Papers by Zhu Tao

46 papers
Zero-shot Sharpness-Aware Quantization for Pre-trained Language Models (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing zero-shot quantization methods are based on overfitting problem in adversarial learning process, leading to sub-optimal performance.
Approach: They propose a zero-shot sharpness-aware quantization framework for the quantization of various PLMs by optimizing a minimax problem.
Outcome: The proposed framework can achieve significant performance gains on discriminative and generative PLMs.
AgentGym2: Benchmarking Large Language Model Agents in De-Idealized Real-World Environments (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks evaluate agents in simplified, idealized settings, relying on pre-packaged tool interfaces, overlooking critical steps, and assume inputs are clean and fully specified.
Approach: They propose a framework that evaluates language agents in simplified, idealized settings . they show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .
Outcome: Experiments on 15 proprietary and open-source models show that even SOTA systems like Gemini and GPT-5 struggle on AgentGym2 .
LoRAMoE: Alleviating World Knowledge Forgetting in Large Language Models via MoE-Style Plugin (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results show that, as the instruction data increases, LoRAMoE can significantly improve the ability to process downstream tasks, while maintaining the world knowledge stored in the LLM.
Approach: They propose a framework that introduces several low-rank adapters and integrates them by using a router network to freeze the backbone model and force a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework freezes the backbone model and forces a portion of LoRAs to focus on leveraging world knowledge to solve downstream tasks, to alleviate world knowledge forgetting.
TexSmart: A System for Enhanced Natural Language Understanding (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications.
Approach: They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities.
Outcome: The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions.
A Confidence-based Partial Label Learning Model for Crowd-Annotated Named Entity Recognition (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing models for named entity recognition (NER) are based on large-scale labeled datasets, which always obtain using crowdsourcing.
Approach: They propose a CONfidence-based partial Label Learning method to integrate prior and posterior confidences for crowd-annotated named entity recognition models.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on real-world and synthetic datasets compared with baselines.
BPP-Search: Enhancing Tree of Thought Reasoning for Mathematical Modeling Problem Solving (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing datasets in operations research domain lack detailed annotations of the modeling process, focusing only on objective values.
Approach: They propose an annotation-based tree-of-thought tree-based reasoning algorithm that integrates reinforcement learning into a tree- of-though.
Outcome: The proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods on StructuredOR, NL4OPT, and MAMO-ComplexLP datasets.
AgentV-RL: Scaling Reward Modeling with Agentic Verifier (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to improve LLM reasoning are limited in complex domains and lack external grounding makes verifiers unreliable on computation-intensive tasks.
Approach: They propose a framework that transforms reward modeling into a multi-turn, tool-augmented deliberative process.
Outcome: The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art ORMs by 25.2% under parallel and sequential TTS.
An Exploratory Study on Long Dialogue Summarization: What Works and What’s Next (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing models for dialogue summarization focus on extracting the main events of short conversations, but real-world dialogues are difficult to train.
Approach: They propose three strategies to deal with the lengthy input problem and locate relevant information using long dialogue datasets.
Outcome: The retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models yield the best performance on three long dialogue datasets.
DYLE: Dynamic Latent Extraction for Abstractive Long-Input Summarization (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing models struggle with summarizing long text due to high memory complexity of the full self-attention.
Approach: They propose a dynamic latent extraction approach for abstractive long-input summarization that treats extracted text snippets as latent variables and allows dynamic attention weights during decoding.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on GovReport, QMSum, and arXiv while yielding strong results on arX.
TencentPretrain: A Scalable and Flexible Toolkit for Pre-training Models of Different Modalities (2023.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Several pre-training models of different modalities are showing a rising trend of homogeneity in their model structures.
Approach: They propose a toolkit that supports pre-training models of different modalities.
Outcome: The proposed toolkit can match the performance of the original implementations on text, vision, and audio benchmarks.
Representation Learning with Ordered Relation Paths for Knowledge Graph Completion (D19-1)

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Challenge: Existing knowledge graphs are incomplete and lack the order of relations in paths.
Approach: They propose a method which takes relation paths into account but ignores order of relations in paths which is important for reasoning.
Outcome: The proposed method performs better than state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets.
A Simple and Effective Method to Improve Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning (2022.coling-1)

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Challenge: Existing zero-shot cross-lingual transfer methods rely on parallel corpora or bilingual dictionaries . however, its effect is limited by the gap between embedding clusters of different languages .
Approach: They propose Embedding-Push, Attention-Pull, and Robust targets to transfer English embeddings to virtual multilingual embedders without semantic loss.
Outcome: Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms existing methods on cross-lingual tasks and can achieve a better multilingual alignment.
Reading Order Matters: Information Extraction from Visually-rich Documents by Token Path Prediction (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Recent advances in multimodal pre-trained models have significantly improved information extraction from visually-rich documents (VrDs).
Approach: They propose a method to predict token sequences within visually-rich documents by a simple prediction head.
Outcome: The proposed method can be used to predict token mentions as token sequences within documents.
FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Error correction is widely used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) to post-process the generated sentence.
Approach: They propose a fast correction model that takes multiple ASR candidates as input for better correction accuracy.
Outcome: The proposed model can reduce the word error rate (WER) with multiple candidates by 3.2% and 2.6%.
Clustering and Ranking: Diversity-preserved Instruction Selection through Expert-aligned Quality Estimation (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for instruction data selection have limitations such as relying on fragile external APIs, being affected by biases in GPT models, or reducing the diversity of the selected instruction dataset.
Approach: They propose an industrial-friendly, expert-aligned and diversity-preserved instruction data selection method: Clustering and Ranking (CaR).
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms Alpaca's existing methods by 32.1% in GPT-4 evaluations.
Reinforcement Learning on Pre-Training Data (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent progress in large language models is driven by scaling of training compute through pre-training with nexttoken prediction (NTP) or post-training (RL) Pre-training using NTP enables models to acquire extensive knowledge and skills from general data, but it suffers from data inefficiency and catastrophic forgetting in continual learning settings.
Approach: They propose to scale training compute through pre-training with next-token prediction (NTP) or post-training by scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to improve learning from general data.
Outcome: Experiments on multiple benchmarks and models show that the proposed approach improves continual pre-training and provides a strong foundation for post-training on Qwen3-8B-Base.
BCL: Bayesian In-Context Learning Framework for Information Extraction (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing information extraction (IE) tasks rely on in-context learning with large language models.
Approach: They propose a Bayesian-based in-context learning framework that refines label representations across IE tasks using particle filtering and Bayes updates.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves performance over existing methods (up to 30%) it underperforms one-shot prompting by a substantial margin on NER tasks and CodeIE fails on RE tasks with near-zero micro-F1.
ODE Transformer: An Ordinary Differential Equation-Inspired Model for Sequence Generation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Residual networks are an Euler discretization of solutions to Ordinary Differential Equations (ODE).
Approach: They propose a residual block of layers in Transformer that can be described as a higher-order solution to ODE.
Outcome: The proposed architecture can gain large improvements over strong baselines at a slight cost in inference efficiency.
T2A-Feedback: Improving Basic Capabilities of Text-to-Audio Generation via Fine-grained AI Feedback (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Text-to-audio (T2A) models still struggle to satisfy human preferences for prompt-following and acoustic quality when generating complex multi-event audio.
Approach: They propose to use AI feedback learning to enhance basic capabilities of text-to-audio models . they use a large audio preference dataset to evaluate the model's capabilities .
Outcome: The proposed model improves in simple and complex scenarios with AI feedback learning.
Structured Attention for Unsupervised Dialogue Structure Induction (2020.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Using structured attention, a model can learn dialogue structure in unsupervised fashion.
Approach: They propose to incorporate structured attention layers into a Variational Recurrent Neural Network model with discrete latent states to learn dialogue structure in an unsupervised fashion.
Outcome: The proposed model learns semantic structures similar to templates used to generate a dialogue corpus on two-party datasets and on multi-party dialogues, disentangling dialogues without human annotation.
MdEval: Massively Multilingual Code Debugging (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are limited in terms of language diversity.
Approach: They propose a multilingual debugging benchmark that includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and introduces the debug instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair task, bug localization task, and bug identification task.
Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization with Domain-Agnostic Multi-Source Pretraining (2021.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods for low-resource dialogue summarization neglect the difference between dialogues and conventional articles.
Approach: They propose a multi-source pretraining paradigm to leverage external summary data . they exploit large-scale in-domain non-summary data to separate dialogue encoder and summary decoder .
Outcome: The proposed model can be used to better leverage external summary data.
Benchmarking Long-Context Language Models on Long Code Understanding (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Currently, long-context language models are limited by the lack of a rigorous evaluation framework for long code understanding.
Approach: They propose to use a long code understanding benchmark LongCodeU to evaluate LCLMs' long code comprehension ability for practical applications.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks show that current LCLMs are limited in their long code understanding ability, particularly when the long code length is greater than 32K, falling far short of their claimed 128K to 1M context windows.
Multi-stage Distillation Framework for Cross-Lingual Semantic Similarity Matching (2022.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing studies have shown that cross-lingual knowledge distillation can improve the performance of pre-trained models for cross-linguistic similarity matching tasks.
Approach: They propose a multi-stage distillation framework for constructing a small-size but high-performance cross-lingual model using contrastive learning, bottleneck, and parameter recurrent strategies.
Outcome: The proposed model can compress the size of XLM-R and MiniLM by more than 50% while the performance is only reduced by about 1%.
Black-Box Membership Inference Attacks for Video Training Data in Multimodal Large Language Models (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods assess model memorization of key semantic concepts within a video but do not provide reliable evidence that a specific video was used during training.
Approach: They propose a black-box MIA framework that can provide reliable evidence of specific video data usage for training multimodal large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework can provide reliable evidence of specific video data usage for training multimodal large language models.
Learning from LLM Agents: In-Context Generative Models for Text Casing in E-Commerce Ads (2025.emnlp-industry)

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Challenge: Existing NER-based transformer models are expensive and lack contextual dependencies, making them less reliable when handling unseen or ad-specific terms, e.g., brand names.
Approach: They propose a two-stage approach to casing correction in e-commerce ad content that leverages Chain-of-Actions to enforce content policies while accurately handling ads-specific terms.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing NER-based models and achieves near-LLM performance at a fraction of the cost.
Machine Translation With Weakly Paired Documents (D19-1)

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Challenge: Recent studies explore the possibility of unsupervised machine translation with monolingual data only.
Approach: They propose a method to mine bilingual sentences from weakly paired documents . they use word distribution-level alignments to constrain word distributions of two weakly-paired documents.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms previous results on six translation tasks using weakly paired bilingual documents and a large number of bilingual sentences.
Parameter-efficient Continual Learning Framework in Industrial Real-time Text Classification System (2022.naacl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing continual learning methods use data replay, parameter isolation and regularization to mitigate catastrophic forgetting.
Approach: They propose a parameter-efficient continual learning framework that updates parameters offline and then trains using an online regularization method.
Outcome: The proposed framework reduces catastrophic forgetting and saves the model with the changed parameters instead of all parameters.
CFBench: A Comprehensive Constraints-Following Benchmark for LLMs (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) focus on fragmented constraints or narrow scenarios, but they overlook the comprehensiveness and authenticity of constraints from the user’s perspective.
Approach: They propose a Chinese Comprehensive Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs that compiles constraints from real-world instructions and constructs a systematic framework for constraint types.
Outcome: The proposed framework integrates multi-dimensional assessment criteria with requirement prioritization, covering various perspectives of constraints, instructions, and requirement fulfillment.
Modeling Layout Reading Order as Ordering Relations for Visually-rich Document Understanding (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing models of layout reading order do not convey the complete reading order information in the layout.
Approach: They propose to model layout reading order as ordering relations over layout elements . they propose a reading-order-relation-enhancing pipeline to improve model performance .
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms existing models on a visual-rich document dataset and on eight cross-domain VrD-IE/QA tasks without targeted optimization.
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Recent studies explore approaches to synthesize instruction data with open-sourced LLMs but require high-quality human-crafted seed data.
Approach: They propose an end-to-end framework to synthesize high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data.
Outcome: The proposed framework synthesizes high-quality instruction data with open-sourced LLMs and sampled unlabeled documents, eliminating the need for seed data.
TCSinger 2: Customizable Multilingual Zero-shot Singing Voice Synthesis (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing zero-shot singing voice synthesis models depend on phoneme and note boundary annotations, limiting their robustness and producing poor transitions between phonemes and notes.
Approach: They propose a multi-task multilingual zero-shot SVS model with style transfer and style control based on various prompts.
Outcome: Experimental results show that TCSinger 2 outperforms baseline models in subjective and objective metrics across multiple related tasks.
Let Modalities Teach Each Other: Modal-Collaborative Knowledge Extraction and Fusion for Multimodal Knowledge Graph Completion (2025.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Recent studies have focused on missing triples in knowledge graphs, but lack correlation between modalities.
Approach: They propose a framework to foster mutual guidance and collaboration in unimodal knowledge extraction and multimodal knowledge fusion.
Outcome: Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate advantages of Moodle over state-of-the-art methods.
Digest the Knowledge: Large Language Models empowered Message Passing for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to augment large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge are unorganized and unorganized.
Approach: They propose a method that learns a concise facts graph and encodes it into multi-level lists of texts to augment LLMs.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on all 5 knowledge graph question answering datasets and offers human-level semantic explainability.
RISK: A Framework for GUI Agents in E-commerce Risk Management (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: RISK is a framework designed to automate multi-step web interactions in e-commerce risk management.
Approach: a new framework is designed to build and deploy GUI agents for e-commerce risk management . RISK-R1 provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions .
Outcome: RISK provides a scalable, domain-specific solution for automating complex web interactions in e-commerce risk management.
On Vision Features in Multimodal Machine Translation (2022.acl-long)

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Challenge: Recent work on multimodal machine translation (MMT) has focused on the way of incorporating vision features into translation but little attention is given to the quality of vision models.
Approach: They develop a selective attention model to study the patch-level contribution of an image in multimodal machine translation.
Outcome: The proposed model is able to learn translation from the visual modality on probing tasks and is compared with existing models.
ComRAG: Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Dynamic Vector Stores for Real-time Community Question Answering in Industry (2025.acl-industry)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Community Question Answering (CQA) focus on static knowledge, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios.
Approach: They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework for real-time industrial CQA that integrates static knowledge with dynamic historical QA pairs via a centroid-based memory mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on three industrial CQA datasets and achieves 25.9% improvement in vector similarity, reducing latency by 8.7%–23.3%, and lowering chunk growth from 20.23% to 2.06% over iterations.
MTO: A Multi-turn Conversational Text-to-OverpassQL Dataset for Enhanced OpenStreetMap Query Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a framework for constructing multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dialogue datasets is proposed . a dataset of over 7,800 dialogues contains more than 20,000 individual utterances .
Approach: They propose a framework for constructing multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dialogue datasets . they convert Overpass queries into syntax trees using a custom parser based on OverpassQl .
Outcome: The proposed dataset includes over 7,800 dialogues, each containing 2 to 4 user utterances . it is the first multi-turn Text-to-OverpassQL dataset built upon the OverpassNL corpus .
Embracing Imperfection: Simulating Students with Diverse Cognitive Levels Using LLM-based Agents (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly popular in education, enabling researchers to simulate students' learning patterns and learning patterns.
Approach: They propose a training-free framework for student simulation that takes into account student cognitive diversity and realism.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms baseline models and achieves 100% improvement in simulation accuracy and realism.
Soft Contextual Data Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation (P19-1)

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Challenge: Existing methods for enhancing training data are limited in natural language tasks due to text characteristics.
Approach: They propose a data augmentation method that softly augments a randomly chosen word in a sentence by its contextual mixture of multiple related words.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms baseline methods on small and large scale machine translation datasets.
VRPO: Rethinking Value Modeling for Robust RL under Noisy Supervision in LLM Post-Training (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world environments often suffers from ambiguous or incomplete supervision.
Approach: They propose a framework that enhances value modeling for robust RL in LLM post-training by integrating auxiliary losses guided by entropy and perplexity from a frozen language model and variational information bottleneck.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms baselines on multi-turn dialogue, math reasoning, and science QA with rule-based and model-based rewards.
Rethinking Expert Trajectory Utilization in LLM Post-training for Mathematical Reasoning (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: evolving generic Large Language Models into specialized Large Reasoning Models requires effective post-training.
Approach: They propose a plasticity-ceiling framework to harness expert trajectories . they establish the Sequential SFT-then-RL pipeline as the superior standard .
Outcome: The proposed framework overcomes stability and premature convergence deficits in synchronized approaches.
ToolHop: A Query-Driven Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Multi-Hop Tool Use (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Effective evaluation of multi-hop tool use is critical for analyzing the understanding, reasoning, and function-calling capabilities of large language models.
Approach: They propose a dataset that provides rigorous evaluation of multi-hop tool use.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves 49.04% accuracy across five model families.
TextFlint: Unified Multilingual Robustness Evaluation Toolkit for Natural Language Processing (2021.acl-demo)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction.
Approach: They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack.
Outcome: The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses.
CodeMEM: AST-Guided Adaptive Memory for Repository-Level Iterative Code Generation (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing memory management approaches show promise but remain limited by natural language-centric representations.
Approach: They propose an AST-guided dynamic memory management system for repository-level iterative code generation that maintains and updates repository context through AST operations.
Outcome: The proposed system improves instruction following by 12.2% and reduces interaction rounds by 2–3 while maintaining competitive inference latency and token efficiency.
BioT5+: Towards Generalized Biological Understanding with IUPAC Integration and Multi-task Tuning (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: BioT5+ is an extension of the BioT5, but lacked a nuanced understanding of molecular structures.
Approach: They propose a new bio-entity modeling framework, BioT5+, which integrates IUPAC names and molecule data.
Outcome: The proposed model bridges the gap between molecular representations and textual descriptions and improves the grounded reasoning of bio-text and bio-sequences.

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