Papers by Zheyu Zhang
Arctic-Text2SQL-R1: Simple Rewards, Strong Reasoning in Text-to-SQL (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhewei Yao, Guoheng Sun, Łukasz Borchmann, Zheyu Shen, Minghang Deng, Bohan Zhai, Hao Zhang, Ang Li, Yuxiong He
| Challenge: | Translating natural language questions into SQL is a core challenge in natural language understanding and human-computer interaction. |
| Approach: | They propose a reinforcement learning framework and model family to generate accurate, executable SQL using a lightweight reward signal based solely on execution correctness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms previous versions of 70B-class systems and achieves state-of-the-art execution accuracy across six diverse Text2SQL benchmarks. |
Towards the Law of Capacity Gap in Distilling Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Language model (LM) distillation aims at distilling knowledge in a large teacher LM to a small student one. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the law of capacity gap to distill knowledge from a large teacher to a small student model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms other language models on a larger scale by using the law of capacity gap inducted from a preliminary study on small-scale (3B) LMs. |
Where Paths Split: Localized, Calibrated Control of Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models display heterogeneous moral preferences across settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for steering toward a desired ethical framework while preserving general competence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines while providing interpretable mechanism. |
Probabilistic Aggregation and Targeted Embedding Optimization for Collective Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have impressive moral reasoning abilities, yet they often diverge when confronted with complex, multi-factor moral dilemmas. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synthesizes multiple LLMs’ moral judgments into a collectively formulated moral judgment, realigning models that deviate significantly from this consensus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework synthesizes multiple LLMs’ moral judgments into a collectively formulated moral judgment, realigning models that deviate significantly from this consensus. |
M-ABSA: A Multilingual Dataset for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)
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ChengYan Wu, Bolei Ma, Yihong Liu, Zheyu Zhang, Ningyuan Deng, Yanshu Li, Baolan Chen, Yi Zhang, Yun Xue, Barbara Plank
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on English-centric aspects of sentiment analysis, limiting scope for multilingual evaluation and research. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a multilingual dataset to analyze aspects with associated sentiment elements in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset is the most extensive multilingual parallel dataset for ABSA to date. |
EMCompress: Video-LLMs with Endomorphic Multimodal Compression (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Static, sparse frame sampling either dilutes evidence across task-irrelevant segments at significant cost or misses fine-grained temporal semantics altogether. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel task that compresses multimodal input while preserving answer invariance across reasonable downstream models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task surpasses prior methods by 0.40 F-1 with competitive query rewriting. |
mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent multilingual pretrained language models encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose a language similarity measure that induces similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. |
| Outcome: | The proposed measure exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, and more accurate similarity results on low correlation languages. |
DetectBench: Can Large Language Model Detect and Piece Together Implicit Evidence? (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhouhong Gu, Lin Zhang, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Jiangjie Chen, Wenhao Huang, Yikai Zhang, Shusen Wang, Zheyu Ye, Yan Gao, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs' abilities to detect evidence in long contexts are far inferior to humans. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to assess LLMs' abilities in evidence and multi-step commonsense reasoning within a long context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of LLMs in evidence detection and commonsense reasoning. |
d-TreeRPO: Towards More Reliable Policy Optimization for Diffusion Language Models (2026.acl-long)
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Leyi Pan, Shuchang Tao, Yunpeng Zhai, Zheyu Fu, Liancheng Fang, Minghua He, Lingzhe Zhang, Zhaoyang Liu, Bolin Ding, Aiwei Liu, Lijie Wen
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods suffer from reliability bottlenecks due to reward sparsity and intractable computations . d-TreeRPO provides fine-grained and verifiable step-wise reward signals . |
| Approach: | They propose a reliable reinforcement learning framework for diffusion large language models that leverages tree-structured rollouts and bottom-up advantage computation based on verifiable outcome rewards. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baseline models and achieves significant improvements across reasoning benchmarks. |
MoDification: Mixture of Depths Made Easy (2025.naacl-long)
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Chen Zhang, Meizhi Zhong, Qimeng Wang, Xuantao Lu, Zheyu Ye, Chengqiang Lu, Yan Gao, Yao Hu, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang, Dawei Song
| Challenge: | Long-context efficiency is a trending topic in large language model (LLM) serving. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to combine long-context efficiency and mixture of depths to bring down both latency and memory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.2 speedup in latency and 1.8 reduction in memory compared to original LLMs especially in long-context applications. |
Not All Features Deserve Attention: Graph-Guided Dependency Learning for Tabular Data Generation with Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for tabular data generation by modeling textualized feature-value pairs. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that explicitly integrates sparse dependency graphs into LLMs’ attention mechanism. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing LLM-based approaches by up to 12% on complex datasets while achieving competitive results with state-of-the-art approaches in synthetic data quality. |
Doubling Your Data in Minutes: Ultra-fast Tabular Data Generation via LLM-Induced Dependency Graphs (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Tabular data is critical across diverse domains, yet high-quality tabular datasets remain scarce due to privacy concerns and the cost of collection. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight generative framework that captures sparse dependencies via an LLM-induced graph. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces constraint violations by 4% and accelerates generation by nearly 9,500 over diffusion-based methods. |
SAGE: Sparse Adaptive Guidance for Dependency-Aware Tabular Data Generation (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to generate tabular data are limited by their static dependences and lack of fidelity. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel LLM-based generation framework that enforces sparse and dynamic dependency guidance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework boosts F1 scores by 10% and reduces policy violations by one point. |