Papers by Zhi Chen
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but this achievement comes with the trade-off of significant computational demands. |
| Approach: | They propose a scaling law that decomposes the overall validation loss and assigns different importance weights to tokens to assess a specific meta-capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can predict the loss trending of models across different levels of computation without a gap between validation loss and model's downstream capabilities. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that VideoEraser outperforms prior methods regarding efficacy, integrity, fidelity, robustness, and generalizability. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that prevents T2V diffusion models from generating videos with undesirable concepts even when explicitly prompted with those concepts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in erasure, celebrity erasion, and explicit content erasing tasks. |
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| Challenge: | MCTS methods retain only the single highest-reward trajectory, discarding comparative signals present in the many explored paths. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that transforms supervision extraction into a synthesis procedure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework matches or exceeds baselines on 60K CRPS-synthesized examples on out-of-domain benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | e-commerce and recommender systems lack a framework for personalized generation . a new framework extracts tags from multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that extracts tags from multimodal information and rewrites item description . they then use a decoupled text-to-text and image-to image retriever to search for similar item text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can generate results aligned with user preferences . it can be used in e-commerce and recommender systems to win over diverse user base . |
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL models are limited in their generalizability, despite their performance being over-estimated. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate novel text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework generates text-to-SQL data via automatic and synchronous (DS, SQL) pair altering. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) are shifting the focus from single verifiable tasks toward complex, open-ended real-world scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that automatically adjusts reward weights and data importance to synchronize learning intent with data utility for optimal performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves model capabilities across all domains and scales. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for fine-grained content extraction are limited by long-tailed distribution of textual entity categories and performance of object detectors. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-granularity entity recognition module and a reranking module to integrate hierarchical information of entity categories, visual cues, and external textual resources collectively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art on the fine-grained content extraction task. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to encode text-to-SQL data are node-centric and ignore semantics embedded in the topological structure of edges. |
| Approach: | They propose a Line Graph Enhanced Text-to-SQL model to mine relational features without constructing meta-paths. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the cross-domain text-to-SQL benchmark Spider at the time of writing. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models fail to grasp the principles governing event evolution in various scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-modal event evolution learning approach to grasp event evolution . they propose an instruction encapsulation process that transforms evolving graphs into instruction-tuning data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model grasps the event evolution mechanism yielding advanced MMER ability. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models face intrinsic limitations in coding with unseen APIs in training corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that empowers LLMs to invoke multiple unseen APIs in code solution by planning a complex problem into several API invocation subtasks and experimenting with correct API usage at intermediate steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves performance for models lacking prior API knowledge, achieving 11.99% over retrieval-based approaches and 17.28% over pretraining-based methods in pass@10. |
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas . a new architecture, ShadowGNN, processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels . |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models on a text-to-sql benchmark . it uses domain-independent representations to extract logical linking between question and schema . |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on the use of LLMs for estimating user intents are either too far from real human thought processes or require labeled samples. |
| Approach: | They propose a deliberative agent framework that leverages human thought process to build high-level domain knowledge and a tree-structured knowledge base to store refined experience and data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is able to build high-level domain knowledge and efficiently store it across multiple steps. |
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| Challenge: | Existing defenses for indirect prompt injection are limited by static protection mechanisms . existing models prioritize injected rules due to strict alignment, whereas static protections sever the feedback loop required for adaptive reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts the paradigm from restrictive isolation to a verify-before-commit protocol. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art dynamic defenses by reducing the attack success rate by over 22% while more thandoubling utility under attack compared to static baselines. |
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| Challenge: | MCoT requires models to leverage knowledge from both textual and visual modalities for step-by-step reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to address the challenges of MCoT, and evaluate it using vision large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark addresses the above challenges and shows that current models still struggle to reason in M3CoT. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models generate high-frequency but trivial responses such as "I don't know" or "I'm ok" due to the discrepancy in discourse-level information, standard models generate one-to-many relationships. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform coarse-grained discourse-level information into fine-grounded word-level knowledge by introducing a fine-grain focus signal and a focus-constrained attention mechanism to take full advantage of focus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate more diverse and informative responses compared with state-of-the-art models. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in event reasoning . however, smaller instruction-tuned models do not consistently demonstrate exceptional proficiency . |
| Approach: | They propose an event-oriented instruction tuning technique to train a large language model . they propose a structure named event quadruple which contains the structure and semantics of events . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves competitive performances on event reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing graph-to-sequence approaches use graph neural networks as encoders, but they lack the structure information needed to translate AMR into the graph-based data. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-to-sequence task which aims to recover natural language from Abstract Meaning Representations (AMR) they adopt graph attention networks with higher-order neighborhood information to explore the edge relations in AMR graphs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on English AMR benchmark datasets and is able to translate the AMR semantics into the natural language. |
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| Challenge: | AdapterShare is an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose an adapter differentiation method to explicitly model the task correlation among multiple tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 1.90 points improvement on five dialogue understanding tasks and 2.33 points gain on NLU tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Song translation requires both translation of lyrics and alignment of music notes . human translators of songs need to have a mastery of cultural traditions and the poetic usage of both source and target languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a model that can model lyric translation and lyrics-melody alignment . they use an encoder-decoder framework that can translate lyrics and determine number of aligned notes . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can translate lyrics and determine the number of aligned notes at each decoding step. |
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions for supervised fine-tuning often lead to catastrophic forgetting, where models lose their previously acquired knowledge and general capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-distribution alignment method that aligns input sequence logits to preserve the model’s semantic distribution, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and improving downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves a superior balance between downstream learning and general capability retention. |
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| Challenge: | Existing task-oriented dialogue systems lack ontology-aware pretraining methods for task-orientated dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose an ontology-aware pretrained language model (OPAL) for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue (TOD) . they propose to pretrain on large-scale contextual text data to bridge the gap between the pretraining method and downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves an exciting boost and obtains competitive performance even without any TOD data on CamRest676 and MultiWOZ benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Mental illness remains one of the most critical public health issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a patient simulation framework for cognitive behavior therapy training that uses large language models to act as a simulated therapy patient. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the skill acquisition and confidence of mental health trainees beyond textbooks, videos, and role-play with non-patients. |
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-objective preference alignment methods for large language models face limitations such as auxiliary reward/reference models and computational complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that achieves dynamic balance across preference dimensions by using dimension-aware generation metrics as implicit rewards. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that AMoPO outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 28.5% . |
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| Challenge: | Chinese word segmentation can be erroneous, ambiguous or inconsistent, causing performance problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a sentence matching framework that uses paired word lattices as input instead of a character sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art short text matching models on two Chinese datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in recent years, but their practical use is hindered by their tendency to generate hallucinations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use ICD-10 and MeSH to evaluate LLMs' ability to detect medical hallucinations and make accurate diagnoses in noisy environments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark can be used to evaluate LLMs’ ability to detect medical hallucinations, make accurate diagnoses in noisy conditions, and provide plausible explanations. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have demonstrated remarkable performance on few-shot Named Entity Recognition tasks due to the high cost of obtaining high-quality labeled data. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the task into entity span detection and entity type classification using a type-independent entity span detector and then classify the detected spans based on their types. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method consistently yields improvements over two baseline approaches. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work on Text-to-SQL for multi-turn dialogue has attracted great interest . current approaches mostly employ end-to end models and face data sparsity problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoupled multi-turn text-to-SQL framework where dialogue context is explicitly solved by an utterance rewrite model and a single-turn Text-toSQl parser are proposed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing models on SParC and CoSQL datasets without annotated in-domain data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to generate long-context instruction-tuning data are limited by poor quality and fewer than 35% of samples are multi-hop . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates a quality verification agent, a single-hop question generation agent, and a multi-hop questions merger agent to enhance model performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves data quality with high-quality, multi-hop, and diverse data. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation, but they still face challenges when tackling complex programming tasks beyond their basic capabilities. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate self-generated tests into the code generation process . they propose to use post-execution and in-exection self-debugging to mitigate test bias . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the performance of large language models in code generation tasks by leveraging execution feedback from tests. |
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| Challenge: | Temporal Logic (STL) is a formal specification tool for cyber-physical systems . but it is difficult to transform ambiguous and complex data into STL, a paper argues . |
| Approach: | They propose a NL-STL dataset with 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns . they propose KGST framework to transform natural language into STL using a generate-then-refine process . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms baseline models in diversity and accuracy . the proposed dataset contains 16,000 samples enriched with diverse patterns . |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on tool use with LLMs focus on enhancing tool-calling ability of LLM . e.g., LLM should not answer unsafe tool use relevant instructions or insecure tool responses to ensure reliability and harmlessness. |
| Approach: | They propose to use supervised fine-tuning and preference learning to align LLMs with H2A principle for tool use. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model demonstrates that LLMs can generate truthful and helpful responses while remaining harmless. |
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| Challenge: | Existing MVQA models ignore multi-level progressive capabilities due to unspecific data and plain architecture. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-level visual language model for medical visual question answering (MVQA) which covers multi- level questions and answers as well as reasoning processes from visual clues to semantic cognition. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing medical multimodal large language models on a multi-level instruction dataset and a feature alignment module. |
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| Challenge: | Extensive research has highlighted the quality of instruction data is essential for the success of this alignment. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for iteratively improving existing instruction data by using Monte Carlo tree search to find suitable prompts that align the language model to effectively learn multiple skills. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the evaluation scores of seed instruction data, raising the average evaluation scores from 2.19 to 3.81. |
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| Challenge: | Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, but they introduce safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified benchmark to assess the trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates truthfulness, safety and efficiency on 26 models. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a method that balances exploration and exploitation in the hidden-state space of response trajectories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model yields consistent improvements across models, algorithms and reasoning benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Multi-hop question answering is a challenging task that requires capturing information from multiple positions in multiple documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for integrating text-based and triple-based paradigms that incorporates structured knowledge into large-scale question answering. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves multi-hop question answering by incorporating structured knowledge into the models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for lifelong model editing suffer from limitations in usability, such as requiring additional training corpora or lacking support for reversible and detachable edits. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method for knowledge retrieval and storage, i.e., Layer-Level Prompting, which enables seamless and efficient lifelong model editing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on question answering and hallucination benchmarks across different LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing non-autoregressive models generate target words in parallel, but with a large latency due to the left-to-right dependency. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a conditional masked translation model and refine results within several iterations to remedy a flawed translation by non-autoregressive models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models by over 1 BLEU while using less training computations. |
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| Challenge: | Current RAG systems concatenate and process numerous retrieved document chunks for prefill . this leads to significant latency in time-to-first-token (TTFT) Experimental results demonstrate that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by up to 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG system. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid offline-online paradigm that precomputes chunk-level key-value caches and stitches them together at inference time using independent–attention and reorderedRoPE techniques. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that TurboRAG reduces TTFT by 9.4x compared to the conventional RAG systems . long concatenated contexts consume disproportionate GPU memory, limiting throughput . |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advances in code generation through the ‘Chain-of-Thought’ prompting technique. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework which aims to transfer LLMs’ reasoning capabilities to smaller models through distillation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the smaller model's code generation performance by over 130% on the APPS benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Pre-training large language models can be expensive and wasteful. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and a two-stage learning method to further accelerate the pre-training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can transfer the knowledge of an existing smaller pre-trained model to a large model through parameter initialization and significantly improve the pre-training efficiency of the large model. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on fact-centered reasoning with limited attention to temporal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new TKGQA dataset, MusTQ, which contains 666K multi-step temporal reasoning questions and a TKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art multi-step temporal reasoning ability with entity-time attention mechanism and optimized temporal knowledge graph representation. |
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| Challenge: | Automated interaction with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is central to general artificial intelligence, but remains challenging within Super App ecosystems. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework synergizing autonomous data synthesis with dual-agent co-evolution . GUI0 establishes a domain-aware foundation model via synthesized corpora and employs curriculum-driven reinforcement learning . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Gemini-2.5-Pro and Claude-4-Sonnet in the SuperAPP benchmark and has universal efficacy across base models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for depth scaling-up rely on empirical heuristic rules for layer duplication, resulting in poor initialization and slower convergence during continual pre-training. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for learning latent parameters between layers by concatenating parameters from each layer and applying Singular Value Decomposition. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that LESA outperforms baseline models with less than half the cost of existing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated outstanding performance in various natural language processing tasks, but their security capabilities in the financial domain have not been explored. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates large language models' financial domain knowledge and practical abilities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches fail to ensure privacy, maintain model performance, and preserve computational efficiency simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a confidential inference framework that partitions the LLM pipeline between a client-verified Confidential Virtual Machine (CVM) and the public cloud to protect client data without compromising the cloud’s model intellectual property or inference quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can defend against state-of-the-art token inference attacks while preserving model privacy, performance, and efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for automated feature generation rely on predefined operator libraries and do not incorporate feature semantics, limiting their ability to produce high-quality features. |
| Approach: | They propose a Memory-Augmented LLM-based Multi-Agent System (MALMAS) that decomposes the generation process into agents with distinct responsibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method extracts informative features from raw tabular data without manual intervention and is crucial for accurate, generalizable machine learning. |
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| Challenge: | Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has significantly advanced the complex reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid-policy optimization approach that synergizes internal exploitation with external data to achieve stronger reasoning capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on six math reasoning benchmarks and superior performance on out-of distribution reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese-based platform that assesses Chinese LLMs using a standardized workflow and a unique sampling strategy. |
| Outcome: | CLEVA evaluates Chinese LLMs on a standardized workflow and a competitive leaderboard with minimal coding. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |