Papers by Zhihao Xu
Learning from Near-Misses: Error-Aware Contrastive Few-Shot Learning for NL2Formula (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing spreadsheet formulas often produce near-miss outputs due to an incorrect function, operator, or reference. |
| Approach: | They propose an abstract syntax tree-based error taxonomy that organizes common error modes by the kind of decision that goes wrong in the parse tree. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves Exact Match (EM) by 6.4 points over supervised fine-tuning and matches self-consistency (SC@5) accuracy. |
Evaluating Readability and Faithfulness of Concept-based Explanations (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating concepts from different perspectives lack a unified formalization. |
| Approach: | They propose a formal definition of concepts generalizing to diverse concept-based explanations’ settings and apply it to other types of explanations or tasks. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experimental analysis was carried out to determine the evaluation measures for explanation evaluation measures. |
Contextual Fine-to-Coarse Distillation for Coarse-grained Response Selection in Open-Domain Conversations (2022.acl-long)
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Wei Chen, Yeyun Gong, Can Xu, Huang Hu, Bolun Yao, Zhongyu Wei, Zhihao Fan, Xiaowu Hu, Bartuer Zhou, Biao Cheng, Daxin Jiang, Nan Duan
| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on coarse-grained response selection in retrieval-based dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose a Contextual Fine-to-Coarse (CFC) distilled model for coarse-grained response selection in open-domain conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves over baseline methods on two datasets based on the Reddit comments dump and Twitter corpus compared with baseline methods. |
Prototype Tuning: A Meta-Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction with Large Language Models (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction (FSDLRE) aims to develop models capable of generalizing to new categories with minimal support examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-training approach to train Large Language Models to improve their ICL capabilities . they construct simulated episodes using relation types that do not overlap with test corpus . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline models on few-shot tasks. |
Understanding Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment through Reward Consistency (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing training pipelines still face alignment conflicts where optimizing for one objective degrades performance on others. |
| Approach: | They propose a reward-based criterion that approximates alignment conflicts via reward models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves harmlessness and helpfulness scores by 23.07% over the vanilla dataset. |
Breaking the Boundaries: A Unified Framework for Chinese Named Entity Recognition Across Text and Speech (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks are limited by the complexity of the data and the potential connections between tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to break the boundaries between different modal NER tasks by using a unified data format for inputs from different modalités. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task breaks the boundaries between different modal NER tasks and is a unified implementation of them. |
Internal Value Alignment in Large Language Models through Controlled Value Vector Activation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing LLMs do not possess consistent values, but many have been developed to align them at the behavioral level, including supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). |
| Approach: | They propose a Controlled Value Vector Activation method that directly aligns the internal values of Large Language Models by interpreting how a value is encoded in their latent representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves highest success rate across 10 basic values without hurting model performance and fluency, and ensures target values even with opposite and potentially malicious input prompts. |
TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing code comment generation approaches ignore type information of interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. Existing approaches ignore the type information due to the hierarchical dependence among the type. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder framework which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework and a type-restricted Decoder to resolve training difficulties. |
Unlocking Implicit Experience: Synthesizing Tool-Use Trajectories from Text (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) can be used to effectively utilize tools in multi-turn interactions, but acquiring diverse and realistic multi-step tool-use data remains a challenge. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-based data synthesis pipeline that generates multi-turn tool-use trajectories from text corpora using relevance filtering, workflow tool extraction, trajectory grounding, and complexity refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves 14.9% improvement on the BFCL V3 Multi-turn benchmark while significantly reducing inference latency and costs. |
PAM: Enhancing General Alignment of Large Reasoning Models through Priority-Aware Metacognition (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies indicate that System-2 thinking alone does not transfer to the general alignment domain. |
| Approach: | They propose to use priority-aware metacognition to help LRMs understand human preferences and monitor and regulate their thinking process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves general alignment performance by 10 points on helpfulness and harmless benchmarks. |
WECA: A WordNet-Encoded Collocation-Attention Network for Homographic Pun Recognition (D18-1)
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Yufeng Diao, Hongfei Lin, Di Wu, Liang Yang, Kan Xu, Zhihao Yang, Jian Wang, Shaowu Zhang, Bo Xu, Dongyu Zhang
| Challenge: | Homographic puns have a long history in human writing, widely used in written and spoken literature, which intended as jokes. |
| Approach: | They propose a WordNet-encoded model to settle polysemy of homographic puns and a word weighted model for recognizing them. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can distinguish between homographic pun and non-homographic pun texts. |