Papers by Zhuo Zhang

44 papers
Advancing Zero-shot Text-to-Speech Intelligibility across Diverse Domains via Preference Alignment (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing zero-shot text-to-speech systems struggle in challenging scenarios such as tongue twisters, repeated words, code-switching, and cross-lingual synthesis.
Approach: They propose a dataset that leverages preference alignment techniques to improve performance . they also extend the Direct Preference Optimization framework to accommodate diverse TTS architectures .
Outcome: The proposed dataset improves intelligibility, similarity, and audio quality for multiple models across domains.
SecFormer: Fast and Accurate Privacy-Preserving Inference for Transformer Models via SMPC (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: a growing number of cloud-based inference services are relying on SMPC to protect data privacy.
Approach: They propose a framework for Privacy-Preserving Inference for Transformer models that eliminates exponential and maximum operations in PPI without sacrificing model performance.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms MPCFormer in terms of performance and efficiency . it is 3.57 and 3.58 times faster than PUMA for BERTBASE and BERTLARGE .
DET: A Dual-Encoding Transformer for Relational Graph Embedding (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to graph representation only consider the local neighbors, sacrificing the Transformer’s ability to attend to elements at any distance.
Approach: They propose a dual-encoding Transformer architecture that uses a structural encoder and a semantic encoder to seek for semantically relevant nodes.
Outcome: The proposed architecture achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art attention-based methods on complex relational graphs like KGs and citation networks.
PDTrim: Targeted Pruning for Prefill-Decode Disaggregation in Inference (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing pruning methods ignore prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation in practice.
Approach: They propose a pruning method that is highly integrated with prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation, enabling more precise pruning of blocks.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves strong performance in both PD disaggregation and PD unified settings, and can be extended to other non-block pruning methods.
Revisiting Data Reconstruction Attacks on Real-world Dataset for Federated Natural Language Understanding (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing DRA methods fail to accurately recover the original text of real-world privacy data.
Approach: They propose to use a real-world privacy dataset to examine the performance of federated learning (FL) methods.
Outcome: The proposed method improves on a real-world privacy dataset and shows that the tokens within a recovery sentence are disordered and intertwined with tokens from other sentences in the same training batch.
PcMSP: A Dataset for Scientific Action Graphs Extraction from Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedure Text (2022.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: 305 open access scientific articles are used for synthesis action graphs . lack of annotated data has hindered progress in this field .
Approach: They propose to annotate Polycrystalline Materials Synthesis Procedures PcMSP from 305 open access scientific articles for the construction of synthesis action graphs.
Outcome: The proposed dataset contains the synthesis sentences, entity mentions and intra-sentence relations extracted from the experimental paragraphs.
Noise-powered Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Representation Framework (2025.coling-main)

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Challenge: Current efforts to integrate MMKG with pretraining are scarce.
Approach: They propose a method that integrates multi-modal entity features into MMKGs using a Transformer-based architecture equipped with modality-level noise masking.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves SOTA performance across ten datasets.
HiSVD: Principled Low-Rank Approximation of LLMs via Hierarchical Modeling of Information Capacity and Spectral Structure (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for generating layer importance ignore the fine-grained influence of spectral distribution shape.
Approach: They propose a hierarchical rank allocation framework with two stages to address this gap . they propose SVD-based lowrank approximation that exploits spectral heterogeneity .
Outcome: Experiments show that HiSVD outperforms state-of-the-art methods on LLMs .
ProtLLM: An Interleaved Protein-Language LLM with Protein-as-Word Pre-Training (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Experimental results demonstrate that ProtLLM achieves superior performance against protein-specialized baselines on protein-centric tasks and induces zero-shot and in-context learning capabilities on protein language tasks.
Approach: They propose a cross-modal large language model (LLM) that can handle protein-centric and protein-language tasks by using a dynamic protein mounting mechanism.
Outcome: The proposed model can predict proteins from a vast pool of candidates and can also predict natural language and biological papers.
Self-Edit: Fault-Aware Code Editor for Code Generation (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing Large language models (LLMs) have low pass rates and accuracy on competitive programming tasks.
Approach: They propose a generate-and-edit approach that uses execution results of generated code from LLMs to improve code quality on competitive programming tasks.
Outcome: The proposed method improves pass@1 by 89% on APPS-dev, 31% on apps-test, and 48% on HumanEval over nine popular code generation LLMs with parameter sizes ranging from 110M to 175B.
ArkRepoBench: A Repository-Level Code Completion Benchmark for HarmonyOS Development (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Despite the maturity of LLM-based code assistance for mainstream languages, the capabilities of ArkTS are largely unexplored.
Approach: They propose to benchmark repository-level code completion for ArkTS using 7,519 samples from 20 official HarmonyOS repositories.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark covers multiple difficulty levels and categorizes completion instances into Single-File, Cross-Filled Independent, and Cross-Filed Dependent settings based on dependency analysis.
Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Natural Language Processing: Past, Present, and Future (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing literature on the generalization of machine learning models to out-of-distribution data is lacking.
Approach: They propose to present the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding.
Outcome: The proposed survey provides the first comprehensive review of recent progress, methods, and evaluations on the generalization challenge from an OOD perspective in natural language understanding.
Know the Known and the Unknown: Reasonable Answer Generation with Knowledge-Informed Citations (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing approaches focus on generating multi-level citations linked to specific references, making it verifiable and trustworthy.
Approach: They propose a new data construction pipeline and a benchmark to improve citation granularity and awareness of unknown information.
Outcome: The proposed model improves on the existing benchmark and data construction pipeline and provides citation granularity and awareness of unknown information.
Threat Behavior Textual Search by Attention Graph Isomorphism (2024.eacl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to analyze malware behavior only disclose a subset of behaviors due to inherent difficulties.
Approach: They propose a novel malware behavior search technique that is based on graph isomorphism at the attention layers of Transformer models.
Outcome: The proposed technique outperforms state-of-the-art methods in a case study of 10 real-world malwares by 6-14%.
ADEPT-SQL: A High-performance Text-to-SQL Application for Real-World Enterprise-Level Databases (2025.acl-demo)

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Challenge: et al., 2017) address domain-specific knowledge barriers, schemas complexity, and computational costs of large LLMs.
Approach: They propose a domain-adapted Text2SQL system that addresses critical deployment challenges in professional fields.
Outcome: The proposed system achieves 97% execution accuracy on real-world databases . it is faster than existing systems and has a higher performance than existing ones.
KBM: Delineating Knowledge Boundary for Adaptive Retrieval in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is employed to tackle these challenges . a Knowledge Boundary Model (KBM) is used to express the known/unknown of a given question .
Approach: They propose a Knowledge Boundary Model to express the known/unknown of a given question . they find that not all questions need to trigger RAG to improve performance .
Outcome: The proposed model reduces time and computational costs by retrieving parts of unknown knowledge . the proposed model can express the known/unknown of a given question and determine whether a RAG needs to be triggered .
Prompting ChatGPT in MNER: Enhanced Multimodal Named Entity Recognition with Auxiliary Refined Knowledge (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to enhance textual entity prediction neglect the need for external knowledge or encounter high redundancy in the retrieved knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that leverages ChatGPT as an implicit knowledge base and heuristically generates auxiliary knowledge for more efficient entity prediction.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two classic datasets and exhibits a stronger robustness and generalization capability.
CoTEvol: Self-Evolving Chain-of-Thoughts for Data Synthesis in Mathematical Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing methods to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities suffer from diminishing returns or high computing overhead.
Approach: They propose a genetic evolutionary framework that casts CoT generation as a population-based search over reasoning trajectories.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves correct-CoT synthesis success by over 30% and enhances structural diversity with markedly improved efficiency.
MARCH: Multi-Agent Reinforced Check for Hallucination (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect hallucinations suffer from inherent confirmation bias, where the verifier inadvertently reproduces the errors of the original generation.
Approach: They propose a framework that enforces rigorous factual alignment by leveraging deliberate *information asymmetry* by combining a pipeline of three specialized agents: a Solver, a Proposer, and a Checker.
Outcome: Extensive experiments across hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that MARCH substantially reduces hallucinism rates.
FedPETuning: When Federated Learning Meets the Parameter-Efficient Tuning Methods of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing research on federated learning (FL) for pre-trained language models (PLMs) with increasing concerns about data privacy, enterprises or institutions are not allowed to collect data from end devices or local clients to a centralized server for fine-tuning PLMs.
Approach: They investigate the parameter-efficient tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs) and develop a federated benchmark for four representative PETuning methods .
Outcome: The proposed method can defend against privacy attacks and maintain acceptable performance with reducing heavy resource consumption.
From Conversation to Evaluation: Benchmarking LLMs on Development Knowledge via SimpleDevQA (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing Dev Knowledge QA benchmarks are limited in development knowledge scope and often not built from real user queries.
Approach: They conduct preliminary analysis of real user–LLM dialogues from WildChat to investigate the importance of Dev Knowledge QA in AI-assisted software development scenarios.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark is based on real user–LLM dialogues from WildChat.
COPR: Continual Human Preference Learning via Optimal Policy Regularization (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is effective for aligning Large Language Models with human preferences, but its complex process limits its ability to continually learn human feedback.
Approach: They propose a non-RL offline method to convert historical optimal policies into optimization constraints when continually learning new preferences.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms strong CL baselines in terms of reward-based evaluations and human assessment.
From Curated Data to Scalable Models: Continual Pre-training of Dense and MoE Large Language Models for Tibetan (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models have achieved remarkable success across a wide range of tasks, yet their performance remains heavily biased toward high-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a pipeline for advancing Tibetan language modeling through multilingual continual pre-training with Tibetan, Chinese, and English.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms open-source and Tibetan-focused models on diverse tasks.
Federated Model Decomposition with Private Vocabulary for Text Classification (2022.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to train federated learning (FL) for natural language processing require sensitive data to leave local devices.
Approach: They propose a fedrated model decomposition method that protects the privacy of vocabularies . they propose an adaptive updating technique to improve the performance of local models .
Outcome: The proposed method protects the privacy of vocabularies in federated learning tasks . it maintains competitive performance and provides better privacy-preserving capacity compared to status quo methods.
Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering (2024.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Domain-specific question answering (QA) requires a comprehensive understanding of a specific domain to answer specialized questions.
Approach: They propose a new alignment objective to align the LLM preference with different human preferences uniformly to optimize LLM performance in real-world, domain-specific QA settings.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline is superior for real-scenario domain-specific question answering with LLMs.
Towards Visual Question Answering on Pathology Images (2021.acl-short)

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Challenge: Pathology imaging is used for identifying the causes and effects of diseases or injuries.
Approach: They propose a pathological visual question answering framework to analyze pathology images and answer medical questions related to these images.
Outcome: The proposed framework performs self-supervised pretraining and finetuning end-to-end to learn powerful visual and textual representations jointly and automatically identifies and excludes noisy self-controlled examples from pretraining.
GigaSpeech 2: An Evolving, Large-Scale and Multi-domain ASR Corpus for Low-Resource Languages with Automated Crawling, Transcription and Refinement (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: GigaSpeech 2 is a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages.
Approach: They propose a large-scale, multi-domain, multilingual speech recognition corpus for low-resource languages and an automated pipeline for data crawling, transcription, and label refinement.
Outcome: The proposed corpus reduces the word error rate for Thai, Indonesian, and Vietnamese on a realistic YouTube test set by 25% to 40% compared to Whisper large-v3.
Structured and Abstractive Reasoning on Multi-modal Relational Knowledge Images (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing studies on understanding and reasoning with abstractive information from the visual modality have not explored the use of STructured and Abstractive Reasoning (STAR) on such data.
Approach: They propose an automatic STAR data engine to synthesize images with MMRK to build multi-modal instructions with reliable chain-of-thought thinking for various STAR tasks.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms GPT-4o in STAR and improves performance across 8 open-source MLLMs.
Have We Designed Generalizable Structural Knowledge Promptings? Systematic Evaluation and Rethinking (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods to integrate external knowledge into LLMs focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP.
Approach: They propose a new paradigm for structural knowledge prompting to integrate external structural knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations.
Outcome: The proposed benchmark SUBARU enables the evaluation of the generalization capabilities of SKP from four perspectives.
FEDLEGAL: The First Real-World Federated Learning Benchmark for Legal NLP (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: federated learning (FL) is a promising technique for preserving data privacy . however, there is no work on applying FL to legal NLP .
Approach: They propose to use federated learning to train models in a collaborative way without sharing data . they propose to test the FL benchmark on real-world legal data from Chinese courts .
Outcome: The proposed benchmark combines five legal NLP tasks and one privacy task on Chinese courts.
LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: LegalBench evaluated 20 LLMs in 162 legal tasks in 20 countries and jurisdictions.
Approach: They present a comprehensive evaluation of 21 popular Large Language Models and the first comparative analysis of the empirical results.
Outcome: The proposed benchmarks are based on the Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy and are compared to 21 popular LLMs.
Detecting Knowledge Boundary of Vision Large Language Models by Sampling-Based Inference (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to detect the knowledge boundary of Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) are expensive and require indiscriminate retrieval to address questions that require real-time information or are knowledge-intensive.
Approach: They propose a method that fine-tunes a VLLM on an automatically constructed dataset for boundary identification.
Outcome: The proposed method reduces indiscriminate retrieval while maintaining or improving the performance of a VLLM on an automatically constructed dataset.
Skill Weaving: Efficient LLM Improvement via Modular Skillpacks (2026.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Large Language Models (LLMs) can specialize under fixed memory and inference budgets, but they struggle to achieve high performance across heterogeneous domains.
Approach: They propose a modular improvement framework that partitions full capabilities of a general-purpose model into domain-specific delta modules that reorganize and refine the model's internal knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed framework outperforms monolithic models on multi-task and agentic benchmarks and achieves up to 4 speedup.
Can CLIP Count Stars? An Empirical Study on Quantity Bias in CLIP (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Despite its versatility, CLIP-based applications often suffer from misunderstandings regarding user intent, leading to discrepancies between the required number of objects and the actual outputs.
Approach: They empirically evaluate CLIP’s understanding of quantity from text, image, and cross-modal perspectives by carefully designing different experimental settings and datasets.
Outcome: The proposed model has shown significant success in various downstream tasks, including editing, generation, and quality evaluation.
Self-Improvement Towards Pareto Optimality: Mitigating Preference Conflicts in Multi-Objective Alignment (2025.findings-acl)

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Challenge: Existing approaches to optimize large language models with human preferences suffer from preference conflicts in the data.
Approach: They propose to construct Pareto-optimal responses to resolve preference conflicts by using a self-improving DPO framework that enables LLMs to self-generate and select Paret-optimized responses.
Outcome: The proposed framework achieves superior Pareto Front performance over baselines on two datasets.
Self-Improvement Programming for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Answering (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods implicitly model time constraints by learning time-aware embeddings of questions and candidate answers, which is far from understanding the question comprehensively.
Approach: They propose a temporal-based temporal programming method that leverages the in-context learning ability of Large Language Models to understand combinatory time constraints in questions.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms existing methods on multiTQ and CronQuestions datasets and is highly efficient on multi-level questions.
Unleashing the Power of Imbalanced Modality Information for Multi-modal Knowledge Graph Completion (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing MMKGC methods overlook the imbalance problem of modality information among entities, resulting in inadequate modal fusion and inefficient utilization of the raw modality.
Approach: They propose to integrate structural, visual, and textual information of entities into the discriminant models to predict the missing triples.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms 19 recent methods and achieves state-of-the-art results on three public MMKGC benchmarks.
TreeRare: Syntax Tree-Guided Retrieval and Reasoning for Knowledge-Intensive Question Answering (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing work shows that large language models generate incorrect statements due to over-reliance on parametric knowledge.
Approach: They propose a framework that utilizes syntax trees to guide information retrieval and reasoning for question answering.
Outcome: The proposed framework improves on existing state-of-the-art methods for large-scale query processing.
Profiler: Black-box AI-generated Text Origin Detection via Context-aware Inference Pattern Analysis (2025.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Existing methods to identify the origin of AI-generated texts fail to identify origin due to the high similarity of different LLMs.
Approach: They propose a black-box AI-generated text origin detection method which accurately predicts the origin of an input text by extracting distinct context inference patterns.
Outcome: The proposed method outperforms 10 state-of-the-art baselines and achieves a 25% increase in AUC score on average across natural language and code datasets.
Exploiting the Shadows: Unveiling Privacy Leaks through Lower-Ranked Tokens in Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Large language models face vulnerabilities related to the extraction of sensitive information.
Approach: They propose a method to exploit the model's lower-ranked output tokens to extract private information from retrieved documents or training knowledge.
Outcome: The proposed method is effective in both the agentic application privacy extraction setting and the direct training data extraction.
ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs (2024.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent research has neglected instances-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations.
Approach: They propose a framework to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in large language models.
Outcome: The proposed framework evaluates and comprehends prompt sensitivity in large language models.
FedLFC: Towards Efficient Federated Multilingual Modeling with LoRA-based Language Family Clustering (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Existing frameworks for multilingual modeling face communication costs and parameter interference conflicts.
Approach: They propose a communication-efficient federated learning framework with low-rank adaptation and language family clustering for Multilingual Modeling (MM) they maintain the weights of the base model, updating the lightweight Low-rank adapt parameters to minimize communication costs.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms the baseline models in performance and reduces communication overhead.
FinHEAR: Human Expertise and Adaptive Risk-Aware Temporal Reasoning for Financial Decision-Making (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Large language models often overlook key behavioral patterns underlying human financial behavior.
Approach: FinHEAR is a multi-agent framework for human expertise and Adaptive Risk-aware reasoning.
Outcome: FinHEAR outperforms baseline models in trend forecasting and decision-making.
T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies evaluate the tool utilization ability of large language models based on the final output or only consider the single-step tool calling.
Approach: They propose a new approach to evaluate the tool utilization capability of large language models (LLMs) they decompose the tool usage into multiple sub-processes, including instruction following, planning, reasoning, retrieval, understanding, and review.
Outcome: The proposed model exhibits consistency with the outcome-oriented evaluation and provides a more fine-grained analysis of the capabilities of LLMs.

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