Papers by Zhuohang Li
From Passive Metric to Active Signal: The Evolving Role of Uncertainty Quantification in Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have remarkable capabilities, but unreliability remains a barrier to deployment in high-stakes domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to transform uncertainty from a passive diagnostic metric to an active control signal guiding real-time model behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model evolution from passive diagnostic metric to active control signal is critical for high-stakes applications. |
SAC3: Reliable Hallucination Detection in Black-Box Language Models via Semantic-aware Cross-check Consistency (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection rely on self-consistency check alone . prominent LMs exhibit a tendency to produce exceedingly confident, but erroneous, assertions . |
| Approach: | They propose a sampling-based method that expands on the principle of self-consistency checking to detect hallucinations at question-level and model-level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the state of the art in detecting non-factual and factual statements across multiple question-answering and open-domain generation benchmarks. |
Heuristic-based Search Algorithm in Automatic Instruction-focused Prompt Optimization: A Survey (2025.findings-acl)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to remarkable achievements across a variety of NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy of automatic prompt optimization methods that explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods can explore and improve prompts with minimal human oversight. |
Towards Statistical Factuality Guarantee for Large Vision-Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in image-conditioned text generation, but hallucinated outputs pose a major barrier to their use in safety-critical applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a conformal-prediction-based framework that achieves finite-sample distribution-free statistical guarantees to the factuality of LVLM output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces the error rate of LLaVa-1.5 claims from 87.8% to 10.0% while ensuring that the output is accurate. |
SEE: Strategic Exploration and Exploitation for Cohesive In-Context Prompt Optimization (2025.acl-long)
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Wendi Cui, Jiaxin Zhang, Zhuohang Li, Hao Sun, Damien Lopez, Kamalika Das, Bradley A. Malin, Sricharan Kumar
| Challenge: | Existing approaches separate the optimization of prompt instructions and in-context learning examples, leading to incohesive, suboptimal results. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that refines both prompt instructions and in-context learning examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art prompt optimization methods on 35 benchmark tasks. |
Do You Know What You Are Talking About? Characterizing Query-Knowledge Relevance For Reliable Retrieval Augmented Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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Zhuohang Li, Jiaxin Zhang, Chao Yan, Kamalika Das, Sricharan Kumar, Murat Kantarcioglu, Bradley Malin
| Challenge: | Language models suffer from poor interpretability and transparency, as well as the intrinsic risk of hallucination and misinformation. |
| Approach: | They propose a statistical framework that assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses how well a query can be answered by an RAG system by capturing the relevance of knowledge. |
Divide-Conquer-Reasoning for Consistency Evaluation and Automatic Improvement of Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for evaluating the quality and consistency of text generated by Large Language Models are not effective. |
| Approach: | They propose a divide-conquer-reasoning approach to evaluate LLM-generated texts using a split-and-conquers evaluator and an automatic metric converter to facilitate this approach. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin on multiple benchmarks and reduces 90% of output inconsistencies in one iteration. |