Papers by Zhongyi Zhou

12 papers
ToolGrad: Efficient Tool-use Dataset Generation with Textual “Gradients” (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Prior work synthesizes tool-use LLM datasets by first generating a user query, then complex tool-using annotations like DFS.
Approach: They propose an agentic framework that synthesizes user queries and generates valid tool-use chains . they propose a dataset with more complex tool use, lower cost, and almost 100% pass rate .
Outcome: Experiments show that tools trained on ToolGrad outperform expensive baseline datasets and proprietary LLMs.
Scalable Data Synthesis through Human-like Cognitive Imitation and Data Recombination (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) rely on massive amounts of training data, however, the quantity of empirically observed data is limited.
Approach: They propose a data synthesis framework that mimics human cognitive behaviors by recombining and interconnecting heterogeneous data from diverse sources.
Outcome: The proposed framework mimics human cognitive behaviors by recombining and interconnecting heterogeneous data from diverse sources thereby enhancing advanced reasoning capabilities in large language models.
See2Refine: Vision-Language Feedback Improves LLM-Based eHMI Action Designers (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: External Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) are emerging as promising solutions to address this communication gap.
Approach: They propose a framework that uses vision-language models (VLMs) for perceptual evaluation as automated visual feedback to improve an LLM-based eHMI action designer.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms prompt-only LLM designers and manually specified baselines in three eHMI modalities and multiple LLM model sizes.
Beyond Full Fine-tuning: Harnessing the Power of LoRA for Multi-Task Instruction Tuning (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm for large-scale language models.
Approach: They conduct a systematic study of Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on diverse tasks and rich resources with different learning capacities.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm can achieve remarkable performance in high-resource and multi-task scenarios, even comparable to full fine-tuning.
Attention and Edge-Label Guided Graph Convolutional Networks for Named Entity Recognition (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Named entity recognition (NER) is the recognition of entities with specific meanings in the text, mainly including person, organization, location, etc.
Approach: They propose an edge-aware node joint update module and introduce a node-awful edge update module to explore hidden in structured information and solve the wrong dependency label information to some extent.
Outcome: The proposed model can exploit the structured information on the dependency tree to improve the recognition of long entities.
Aligning Retrieval with Reader Needs: Reader-Centered Passage Selection for Open-Domain Question Answering (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Existing retrieval methods aim to gather relevant passages but fail to prioritize consistent and useful information for the reader.
Approach: They propose a novel method which re-ranks passages based on the reader's prediction probability distribution and clusters passage according to the predicted answers.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the quality of evidence passages under zero-shot scenarios.
DiffS2UT: A Semantic Preserving Diffusion Model for Textless Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models for speech generation are not efficient due to low information density of speech data.
Approach: They propose a method to integrate discrete diffusion models into speech generation tasks . they propose to apply diffusion forward process while employing diffusion backward process .
Outcome: The proposed model achieves comparable results to the auto-regressive baselines with significantly fewer decoding steps (50 steps).
XMC-Agent : Dynamic Navigation over Scalable Hierarchical Index for Incremental Extreme Multi-label Classification (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods for XMC struggle with the growing set of labels due to their static label assumptions, and embedding-based methods struggle with complex mapping relationships due to late interaction paradigm.
Approach: They propose a large language model (LLM) powered agent framework for extreme multi-label classification, XMC-Agent, which can effectively learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically increasing set of labels.
Outcome: The proposed framework can learn, manage and predict the extremely large and dynamically growing set of labels and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three standard datasets.
Debiasing In-Context Learning by Instructing LLMs How to Follow Demonstrations (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: In-context learning (ICL) has gained considerable attention due to its data efficiency and task adaptability.
Approach: They propose to de-biase demonstration bias in in-context learning by focusing on semantic ambiguity induced by demonstrations and reducing the semantic hazard.
Outcome: The proposed methods significantly improve performance on six datasets.
ChatVLA: Unified Multimodal Understanding and Robot Control with Vision-Language-Action Model (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in vision-language-action models prioritize robotic action mastery . however, models trained on visual-text pairs struggle to interpret multimodal data .
Approach: They propose a framework that integrates multimodal data after initial control mastery and a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to minimize task interference.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art vision-language-action (VLA) methods on multimodal understanding benchmarks and achieves six times higher performance on visual question-answering datasets.
Chain-of-Rewrite: Aligning Question and Documents for Open-Domain Question Answering (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to answer open-domain question have encountered term mismatch and limited interaction between IR systems and large language models.
Approach: They propose a method which leverages the guidance and feedback gained from the analysis to provide faithful and consistent extensions for effective question answering.
Outcome: Experiments on four open-domain question answering datasets show the proposed method performs well under zero-shot settings.
CPRM: A LLM-based Continual Pre-training Framework for Relevance Modeling in Commercial Search (2025.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Relevance modeling between queries and items is a key component of commercial search engines.
Approach: They propose a framework for continual pre-training of LLMs to enhance domain knowledge . they employ queries and multi-field item to jointly pre-train for enhancing domain knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves convincing performance compared to strong baselines.

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