Papers by Zhihui Fu
DiffuSpec: Unlocking Diffusion Language Models for Speculative Decoding (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive (AR) decoding in large language models is latency-bounded by strictly sequential token generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a diffusion-based drafter that proposes multi-token candidates and then verifies them in parallel by the target model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed drafter generates multi-token proposals in a single forward pass while remaining compatible with standard AR verifiers. |
POP: Prefill-Only Pruning for Efficient Large Model Inference (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing structured pruning methods suffer from significant accuracy degradation . Existing pruning methods are expensive and require specialized hardware and kernels to perform . |
| Approach: | They propose a stage-agnostic pruning approach that overlooks asymmetric roles between prefill and decode stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning approach achieves 1.37 speedup in prefill latency with minimal performance loss. |
“I See What You Did There”: Can Large Vision-Language Models Understand Multimodal Puns? (2026.acl-long)
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Naen Xu, Jiayi Sheng, Changjiang Li, Chunyi Zhou, Yuyuan Li, Tianyu Du, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Puns are a common form of rhetorical wordplay that exploits polysemy and phonetic similarity to create humor. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal pun generation pipeline and a model to evaluate their understanding of puns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark improves the understanding of multimodal puns by 16.5% in the F1 test. |
Compiling Activation Steering into Weights via Null-Space Constraints for Stealthy Backdoors (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Yin, Tianxu Han, Naen Xu, Changjiang Li, Ping He, Chunyi Zhou, Jun Wang, Zhihui Fu, Tianyu Du, Jinbao Li, Shouling Ji
| Challenge: | Existing methods to inject safety-aligned large language models rely on token-level mappings, which do not guarantee sustained harmful output. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that directly modifies model weights to map a trigger to an attacker-specified response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves high triggered attack success while maintaining non-triggered safety and general utility. |
MMEvalPro: Calibrating Multimodal Benchmarks Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Evaluation (2025.naacl-long)
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Jinsheng Huang, Liang Chen, Taian Guo, Fu Zeng, Yusheng Zhao, Bohan Wu, Ye Yuan, Haozhe Zhao, Zhihui Guo, Yichi Zhang, Jingyang Yuan, Wei Ju, Luchen Liu, Tianyu Liu, Baobao Chang, Ming Zhang
| Challenge: | Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit impressive cross-modal understanding and reasoning abilities, but many benchmarks suffer from systematic biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to avoid Type-I errors by creating one perception question and one knowledge anchor question through a meticulous annotation process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark avoids Type-I errors while maintaining reliability of MCQ evaluations. |