Papers by Zhikun Xu
V-ALPHASOCIAL: Benchmark and Self-Reflective Chain-of-Thought Generation for Visual Social Commonsense Reasoning (2025.findings-acl)
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Zongyu Lin, Zhikun Xu, Xiaohan Song, Yixin Wan, Xingcheng Yao, Tsung-Han Lin, Selina Song, Pranav Subbaraman, Ben Zhou, Kai-Wei Chang, Yizhou Sun
| Challenge: | Social commonsense reasoning is a multimodal task that requires both textual and visual cues. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that integrates visual cues into social commonsense reasoning tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves social commonsense reasoning on a multimodal foundation model. |
Reliable Use of Lemmas via Eligibility Reasoning and Section-Aware Reinforcement Learning (2026.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) perform strongly on mathematical benchmarks but often import conclusions without validating assumptions. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that encodes a lemma specification and trains with reinforcement learning and section-aware loss masking to assign penalty to the section responsible for errors. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on benchmarks but often misapplyes lemmas . the model is able to encode the specification and train with reinforcement learning . |
NOVA: An Iterative Planning Framework for Enhancing Scientific Innovation with Large Language Models (2025.findings-acl)
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Xiang Hu, Hongyu Fu, Jinge Wang, Yifeng Wang, Zhikun Li, Renjun Xu, Yu Lu, Yaochu Jin, Lili Pan, Zhenzhong Lan
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate research ideas rely on retrieval or prompt engineering to generate ideas. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses iterative planning and search to boost creative potential of LLMs by integrating external knowledge with broader and deeper insights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in generating 2.5 times more top-rated ideas based on 170 seed papers in a Swiss Tournament evaluation. |
Exploiting Abstract Meaning Representation for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing work attempts to address these challenges using Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) but the diversity of surface form expressions can hinder the model’s ability to capture accurate correlations, especially when the context is lengthy and complex. |
| Approach: | They propose a method known as Graph-as-Token (GST) to incorporate AMRs into PLMs to assist the model in understanding complex semantic information. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods and significantly improves performance on both Natural Questions and TriviaQA. |
ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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Zhikun Xu, Ming Shen, Jacob Dineen, Zhaonan Li, Xiao Ye, Shijie Lu, Aswin Rrv, Chitta Baral, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | Unlike other data augmentation methods, thoughts of words (TOW) views next-word prediction as a core reasoning task and injects fine-grained thoughts into pre-training texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-time data-augmentation method called thoughts of words (TOW) that injects fine-grained thoughts directly into a next-word prediction task and teaches the model to understand how the observed next word is related to previous contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces model hallucination by 10% and improves reasoning performance by 7% to 9% on average. |
Let LLMs Take on the Latest Challenges! A Chinese Dynamic Question Answering Benchmark (2025.coling-main)
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Zhikun Xu, Yinghui Li, Ruixue Ding, Xinyu Wang, Boli Chen, Yong Jiang, Haitao Zheng, Wenlian Lu, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
| Challenge: | Recent work has noted that due to the extremely high cost of iterative updates of LLMs, they are often unable to answer dynamic questions well. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese Dynamic QA benchmark containing question-answer pairs related to the latest dynamic questions on the Chinese Internet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark will be one of the key data resources for improving LLMs’ Chinese question-answering ability in the future. |
QA‐LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jacob Dineen, Aswin Rrv, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
| Challenge: | QA-LIGN decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . scalar rewards obscure which objectives drive the training signal . |
| Approach: | a new method decomposes monolithic rewards into interpretable principle-specific evaluations . QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . |
| Outcome: | QA-LIGN reduces attack success rates by up to 68.7% while maintaining a 0.67% false refusal rate . the results outperform DPO and GRPO with state-of-the-art reward models given equivalent training . |