Papers by Zhiqiang Tao
Evaluating Fairness in Large Vision-Language Models Across Diverse Demographic Attributes and Prompts (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large vision-language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in open-world visual understanding, but it is not clear how they address demographic biases in real life. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to assess visual fairness in LVLMs by question-answering/classification tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves transparency and offers a scalable solution for fairness mitigation. |
Does Reasoning Introduce Bias? A Study of Social Bias Evaluation and Mitigation in LLM Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models have enabled automatic generation of chain-of-thought reasoning . however, when reasoning steps reflect social stereotypes, they can reinforce harmful associations and lead to misleading conclusions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that detects how model predictions change across incremental reasoning steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms a stereotype-free baseline and improves accuracy. |
X-CoT: Explainable Text-to-Video Retrieval via LLM-based Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-video retrieval systems use embedding models for feature extraction and compute cosine similarities for ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose an explainable retrieval framework upon LLM CoT reasoning to replace embedding models for feature extraction and ranking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed retrieval framework improves retrieval performance and produces detailed rationales. |
Does RAG Introduce Unfairness in LLMs? Evaluating Fairness in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models address fairness concerns with respect to sensitive attributes such as gender, geographic location, and other demographic factors. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to evaluate fairness in RAG using scenario-based questions and analyzing disparities across demographic attributes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes disparities across demographic attributes and identifies fairness issues in retrieval and generation stages. |
Self-Training Large Language and Vision Assistant for Medical Question Answering (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for collecting medical data are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to train a large-scale LVLM capable of auto-generating medical visual instruction data to improve data efficiency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows that it performs well across three major visual question answering (VQA) benchmarks. |
Nested Browser-Use Learning for Agentic Information Seeking (2026.acl-long)
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Baixuan Li, Jialong Wu, Wenbiao Yin, Kuan Li, Zhongwang Zhang, Huifeng Yin, Zhengwei Tao, Liwen Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Jingren Zhou, Yong Jiang, Wentao Zhang, Zhiqiang Gao
| Challenge: | Existing information-seeking (IS) agents rely on the web for their information acquisition. |
| Approach: | They propose a browser-action framework that decouples interaction control from page exploration through a nested structure. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that NestBrowse offers clear benefits in practice. |
M-Ped: Multi-Prompt Ensemble Decoding for Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiaxin Guo, Daimeng Wei, Yuanchang Luo, Hengchao Shang, Zongyao Li, Jinlong Yang, Zhanglin Wu, Zhiqiang Rao, Shimin Tao, Hao Yang
| Challenge: | a new ensemble decoding approach enhances the performance of Large Language Models. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-prompt ensemble decoding approach to enhance LLM performance . they submit n variations of prompts with X to LLMs in batch mode to decode and derive probability distributions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves pass@k rates, LENS metrics and BLEU scores on diverse NLP tasks. |
Automatic Annotation Augmentation Boosts Translation between Molecules and Natural Language (2025.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in AI for biological research focus on integrating molecular data with natural language to accelerate drug discovery. |
| Approach: | They propose a Language-based Automatic Annotation Augmentation framework that leverages large language models to augment existing datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art models on text-based tasks and validates its versatility and utility. |
Do Large Language Models Rank Fairly? An Empirical Study on the Fairness of LLMs as Rankers (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are more efficient in natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They evaluate large language models (LLMs) using a TREC Fair Ranking dataset . they assess fairness from both user and content perspectives . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the existing models in the fair ranking task. |
Visual Self-Refinement for Autoregressive Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Jiamian Wang, Ziqi Zhou, Chaithanya Kumar Mummadi, Sohail Dianat, Majid Rabbani, Raghuveer Rao, Chen Qiu, Zhiqiang Tao
| Challenge: | Autoregressive models excel in sequential modeling but the spatial nature of visual signals conflicts with the sequential dependencies of next-token prediction, leading to suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play refinement module to enhance the spatial correspondence modeling within the generated visual sequence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed module enhances vision-language modeling under a shared sequential prediction framework. |