements. |
How Pre-trained Language Models Capture Factual Knowledge? A Causal-Inspired Analysis (2022.findings-acl)
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Shaobo Li, Xiaoguang Li, Lifeng Shang, Zhenhua Dong, Chengjie Sun, Bingquan Liu, Zhenzhou Ji, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that pre-trained language models can fill in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts such as ”Dante was born in [MASK]” . |
| Approach: | They propose to quantitatively measure and evaluate the word-level patterns that PLMs depend on to generate the missing factual words. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model fills in the missing factual words in cloze-style prompts by relying on effective clues or shortcut patterns. |
MINER: Multi-Interest Matching Network for News Recommendation (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods learn a single user embedding from user’s historical behaviors to represent the reading interest. |
| Approach: | They propose a poly attention scheme to learn multiple interest vectors for each user, which encodes the different aspects of user interest. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on the MIND news recommendation benchmark. |
Cocktail: A Comprehensive Information Retrieval Benchmark with LLM-Generated Documents Integration (2024.findings-acl)
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Sunhao Dai, Weihao Liu, Yuqi Zhou, Liang Pang, Rongju Ruan, Gang Wang, Zhenhua Dong, Jun Xu, Ji-Rong Wen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to an influx of AI-generated content on the internet, transforming corpus of Information Retrieval (IR) systems from human-written to a coexistence with LLM-generated contents. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark named Cocktail that compares IR models with LLMs to find relevant documents and passages from a corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark aims to evaluate IR models in the mixed-sourced data landscape of the LLM era. |
SocialEval: Evaluating Social Intelligence of Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Jinfeng Zhou, Yuxuan Chen, Yihan Shi, Xuanming Zhang, Leqi Lei, Yi Feng, Zexuan Xiong, Miao Yan, Xunzhi Wang, Yaru Cao, Jianing Yin, Shuai Wang, Quanyu Dai, Zhenhua Dong, Hongning Wang, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Existing work on LLMs does not address their social intelligence (SI) and their discrepancy with humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a script-based bilingual SI benchmark that integrates outcome-oriented goal achievement evaluation and process-oriented interpersonal ability evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a script-based bilingual evaluation paradigm that integrates outcome- and process-oriented evaluation by manually crafting narrative scripts. |
MemBench: Towards More Comprehensive Evaluation on the Memory of LLM-based Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have highlighted the significance of memory mechanisms in LLM-based agents, which enable them to store observed information and adapt to dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset and benchmark to evaluate the memory capability of LLM-based agents from multiple aspects including their effectiveness, efficiency, and capacity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark incorporates factual memory and reflective memory as different levels, and proposes participation and observation as various interactive scenarios. |
Semantic Sentence Matching via Interacting Syntax Graphs (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Extensive research efforts have been devoted to the task of matching two natural language sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to embed syntactic structures into an embedding vector and combine them with other features to predict matching scores. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on three public datasets and can interpret sentences in interpretable way. |
Benchmarking Post-Training Quantization of Large Language Models under Microscaling Floating Point Formats (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) is a low-precision format for large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They conduct systematic evaluations of PTQ under Microscaling Floating-Point (MXFP) . they find that MXFP8 consistently achieves near-lossless performance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves near-lossless performance while MXFP4 introduces substantial accuracy degradation and remains challenging. |
Enhancing Multimodal Unified Representations for Cross Modal Generalization (2025.findings-acl)
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Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Shengpeng Ji, Shulei Wang, Hanting Wang, Minghui Fang, Jieming Zhu, Zhenhua Dong, Sashuai Zhou, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing studies on discrete unified representations overlook important distinctions between different dimensions of features. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a codebook to optimize unified representations from pretraining and fine- and coarse-grained disentangling to optimize the representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the interpretability of multimodal unified representations . they use training-free optimization of codebook and fine and coarse cross-modal disentangling . |
Optimal Partial Transport Based Sentence Selection for Long-form Document Matching (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for document matching are limited by the partial nature of the sentence-level matching signals. |
| Approach: | They propose a matching approach that equips existing document matching models with an Optimal Partial Transport component, namely OPT-Match, which selects the key sentences that play a major role in matching. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing models on four publicly available datasets and the key sentences selected by it are consistent with human-provided rationales. |
ICG: Improving Cover Image Generation via MLLM-based Prompting and Personalized Preference Alignment (2025.emnlp-main)
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Zhipeng Bian, Jieming Zhu, Qijiong Liu, Wang Lin, Guohao Cai, Zhaocheng Du, Jiacheng Sun, Zhou Zhao, Zhenhua Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models and diffusion models have opened new possibilities for AI-generated content . personalized cover image generation remains underexplored despite its critical role in boosting user engagement on digital platforms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates MLLM-based prompting with personalized preference alignment to generate high-quality, contextually relevant covers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves image quality, semantic fidelity, and personalization, leading to stronger user appeal and offline recommendation accuracy in downstream tasks. |
Improving Retrospective Language Agents via Joint Policy Gradient Optimization (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have sparked interest in creating autonomous agents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that jointly optimizes both task-planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves task planning and self-reflective evolution capabilities in language agents. |
RecBase: Generative Foundation Model Pretraining for Zero-Shot Recommendation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Sashuai Zhou, Weinan Gan, Qijiong Liu, Ke Lei, Jieming Zhu, Hai Huang, Yan Xia, Ruiming Tang, Zhenhua Dong, Zhou Zhao
| Challenge: | Existing methods for addressing item-level user interests are lacking in cross-domain generalization . RecBase model is domain-agnostic and can be used to enhance recommender systems' effectiveness . |
| Approach: | They propose a domain-agnostic foundational model pretrained with a recommendation-oriented objective that leverages a large-scale, heterogeneous, cross-domain corpus with unified textual representations and feature mappings to enhance cross- domain generalization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses baselines in zero-shot and cross-domain recommendation tasks on eight real-world datasets. |
Q-PRM: Adaptive Query Rewriting for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Step-level Process Supervision (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to rewriting queries often lack supervision signals for intermediate steps . existing approaches rely on outcome-supervised training or heuristic rules to guide the rewrite process . |
| Approach: | They propose a query rewriting framework that generates process-level supervision signals for intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | a new query rewriting framework outperforms existing approaches on open-domain QA benchmarks. |
MIRA: Empowering One-Touch AI Services on Smartphones with MLLM-based Instruction Recommendation (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | generative AI is revolutionizing how users interact with smartphones, transforming how they interact with them. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for task instruction recommendation that enables intuitive one-touch AI tasking on smartphones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements in recommendation accuracy and coherence and intent alignment with predefined instruction candidates. |
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. |