Papers by Zhenhua Xu
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. |
MalURLBench: A Benchmark Evaluating Agents’ Vulnerabilities When Processing Web URLs (2026.findings-acl)
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Dezhang Kong, Zhuxi Wu, Shiqi Liu, ZhiCheng Tan, Kuichen Lu, Minghao Li, Qichen Liu, Shengyu Chu, Zhenhua Xu, Xuan Liu, Meng Han
| Challenge: | Existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs, despite their ability to process malicious URL's. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ vulnerabilities to malicious URLs and a lightweight defense module to mitigate the vulnerability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites. |
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. |
CTCC: A Robust and Stealthy Fingerprinting Framework for Large Language Models via Cross-Turn Contextual Correlation Backdoor (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fingerprinting model ownership traces are vulnerable to illegal plagiarism and are not reliable. |
| Approach: | They propose a rule-driven fingerprinting framework that encodes contextual correlations across multiple dialogue turns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves stronger stealth and robustness than previous work. |
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs lack immersion and adaptability, resulting in limited character orchestration and on-the-fly character introduction. |
| Approach: | They propose an LLM-based framework that allows actors to interact with users in an ongoing narrative. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms commercial LLMs in character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence. |
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. |
MapGPT: Map-Guided Prompting with Adaptive Path Planning for Vision-and-Language Navigation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Embodied agents equipped with GPT as their brains have extraordinary decision-making and generalization abilities across various tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a map-based agent that introduces an online linguistic-formed map to encourage global exploration. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on R2R and REVERIE simultaneously. |
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. |
EverTracer: Hunting Stolen Large Language Models via Stealthy and Robust Probabilistic Fingerprint (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing fingerprinting methods require impractical white-box access or introduce detectable statistical anomalies. |
| Approach: | They propose a gray-box fingerprinting framework that ensures stealthy and robust model provenance tracing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is the first to repurpose Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) for defensive use, embedding ownership signals via memorization instead of artificial trigger-output overfitting. |
Web Fraud Attacks Against LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-driven multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly gaining popularity, and its inherent security risks are rapidly becoming a concern. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel attack manipulating unique structures of web links to deceive MAS by using homoglyph deception, sub-directory nesting, and parameter obfuscation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attacks exploit unique structures of web links to deceive MAS . they exhibit significant destructive potential across different MAS architectures . |
PREE: Towards Harmless and Adaptive Fingerprint Editing in Large Language Models via Knowledge Prefix Enhancement (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing black-box fingerprinting techniques rely on overfitting high-perplexity trigger patterns . experimental results show that model editing in the fingerprint domain exhibits unique advantages . |
| Approach: | They propose a prefix-enhanced fingerprint editing framework that encodes copyright information into parameter offsets through dual-channel knowledge edit to achieve covert embedding of fingerprint features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model editing framework achieves 90% trigger precision in mainstream architectures . the proposed model editor achieves the 90% accuracy in mainstream models . |
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. |
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. |
MEraser: An Effective Fingerprint Erasure Approach for Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised critical concerns about model ownership and intellectual property protection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for effectively removing backdoor-based fingerprints from LLMs . they propose deleting backdoor fingerprints using a transferable erasure mechanism . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method removes backdoor-based fingerprints while maintaining model performance. |
Unlocking the Effectiveness of LoRA-FP for Seamless Transfer Implantation of Fingerprints in Downstream Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | lightweight plug-and-play framework that encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters . |
| Approach: | proposed framework encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters via constrained fine-tuning . enables seamless fingerprint transplantation through parameter fusion, eliminating full-parameter updates while maintaining integrity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves superior robustness against various scenarios while reducing computational overhead compared to traditional approaches. |
MPC-BERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Multi-Party Conversation Understanding (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multi-party conversation represent interlocutors and utterances individually . existing methods ignore complicated structure of MPC which may provide crucial interlocutor and tertiary semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a pre-trained model for multi-party conversation that considers learning who says what to whom in a unified model with elaborated self-supervised tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on three downstream tasks at two benchmarks. |
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. |