Papers by Zhisong Zhang
Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness (2025.acl-long)
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Shuofei Qiao, Zhisong Qiu, Baochang Ren, Xiaobin Wang, Xiangyuan Ru, Ningyu Zhang, Xiang Chen, Yong Jiang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved considerable performance across various agentic planning tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric approach that applies agents with knowledgeable self-awareness like humans to a heuristic situation judgement criterion to mark special tokens on their self-explored trajectories for collecting training data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed paradigm outperforms baseline models on various tasks with minimal external knowledge. |
Recall with Reasoning: Chain-of-Thought Distillation for Mamba’s Long-Context Memory and Extrapolation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing long-context memory methods such as Mamba struggle with long-constituency when the length of the processed text exceeds the model's training length. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses chain-of-thought summarization to teach Mamba to actively recall and reason over long contexts. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on LONGMEMEVAL and HELMET show that RwR outperforms existing long-term memory methods while preserving short-context capabilities. |
Transfer Learning from Semantic Role Labeling to Event Argument Extraction with Template-based Slot Querying (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for event argument extraction are limited by the limited amount of annotations available. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SRL annotations for event argument extraction . they propose to specify natural language-like queries to tackle label mismatch problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves impressive zero-shot results on English benchmarks . it also provides benefits in low-resource cases, where few annotations are available . |
A Thorough Examination of Decoding Methods in the Era of LLMs (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Decoding methods are essential for converting language models from next-token predictors into practical task solvers. |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate decoding methods in general-purpose large language models . they find that decoding method performance is notably task-dependent . |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods perform task-dependently and are influenced by alignment, model size, and quantization. |
Reasons to Reject? Aligning Language Models with Judgments (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | a new framework for aligning large language models with judgments is proposed to help with alignment . a framework that allows for fine-grained inappropriate content detection and correction based on judgments . large language model alignment is critical for making artificial intelligence a reliable ally for humanity . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows for fine-grained inappropriate content detection and correction based on judgments. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework beats the 175B DaVinci003 and improves on AlpacaEval using judgments. |
WebRollback: Enhancing Web Agents with Explicit Rollback Mechanisms (2026.eacl-short)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have adopted a greedy one-way search strategy to deal with dynamic web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate a rollback mechanism into web agents to allow them to revert back to a previous state in navigation trajectory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is able to revert back to a previous state in its navigation trajectory, allowing the models to directly control the search process. |
An Empirical Exploration of Local Ordering Pre-training for Structured Prediction (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that pre-training contextualized encoders with language model objectives is effective for structured prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-supervised method for pre-training contextualized encoders with language model objectives. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is effective on three typical structured prediction tasks in four languages. |
Low-Bit Quantization Favors Undertrained LLMs (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Larger models or those trained on fewer tokens exhibit less quantization-induced degradation (QiD), while smaller, well-trained models face significant performance losses. |
| Approach: | They propose to use QiD to measure an LLM’s training levels and determine the number of training tokens required for fully training LLMs of various sizes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scaling laws can predict the quantization performance of different-sized LLMs trained with tokens. |
WebAggregator: Enhancing Compositional Reasoning Capabilities of Deep Research Agent Foundation Models (2026.acl-long)
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Rui Wang, Ce Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Jianshu Zhang, Hongru Wang, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Tianqing Fang, Zhisong Zhang, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Kam-Fai Wong
| Challenge: | Existing agentic systems are retrieval-heavy but reasoning-light . current systems lack compositional reasoning, a key component of deep research . |
| Approach: | They propose a data synthesis pipeline WebAggregator to shift agentic paradigm . they use Proactive Explorer to collect interconnected knowledge and Compositional Logic Proposer to weave knowledge into complex questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline surpasses GPT-4.1 and matches Claude-3.7-Sonnet on GAIA, WebWalkerQA, and XBench. |
On the Benefit of Syntactic Supervision for Cross-lingual Transfer in Semantic Role Labeling (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in neural architectures and pre-trained representations have greatly improved the performance of fully-supervised semantic role labeling (SRL) but there are limitations in the availability of supervised training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage syntactic dependencies to facilitate cross-lingual transfer by annotating predicate-argument structures in text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be extended to other languages with limited training data. |
Data-efficient Active Learning for Structured Prediction with Partial Annotation and Self-Training (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Structured prediction is a fundamental problem in NLP, wherein the label space consists of complex structured outputs with groups of interdependent variables. |
| Approach: | They propose a partial annotation approach that selects only the most informative sub-structures for annotation and a method that incorporates the current model's automatic predictions as pseudo-labels for un-annotated sub-structurals. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces annotation cost over strong full annotation baselines under a fair comparison scheme that takes reading time into consideration. |
An Empirical Investigation of Structured Output Modeling for Graph-based Neural Dependency Parsing (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | In the past few years, graph-based dependency parsers have led to impressive empirical successes on parsing accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a graph-based dependency parser to model global outputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has been shown to perform better on sentence-level Complete Match metric compared with the previous model. |
UNCLE: Benchmarking Uncertainty Expressions in Long-Form Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing work lacks direct and fair evaluation of Large Language Models’ ability to express uncertainty effectively in long-form generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate uncertainty expression in both long- and short-form question answering (QA) they propose prompt-based and training-based methods to improve models’ performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method mitigates this issue but a misalignment persists in uncertainty expression between long- and short-form generation. |
LoGU: Long-form Generation with Uncertainty Expressions (2025.acl-long)
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Ruihan Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Zhisong Zhang, Xinting Huang, Sen Yang, Nigel Collier, Dong Yu, Deqing Yang
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) generate factually incorrect content, i.e., hallucinations, despite impressive performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable models to express uncertainty when unsure . they propose atomic claims to refine uncertainty and refine it using supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to enhance uncertainty expression. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework significantly improves accuracy, reduces hallucinations, and maintains comprehensiveness of responses. |
Exploring Recombination for Efficient Decoding of Neural Machine Translation (D18-1)
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| Challenge: | Neural Machine Translation (NMT) decoder captures features of entire prediction history . some partial hypotheses with different prefixes will be regarded differently no matter how similar they are . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a n-gram suffix to adapt it to beam search decoding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can obtain similar translation quality with a smaller beam size, making it more efficient. |
Cross-Lingual Syntactic Transfer through Unsupervised Adaptation of Invertible Projections (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Current systems for syntactic analysis tasks rely heavily on large scale annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose to learn a generative model with a structured prior that uses labeled source and unlabeled target data jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing tasks on English as the only source corpus and on a wide range of target languages. |
WebCoT: Enhancing Web Agent Reasoning by Reconstructing Chain-of-Thought in Reflection, Branching, and Rollback (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Minda Hu, Tianqing Fang, Jianshu Zhang, Jun-Yu Ma, Zhisong Zhang, Jingyan Zhou, Hongming Zhang, Haitao Mi, Dong Yu, Irwin King
| Challenge: | Web agents powered by Large Language Models lack the ability to perform in uncertain web environments. |
| Approach: | They propose to reconstruct web agents' reasoning skills into chain-of-thought rationales by fine-tuning their LLM backbone into a web-based model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach significantly improves the agent self-improving benchmark OpenWebVoyager, demonstrating that it can be used to improve the agent's reasoning skills. |
WebEvolver: Enhancing Web Agent Self-Improvement with Co-evolving World Model (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Agent self-improvement, where agents train their underlying Large Language Model (LLM) on self-sampled trajectories, shows promising results but often stagnates in web environments due to limited exploration and under-utilization of pretrained web knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a co-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) that predicts the next observation based on current observation and action within the web environment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that agents can perform better in real-world web environments without using any distillation from more powerful close-sourced models. |
Attention Entropy is a Key Factor: An Analysis of Parallel Context Encoding with Full-attention-based Pre-trained Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zhisong Zhang, Yan Wang, Xinting Huang, Tianqing Fang, Hongming Zhang, Chenlong Deng, Shuaiyi Li, Dong Yu
| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of language tasks due to their remarkable ability in context modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose to use parallel context encoding to reduce attention entropy by incorporating attention sinks and selective mechanisms to reduce irregular attention . they also propose to incorporate attention sink mechanisms into the parallel encoded context to reduce the irregular attention. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods lower irregular attention entropy and narrow performance gaps. |
On Difficulties of Cross-Lingual Transfer with Order Differences: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing (N19-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on crosslingual transfer have focused on word-level information sharing, but words are not independent in sentences; their combinations form larger linguistic units, known as context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use orderagnostic models to transfer word order to distant languages . they train dependency parsers on an English corpus and evaluate their transfer performance on 30 other languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better on languages with different word orders than on other languages. |
A Two-Step Approach for Implicit Event Argument Detection (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | et al., 2015) only consider local arguments in the same sentence of the event trigger. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose the implicit event argument detection task into two sub-problems . they propose to use argument head-word detection and head-to-span expansion to reduce the number of candidates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves better performance than a strong sequence labeling baseline. |
Towards More Efficient Insertion Transformer with Fractional Positional Encoding (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Empirical studies on text generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of insertion-based models. |
| Approach: | They propose a reusable positional encoding scheme for insertion transformers that allows reusing representations calculated in previous steps. |
| Outcome: | Empirical studies show that the proposed model reduces the time required to generate a token and improves decoding efficiency. |
A Silver Bullet or a Compromise for Full Attention? A Comprehensive Study of Gist Token-based Context Compression (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | gist-based context compression methods can achieve only slight performance loss on tasks like retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA, but it faces challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
| Approach: | They propose two strategies to improve gist-based context compression in large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can achieve only slight performance loss on retrieval-augmented generation and long-document QA tasks, but they face challenges in tasks like synthetic recall. |
Incorporating a Local Translation Mechanism into Non-autoregressive Translation (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to capture local dependencies among output tokens are not efficient, causing errors of repeated translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a local autoregressive translation mechanism that predicts a short sequence of tokens for each target decoding position instead of one token. |
| Outcome: | Empirical results show that the proposed method achieves comparable or better performance with fewer decoding iterations, bringing a 2.5x speedup. |
A Survey of Active Learning for Natural Language Processing (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing literature surveys on active learning for NLP are too specific or too general, covering deep active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use active learning to improve model learning and annotation cost for NLP problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is based on a large dataset of data-driven machine learning models. |
Choosing Transfer Languages for Cross-Lingual Learning (P19-1)
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Yu-Hsiang Lin, Chian-Yu Chen, Jean Lee, Zirui Li, Yuyan Zhang, Mengzhou Xia, Shruti Rijhwani, Junxian He, Zhisong Zhang, Xuezhe Ma, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Patrick Littell, Graham Neubig
| Challenge: | Cross-lingual transfer is a useful tool for improving performance of natural language processing (NLP) on low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual transfer to improve accuracy of low-resource languages . they build models that consider features to perform prediction on such languages based on ranking problem . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts good transfer languages much better than baselines considering single features in isolation. |