Papers by Zhixu Li
Can Pre-trained Language Models Interpret Similes as Smart as Human? (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Simile interpretation is a crucial task in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to let PLMs infer the shared properties of similes by probing textual corpora and human-designed questions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task outperforms pre-trained language models on simile interpretation tasks while still underperforming humans. |
WikiDiverse: A Multimodal Entity Linking Dataset with Diversified Contextual Topics and Entity Types (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Multimodal Entity Linking (MEL) is an essential task for many multimodal applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a human-annotated Wikipedia-based multimodal entity linking dataset to improve the quality of existing MEL models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model uses the visual information of images more effectively than existing models. |
Are Large Language Models Reliable Reviewers? A Benchmark for Error Detection in Financial Documents (2026.findings-acl)
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Ying He, Zhouhong Gu, Zhecheng Hu, Yubo Zhou, Hao Shen, Jiaqing Liang, Zhaoqian Dai, Ma Shuguang, Fei Yu, Yanghua Xiao, Zhixu Li
| Challenge: | Existing LLMs struggle to identify errors in financial documents, a study shows . 18% of financial practitioners make errors daily, one-third make errors several times weekly, and 59% make errors multiple times monthly. |
| Approach: | They introduce FinED-Bench, a publicly available Benchmark for financial error detection . it covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents in 2025 . supervised fine-tuning can significantly improve the performance of weaker LLMs, they show . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark covers nine real-world financial scenarios and includes over 900 documents reported in 2025 that are unseen by existing language models. |
AesX: Enhance Your Images with Stunning Aesthetic Beauty (2026.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing models do not analyze human preferences at a finer granularity, which leads to quality issues. |
| Approach: | They propose a set of preference indicators across two major dimensions, text-image consistency and aesthetic quality, and a generative framework to steer the model toward a generation path that more closely aligns with human aesthetic sensibilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves target recognition accuracy and overall visual aesthetic presentation by focusing on human preferences. |
AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Wenhao Huang, Zhouhong Gu, Chenghao Peng, Jiaqing Liang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen
| Challenge: | Existing methods for web scraping suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that generates web scrapers with large language models and a new executability metric to measure the performance of web scraper generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can handle diverse web environments more efficiently. |
MotiR: Motivation-aware Retrieval for Long-Tail Recommendation (2025.acl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieval of recommendation systems rely on collaborative filtering signals and lacks similarity for long-tail items. |
| Approach: | They propose a Motivation-aware Retrieval for Long-Tail Recommendation that integrates purchase motivations with traditional item features to capture similarity among long-tail items. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model captures similarity between long-tail items while maintaining collaborative filtering advantages for popular items. |
OVEL: Online Video Entity Linking (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on Multi-modal Entity Linking focus on linking textual and visual mentions or offline videos’ mentions to entities in multi-modal knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a task called Online Video Entity Linking to establish connections between online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can establish connections between mentions in online videos and a knowledge base with high accuracy and timeliness. |
Is There a One-Model-Fits-All Approach to Information Extraction? Revisiting Task Definition Biases (2024.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Definition bias is a negative phenomenon that can mislead models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that measures definition bias, bias-aware fine-tuning and task-specific bias mitigation to mitigate definition bias in information extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework mitigates definition bias in information extraction tasks by measuring definition bias, bias-aware fine-tuning, and task-specific bias mitigation. |
Towards Unifying Multi-Lingual and Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing work on multilingual summarization and cross-lingual summmarization has been limited due to their different definitions. |
| Approach: | They propose to unify MLS and CLS into a more general setting, i.e. many-to-many summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in the zero-shot directions. |
HOTVCOM: Generating Buzzworthy Comments for Videos (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing research focuses on generating descriptive comments in English . hot-comments are important for video marketing and branding, authors say . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to generate hot-comments on a Chinese video dataset . they use a combination of visual, auditory, and textual data to generate them . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows that it generates hot-comments on both the new and existing datasets. |
GeoAgent: To Empower LLMs using Geospatial Tools for Address Standardization (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to address address standardization are lacking in the current field. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework incorporates spatial knowledge into address texts and achieves efficient address standardization. |
ESC-Eval: Evaluating Emotion Support Conversations in Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Haiquan Zhao, Lingyu Li, Shisong Chen, Shuqi Kong, Jiaan Wang, Kexin Huang, Tianle Gu, Yixu Wang, Jian Wang, Liang Dandan, Zhixu Li, Yan Teng, Yanghua Xiao, Yingchun Wang
| Challenge: | Emotion Support Conversation (ESC) is a crucial application for reducing stress and providing emotional guidance. |
| Approach: | They re-organize 2,801 role-playing cards to define roles of role-players . they train a specific role- playing model called ESC-Role which behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4 . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model behaves more like a confused person than GPT-4, and the model performs better than GPLs. |
MAPO: Boosting Large Language Model Performance with Model-Adaptive Prompt Optimization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Yuyan Chen, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Zhengyu Chen, Wei Wu, Dayiheng Liu, Zhixu Li, Bang Liu, Yanghua Xiao
| Challenge: | Existing research emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer method that optimizes original prompts for each LLM in downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can optimize prompts for an LLM in downstream tasks. |
FashionKLIP: Enhancing E-Commerce Image-Text Retrieval with Fashion Multi-Modal Conceptual Knowledge Graph (2023.acl-industry)
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Xiaodan Wang, Chengyu Wang, Lei Li, Zhixu Li, Ben Chen, Linbo Jin, Jun Huang, Yanghua Xiao, Ming Gao
| Challenge: | Recent advances in visual-language pre-trained (VLP) models have greatly improved cross-modal retrieval performance . however, the fine-grained interactions between objects from different modalities are far from well-established . e-commerce domain lacks sufficient training data and fine-granular cross-modulal knowledge . |
| Approach: | They propose a visual-language pre-trained (VLP) image-text retrieval model that integrates cross-modal knowledge into the model to improve performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves performance on e-commerce image-text retrieval task by a large margin. |
MusTQ: A Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering Dataset for Multi-Step Temporal Reasoning (2024.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on fact-centered reasoning with limited attention to temporal reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a new TKGQA dataset, MusTQ, which contains 666K multi-step temporal reasoning questions and a TKG. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art multi-step temporal reasoning ability with entity-time attention mechanism and optimized temporal knowledge graph representation. |
A Survey on Cross-Lingual Summarization (2022.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual summarization is a task of generating a summary in one language for a given document in a different language. |
| Approach: | They present a systematic review of the literature on cross-lingual summarization . they summarize previous efforts and compare them with each other . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is compared with previous approaches and summarizes them to provide a deeper analysis. |
Adaptive Ordered Information Extraction with Deep Reinforcement Learning (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for information extraction follow a fixed extraction order for complex tasks with multiple elements to be extracted in one instance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive ordered IE paradigm to find optimal element extraction order for different instances and a reinforcement learning framework to generate optimal order dynamically. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method beats existing methods and improves on several public datasets. |
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets involve translation, but translationese is distinguished from original text . previous studies have shown that translationeses in CLS are not a problem in training sets . |
| Approach: | They propose to use cross-lingual summarization to generate a concise summary in a target language from a document in . existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation, but the translated text is distinguished from the original written in that language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method systematically investigates how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. |
Generative Entity Typing with Curriculum Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Entity typing fails to assign an entity to the types beyond the predefined type set. |
| Approach: | They propose a generative entity typing paradigm that assigns types to entities . traditional classification-based approaches fail to assign entities to the types beyond the predefined set . they employ curriculum learning to train the model on heterogeneous data . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model on heterogeneous training data. |
ClidSum: A Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Dialogue Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark dataset for building cross-lingual summarization systems on dialogue documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms pipeline models on ClidSum and mDialBART. |
CONSTRUCTURE: Benchmarking CONcept STRUCTUre REasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Zhiwei Zha, Xiangru Zhu, Yuanyi Xu, Chenghua Huang, Jingping Liu, Zhixu Li, Xuwu Wang, Yanghua Xiao, Bei Yang, Xiaoxiao Xu
| Challenge: | Existing multimodal large language models lack the ability to perceive the visual world with a deep concept structure cognition. |
| Approach: | They propose a concept-level benchmark to assess MLLMs’ hierarchical concept understanding and reasoning abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in concept structure reasoning evaluation. |