Papers by Zhijian Xu
Solve-Detect-Verify: Inference-Time Scaling with Flexible Generative Verifier (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enhanced capabilities in complex reasoning through step-by-step trace generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative verifier that dynamically allocates compute between rapid fast thinking and deliberative slow thinking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution outperforms GenPRM-32B on ProcessBench while requiring 2.3x fewer TFLOPS and 15x less training data. |
SQL-ASTRA: Alleviating Sparse Feedback in Agentic SQL via Column-Set Matching and Trajectory Aggregation (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Agentic SQL is a framework for multiturn agent learning, but it is limited to single-turn paradigms. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that provides a universal two-tiered reward mechanism for credit assignment . they propose 'Aggregated Trajectory Reward' to resolve multi-turn credit assignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms SOTA Arctic-Text2SQL-R1-7B on BIRD and Spider 2.0 using identical models. |
OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation (2024.emnlp-demo)
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Haowei Zhang, Shengyun Si, Yilun Zhao, Lujing Xie, Zhijian Xu, Lyuhao Chen, Linyong Nan, Pengcheng Wang, Xiangru Tang, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | Existing methods for table-to-text generation are limited and benchmarked on a limited number of datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose to use open-source tools to reproduce existing large language models for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit compares existing large language models on 9 table-to-text generation datasets and maintains a leaderboard to provide insights for future work. |
AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research (2025.acl-long)
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Yilun Zhao, Weiyuan Chen, Zhijian Xu, Manasi Patwardhan, Chengye Wang, Yixin Liu, Lovekesh Vig, Arman Cohan
| Challenge: | a benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in designing ablation studies for scientific research is available online. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to design ablation studies . they investigate whether current automated evaluation methods are not reliable . |
| Outcome: | The benchmark compared leading LLMs with human experts on generating detailed ablation study designs . the results show that current evaluation methods are not reliable for the task . |
From Implicit Exploration to Structured Reasoning: Guideline and Refinement for LLMs (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models rely on implicit exploration, which leads to unstable reasoning paths and lack of error correction. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that shifts from implicit exploration to structured reasoning through guideline and refinement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms strong baselines on the Big-Bench Hard benchmark. |
Revisiting Automated Evaluation for Long-form Table Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing automated metrics for long-form table question answering (LFTQA) are poorly correlated with human judgments and fail to distinguish between factually accurate responses and those that are factual incorrect. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a meta-evaluation dataset to assess the effectiveness of LLM-based LFTQA systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed meta-evaluation dataset includes 2,988 human-annotated examples. |
ChemAmp: Amplified Chemistry Tools via Composable Agents (2026.findings-acl)
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Zhucong Li, Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Zhijian Zhou, Qianyu He, Jiaqing Liang, Fenglei Cao, Xu Yinghui, Yuan Qi
| Challenge: | LLM-based agents are powerful tools for automating complex scientific workflows, especially in chemistry, but their single-task performance is limited by tool constraints. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that optimizes the collective capabilities of specialized tools by dynamic coordination within individual tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms chemistry-specialized models, generalist LLMs, and agent systems with tool orchestration. |
KG-RAG: Enhancing GUI Agent Decision-Making via Knowledge Graph-Driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyi Guan, Jason Chun Lok Li, Zhijian Hou, Pingping Zhang, Donglai Xu, Yuzhi Zhao, Mengyang Wu, Jinpeng Chen, Thanh-Toan Nguyen, Pengfei Xian, Wenao Ma, Shengchao Qin, Graziano Chesi, Ngai Wong
| Challenge: | Recent advances in GUI agents have limited app-specific knowledge of complex mobile tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a Knowledge Graph-driven Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework that transforms fragmented UTGs into structured vector databases for efficient real-time retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in a 75.8% success rate and 84.6% decision accuracy test across mobile apps. |
Dyve: Thinking Fast and Slow for Dynamic Process Verification (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing process verification methods struggle with reliably assessing incomplete reasoning traces and are limited by the cost of high-quality human annotations or the inherent noise in automatically generated labels. |
| Approach: | They propose a dynamic process verifier that integrates fast and slow thinking to enhance reasoning error detection in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system outperforms existing process-based verifiers and maintains computational efficiency while maintaining high performance. |
Can LLMs Identify Critical Limitations within Scientific Research? A Systematic Evaluation on AI Research Papers (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a variety of scientific tasks, such as answering questions about scientific papers, writing scientific papers and retrieving related works. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of limitation types in scientific research with a focus on AI to evaluate their ability to support early-stage feedback and complement human peer review. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enhances the ability of LLM systems to generate limitations in research papers, enabling them to provide more concrete and constructive feedback. |
Guideline Compliance in Task-Oriented Dialogue: The Chained Prior Approach (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions based on large language models cannot achieve strict guideline compliance . a novel TOD system is being developed to improve guideline adherence . |
| Approach: | They propose a task-oriented dialogue system that explicitly considers domain-specific guidelines by integrating a policy module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 20% better guideline compliance than state-of-the-art solutions. |