Papers by Zhiheng Wang

38 papers
Soundwave: Less is More for Speech-Text Alignment in LLMs (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing end-to-end speech large language models rely on large-scale annotated data for training, while data-efficient training has not been discussed in depth.
Approach: They propose a training strategy and a novel architecture to address representation space gap and sequence length inconsistency in speech and text.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms other advanced speech LLMs in speech translation and AIR-Bench speech tasks with only a fraction of the training data.
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified.
Approach: They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .
Outcome: Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM.
Approach: They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting.
Improving Discriminative Capability of Reward Models in RLHF Using Contrastive Learning (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current methods rely on ranking losses to teach reward model to assess preferences, but they are susceptible to noise and ambiguous data, often failing to deeply understand human intentions.
Approach: They propose a method that incorporates contrastive learning into the reward modeling process to enhance generalization and stabilize the reinforcement learning training process.
Outcome: The proposed method enhances generalization of the reward model, stabilizes the reinforcement learning training process, and improves the final alignment with human preferences.
Locate, Steer, and Improve: A Practical Survey of Actionable Mechanistic Interpretability in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing literature on mechanistic interpretation (MI) treats it as an observational science, leaving practical applications underexplored.
Approach: They propose a survey structured around the pipeline to identify and improve MI models.
Outcome: The proposed framework enables tangible improvements in Alignment, Capability, and Efficiency.
Paper2Rebuttal: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transparent Author Response Assistance (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current approaches to writing effective rebuttals are limited by the direct-to-text generation problem . authors must accurately decipher reviewer intent while ensuring every response is firmly anchored in verifiable manuscript details.
Approach: They propose a framework that reframes rebuttal generation as an evidence-centric planning task.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines in coverage, faithfulness, and strategic coherence.
Hybrid Hierarchical Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent work shows that dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR) can outperform dense passage retrieval.
Approach: They propose a framework that applies sparse, dense and a combination of them to document and passage retrieval.
Outcome: The proposed framework can outperform dense hierarchical retrieval (DHR) and sparse retrievers (BM25) on open-domain question answering (ODQA) datasets with an average improvement of 4.69% on recall@100 over DHR.
PFDial: A Structured Dialogue Instruction Fine-tuning Method Based on UML Flowcharts (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in dialogue and reasoning, but they struggle to solve strictly constrained dialogue tasks.
Approach: They construct a dataset that contains 12,705 high-quality Chinese dialogue instructions from 440 flowcharts containing 5,055 process nodes.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms GPT-4o models on backward transitions and outperformed GPT-42 models on the same dataset.
AgentGym: Evaluating and Training Large Language Model-based Agents across Diverse Environments (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are promising foundations to build generally-capable agents . however, the community lacks a unified interactive framework that covers diverse environments for comprehensive evaluation of agents.
Approach: They propose a framework that features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.
Outcome: The proposed framework features 7 real-world scenarios, 14 environments, and 89 tasks for unified, real-time, and concurrent agent interaction.
Multi-Programming Language Sandbox for LLMs (2025.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: MPLSandbox is an out-of-the-box multi-programming language sandbox designed to provide unified and comprehensive feedback from compiler and analysis tools for Large Language Models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose a multi-programming language sandbox that provides unified feedback from compilers and analysis tools for Large Language Models.
Outcome: The proposed multi-language sandbox can provide comprehensive feedback from compilers and analysis tools for large language models (LLMs).
VENUS: A VLLM-driven Video Content Discovery System for Real Application Scenarios (2025.emnlp-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Video Content Discovery (VCD) is to identify specific videos defined by a pre-specified text policy.
Approach: They propose a Vision-Language Large Model-driven video content discovery system called VENUS to solve these problems.
Outcome: The proposed system generates high-quality, VCD-specific data for model training and extends it to support it better.
Entailment Tree Explanations via Iterative Retrieval-Generation Reasoner (2022.findings-naacl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large language models have achieved high performance on various natural language benchmarks, but the explainability of their output remains elusive.
Approach: They propose an architecture called iterative retrieval-generation reasoner that generates an entailment tree that explains a given hypothesis by using premises from C.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing benchmarks on premise retrieval and entailment tree generation with around 300% gain in overall correctness.
LLMEval-Fair: A Large-Scale Longitudinal Study on Robust and Fair Evaluation of Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing evaluation of Large Language Models on static benchmarks is vulnerable to data contamination and leaderboard overfitting.
Approach: LLMEval-Fair framework provides a framework for dynamic evaluation of Large Language Models . evaluators use a proprietary bank of 220k graduate-level questions to analyze model data .
Outcome: LLMEval-Fair provides robust and credible evaluation framework for Large Language Models . it provides a strong empirical validation for the dynamic evaluation paradigm .
A Systematic Assessment of Language Models with Linguistic Minimal Pairs in Chinese (2026.tacl-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Using sub-linear length normalized log-probabilities (SLLN-LP), we find unequal lengths of sentences in minimal pairs difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters.
Approach: They propose to use ZhoBLiMP as a linguistic minimal pair benchmark for Chinese language models to mitigate biases.
Outcome: The proposed metric mitigates biases in Chinese language models with over 100 paradigms . Anaphor, Quantifiers, and Ellipsis are difficult for LMs even up to 32B parameters .
MSIA: Adaptive Medical Multimodal Multi-turn Semantic Jailbreak (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Medical large language models exhibit high domain specificity and condensed semantics, making them vulnerable to diagnostic errors in real-world clinical settings.
Approach: They propose a framework for modeling and inducing multi-turn medical semantic jailbreaks in clinical dialogues.
Outcome: Experiments on chest X-ray-based multimodal medical dialogues show that MSIA outperforms existing jailbreak methods with an average success rate of 76.67%.
RobustQA: Benchmarking the Robustness of Domain Adaptation for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing ODQA datasets consist mainly of Wikipedia corpus, and are insufficient to study models’ generalizability across diverse domains.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate ODQA's domain robustness using Wikipedia corpus . they annotate QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark improves model performance on annotated QA pairs in retrieval datasets with rigorous quality control.
VideoScore: Building Automatic Metrics to Simulate Fine-grained Human Feedback for Video Generation (2024.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing video metrics are lagging behind in providing reliable scores over generated videos due to lack of large-scale human-annotated dataset.
Approach: They propose to use VideoFeedback to train a human-annotated multi-aspect score over 37.6K synthesized videos from 11 existing video generative models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the prior best metrics by 50 points in the test.
SWE-QA-Pro: A Representative Benchmark and Scalable Training Recipe for Repository-Level Code Understanding (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing benchmarks for agentic repository-level code understanding overlook long tail topics and rely on memorized knowledge.
Approach: They propose a repository-level agentic code understanding benchmark that uses long-tail repositories with executable environments to enforce topical balance.
Outcome: Empirically, a Qwen3-8B model trained with the proposed benchmark outperforms GPT-4o by 2.3 points.
Reward Modeling Requires Automatic Adjustment Based on Data Quality (2024.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is a method for aligning language models with human values.
Approach: They propose a method that automatically adjusts reward modeling based on data quality . they use preference data to train a reward model that is more aligned with human values .
Outcome: The proposed method stabilizes reward model training and significantly improves alignment performance on human preference datasets.
Improving Cross-task Generalization of Unified Table-to-text Models with Compositional Task Configurations (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods for multitask learning typically use a dataset name as input prefix, which limits the effectiveness of multitask training.
Approach: They propose compositional task configurations, a set of prompts prepended to the encoder to improve cross-task generalization of unified models.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the UnifiedSKG baseline by noticeable margins in both in-domain and zero-shot settings.
Toward Optimal LLM Alignments Using Two-Player Games (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Alignment of large language models (LLM) is a process that ensures the model’s responses to user prompts align with human intentions and social values.
Approach: They propose an alignment method based on a two-agent game consisting of an adversarial agent and a defensive agent.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on a two-agent game with an adversarial agent and a defensive agent.
Enhancing LLM-based Search Agents via Contribution Weighted Group Relative Policy Optimization (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to training large language models suffer from unstable value estimation, whereas outcome supervision struggles with credit assignment due to sparse, trajectory-level rewards.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates process supervision into group relative policy optimization.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms standard GRPO on knowledge-intensive benchmarks by 5.0% and 6.3% on Qwen3-1.7B.
AscendKernelGen: LLM-Driven Kernel Generation for NPUs (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Neural Processing Units (NPUs) are critical for AI infrastructure, but their development remains a bottleneck due to vendor-specific Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs).
Approach: They propose a framework for NPU kernel development that bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding . compiler success on complex Level-2 kernels improves from 0% to 95.5%, they say .
Outcome: The proposed framework bridges the gap in hardware-specific coding, showing a near-zero success rate on complex kernels.
MM-Doc-R1: Training Agents for Long Document Visual Question Answering through Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work on long document visual question answering is based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) where textual or visual content is encoded into embeddings and relevance is determined by similarity scores with respect to the original query.
Approach: They propose a framework that employs an agentic, vision-aware workflow to address long document visual question answering through iterative information discovery and synthesis.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms existing RL systems by 10.4% on the MMLongbench-Doc benchmark and demonstrates superior training performance over GRPO.
LLMEval-Med: A Real-world Clinical Benchmark for Medical LLMs with Physician Validation (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Current medical benchmarks have limitations in question design, data sources and evaluation methods.
Approach: They propose a new benchmark covering five core medical areas . it includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records .
Outcome: The proposed model covers five core medical areas and includes 2,996 questions created from real-world electronic health records and expert-designed clinical scenarios.
TL-Training: A Task-Feature-Based Framework for Training Large Language Models in Tool Use (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a new approach to training large language models (LLMs) overlooks task-specific characteristics in tool use, leading to performance bottlenecks.
Approach: They propose a task-feature-based framework that mitigates the effects of suboptimal training data . they use a dataset to train large-scale LLMs and a reward mechanism tailored to error categories .
Outcome: The proposed framework matches or surpasses open- and closed-source LLMs in tool-use performance using only 1,217 training data points.
Language Agnostic Multilingual Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Annotated training data is costly to obtain in many languages .
Approach: They propose a semantic contrastive loss to align parallel sentences that share the same semantics in different languages and a language contrastive gain to leverage parallel sentence pairs to remove language-specific information from non-parallel corpora.
Outcome: The proposed model improves retrieval performance while requiring less computational effort.
Parrot: A Training Pipeline Enhances Both Program CoT and Natural Language CoT for Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work focuses on enabling models to generate natural language chain-of-thought rationales or leverage executable and verifiable code, such as Python.
Approach: They propose a novel training pipeline that integrates sequential P-CoT and N-Co T generation and a subtask hybrid training strategy to facilitate natural language transferability.
Outcome: The proposed training pipeline improves both N-CoT and P-Co T performance over the RL baseline.
RoCoIns: Enhancing Robustness of Large Language Models through Code-Style Instructions (2024.lrec-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in following human instructions and solving NLU tasks.
Approach: They propose to use code style instructions to replace typically natural language instructions to provide more precise instructions and strengthen the robustness of LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms natural language models on eight robustness datasets and achieves an improvement of 5.68% in test set accuracy and a reduction of 5.66 points in Attack Success Rate (ASR).
From Short Video to Clickable Search: RLVR-Enabled Listwise Query Suggestion with Retrieval-Augmented Context (2026.acl-industry)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to generate short-video bottom-bar queries are largely retrieval-based.
Approach: They propose to reformulate the task as one-shot list generation, producing multiple queries per video . they also build multi-query ground truth from exposure and CTR logs, and redesign offline evaluation .
Outcome: The proposed system yields strong offline and online improvements . it is deployed on Kuaishou to serve hundreds of millions of users daily .
ABC-Bench: Benchmarking Agentic Backend Coding in Real-World Development (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) have redefined the role of AI in software engineering . current benchmarks focus on localized code generation, but neglect dynamic, full-process requirements of real-world engineering.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.
Outcome: The ABC-Bench benchmark evaluates agentic backend coding within a realistic, executable workflow.
StepCoder: Improving Code Generation with Reinforcement Learning from Compiler Feedback (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing work integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality but the long code generated by LLMs makes RL exploration ineffective.
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates reinforcement learning and compiler feedback to enhance code generation quality.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in corresponding benchmarks and integrates reinforcement learning with compiler feedback to improve code generation quality.
Tokenization Consistency Matters for Generative Models on Extractive NLP Tasks (2023.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Pretrained sequence-to-sequence (seq2sequ) models have been widely used to solve extractive tasks, where parts of the input are extracted to form the desired output.
Approach: They propose a simple fix to tokenization inconsistency that damages extractive nature of generative models by causing performance drop and hallucination.
Outcome: The proposed model performs better in both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets with a notable average of +1.7 F1 gain when a BART model is trained on SQuAD and evaluated on 8 QA datasets.
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards.
From Scores to Preferences: Redefining Evaluation Paradigm for Speech Quality Reward Modeling (2026.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Experimental results show that the MOS-aware GRM significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination.
Approach: They propose a MOS-aware reward model that incorporates MOS gap into reward function during reinforcement learning.
Outcome: The proposed model significantly improves fine-grained speech quality discrimination.
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
IP-Dialog: Evaluating Implicit Personalization in Dialogue Systems with Synthetic Data (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Traditional data generation methods are labor-intensive, resource-demanding, and raise privacy concerns.
Approach: They propose an automatic synthetic data generation approach and introduce the **I**mplicit **P**ersonalized **Dialog**ue benchmark along with a training dataset, covering 10 tasks and 12 user attribute types.
Outcome: The proposed approach incorporates the **Implicit **P**ersonalized **Dialog**ue benchmark along with a training dataset, covering 10 tasks and 12 user attribute types.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations