Papers by Zhichao Chen
Think Smart, Not Hard: Difficulty Adaptive Reasoning for Large Audio Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to determine whether to perform reasoning lack fine-grained mechanisms to adapt reasoning length to problem complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a difficulty-adaptive reasoning method that dynamically links reasoning length to the model’s perceived problem difficulty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces average reasoning length by 50%, achieving higher efficiency without sacrificing accuracy. |
Bit-Flip Error Resilience in LLMs: A Comprehensive Analysis and Defense Framework (2025.emnlp-main)
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Yuhang Chen, Zhen Tan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Huaizhi Qu, Xinyu Zhao, Qi Lin, Yu Cheng, Andrew Kwong, Zhichao Cao, Tianlong Chen
| Challenge: | Bit-flip errors (BFEs) are hardware faults where individual bits in memory or processing units are unintentionally flipped. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel defense strategy to mitigate bit-flip errors (BFEs) they propose bfe protection and a self-correction mechanism to minimize performance degradation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed defense strategy minimizes performance degradation while significantly improving robustness against BFEs. |
Self-Para-Consistency: Improving Reasoning Tasks at Low Cost for Large Language Models (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that self-consistency decoding can improve performance for complex reasoning tasks with large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a self-consistency decoding strategy that generates multiple paraphrases for each test question and then generates reasoning paths for the original and all the paraphrased questions based on greedy decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy reduces the sampling number and improves performance on complex reasoning tasks. |
A Systematic Survey of Automatic Prompt Optimization Techniques (2025.emnlp-main)
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Kiran Ramnath, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Xuan Qi, Zhengyuan Shen, Shuai Wang, Sangmin Woo, Sullam Jeoung, Yawei Wang, Haozhu Wang, Han Ding, Yuzhe Lu, Zhichao Xu, Yun Zhou, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Qiaojing Yan, Yueyan Chen, Haibo Ding, Panpan Xu, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in prompt engineering have created impediments for end users to adopt . however, prompt engineering remains an impedance due to rapid advances in models, tasks, and associated best practices. |
| Approach: | They propose to define APO as a 5-part unifying framework and categorize all relevant works based on their salient features. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework aims to improve the performance of large language models on various tasks. |
StreamVoice: Streamable Context-Aware Language Modeling for Real-time Zero-Shot Voice Conversion (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LM-based VC models require offline conversion from source semantics to acoustic features, limiting their deployment to real-time applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a streaming LM-based model for zero-shot voice conversion that uses a fully causal context-aware LM with a temporal-independent acoustic predictor to facilitate real-time conversion given arbitrary speaker prompts and source speech. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to non-streaming VC systems while maintaining a fully causal context-aware LM with a temporal-independent acoustic predictor. |
IPR: Intelligent Prompt Routing with User-Controlled Quality-Cost Trade-offs (2025.emnlp-industry)
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Aosong Feng, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Yun Zhou, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Sheng Guan, Yueyan Chen, Xian Wu, Ninad Kulkarni, Yi Zhang, Zhengyuan Shen, Dmitriy Bespalov, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Yifei Teng, Darren Yow-Bang Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing systems require users to manually select models or employ rigid routing rules that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of query complexity. |
| Approach: | They propose a quality-constrained intelligent prompt routing framework that automatically selects optimal models based on predicted response quality and user-specified tolerance levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 43.9% cost reduction while maintaining quality parity with strongest model in the Claude family and processes requests with sub-150ms latency. |
Diffusion Language Model Inference with Monte Carlo Tree Search (2026.findings-eacl)
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Zheng Huang, Kiran Ramnath, Yueyan Chen, Aosong Feng, Sangmin Woo, Balasubramaniam Srinivasan, Zhichao Xu, Kang Zhou, Shuai Wang, Haibo Ding, Lin Lee Cheong
| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference use heuristics to determine which positions to unmask and which tokens to commit . MEDAL is an inference-time scaling framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates Monte Carlo Tree SEarch initialization for Diffusion Language Model inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 22.0% improvement over existing inference strategies across multiple benchmarks. |
Uncertainty-Aware Contrastive Sentence Embedding With Local Context Representation for Text Classification (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for text classification are based on encoder-only transformers and generative pre-trained transformers. |
| Approach: | They propose an uncertainty-aware contrastive sentence embedding approach that addresses language ambiguity and inter-class separability for a text classification task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves classification accuracy on public datasets compared with state-of-the-art methods. |
FanChuan: A Multilingual and Graph-Structured Benchmark For Parody Detection and Analysis (2025.findings-acl)
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Yilun Zheng, Sha Li, Fangkun Wu, Yang Ziyi, Lin Hongchao, Zhichao Hu, Cai Xinjun, Ziming Wang, Jinxuan Chen, Sitao Luan, Jiahao Xu, Lihui Chen
| Challenge: | Parody is an emerging phenomenon on social media, where individuals imitate a role or position opposite to their own . limited available data and deficient diversity in current datasets hinder study of parody . |
| Approach: | They build a dataset of parody users and annotated comments from both English and Chinese corpora to test parody detection and comment sentiment analysis. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide richer contextual information, which is lacking in existing datasets. |
ROSE: An Intent-Centered Evaluation Metric for NL2SQL (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing evaluation metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of Natural Language to SQL (NL2SQL) solutions are becoming unreliable due to its sensitiveness to syntactic variation and inconsistent consistency with ground-truth SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose an intent-centered metric that focuses on whether the predicted SQL answers the question, rather than consistency with the ground-truth SQL. |
| Outcome: | The proposed metric outperforms the next-best metric by nearly 24% on the expert-aligned validation set **ROSE-VEC**. |