Papers by Zhuosheng Zhang
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on dialogue modeling use pre-trained language models to encode dialogue history as successive tokens, which is insufficient in capturing the temporal characteristics of dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a bidirectional information decoupling network as a universal dialogue encoder which explicitly incorporates both the past and future contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model incorporates past and future contexts and can be generalized to a wide range of dialogue-related tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for retrieving encyclopedic knowledge lack a large corpus and effective commonsense retriever. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for retrieval-augmented commonsense reasoning with a large commonsensense corpus and a commonseense retriever. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods on commonsense reasoning tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for red-teaming face a trade-off between requiring target-specific knowledge and incurring prohibitive computational costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that evolves payloads exclusively on the semantic dimension via a discovery-deployment pipeline. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that EVA outperforms baselines in terms of attack success rate while evolving benign seeds into successful attacks within 1.18 to 1.71 iterations. |
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| Challenge: | Open-Domain Question Answering (ODQA) aims to answer questions without explicitly providing specific background documents. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to explicitly utilize the massive knowledge encoded in LLM parameters and their strong instruction understanding abilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework surpasses state-of-the-art methods on three widely-used ODQA datasets and achieves comparable performance with customized fine-tuned models on full training data. |
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| Challenge: | tangled multi-party dialogues lead to difficulties in understanding the dialogue history for both human and machine. |
| Approach: | They propose a model for disentangling multi-party dialogues using speaker property and reference dependency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on the Ubuntu IRC benchmark dataset and contributes to dialogue-related comprehension. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have been widely deployed as autonomous agents capable of following user instructions and making decisions in real-world applications. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate LLMs' ability to follow domain-oriented guidelines . they evaluate Lms on three critical aspects: adherence to diverse rules, robustness to rule updates . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates LLMs on three critical aspects: adherence to diverse rules, robustness to rule updates, and alignment with human preferences. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for conversational machine reading (CMR) are not effective for capturing multiple objects in complex interactive scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a dialogue graph modeling framework that captures explicit and implicit interactions hidden in the rule documents and a model that asks clarification questions to the machine. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exceeds the milestone accuracy score of 80% on the ShARC benchmark and achieves new state-of-the-art by first exceeding the milestone precision score of 90%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods of logical reasoning focus on entity-aware information but ignore hierarchical relations that may even have mutual effects. |
| Approach: | They propose a holistic graph network that deals with context at both discourse-level and word-level as the basis for logical reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on logical reasoning QA datasets and natural language inference datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Diffusion large language models (DLLMs) are a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering token-level probabilities under bidirectional context. |
| Approach: | They propose to use diffusion large language models to generate token-level probabilities under bidirectional context and to examine the calibration paradox inherent to their native uncertainty estimates. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms AR baselines on mathematical reasoning benchmarks and is highly miscalibrated on reasoning benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have optimized independent strategies of ennoising or denosing . Existing methods treat training instances equally throughout the training process . |
| Approach: | They propose to use ennoising and denoising to train discriminative pre-trained language models . they propose to model the complexity of restoring the original sentences from corrupted ones . |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that the proposed method improves pre-training efficiency, effectiveness, and robustness. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models face unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-disciplinary collaboration framework that leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework excels at mining and harnessing medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies train independent or pipeline systems for the two subtasks but are trivial by using hard-label decisions to activate question generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to smooth two dialogue states in one decoder and bridge decision making and question generation to provide a richer dialogue state reference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves state-of-the-art on the OR-ShARC dataset. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods rely on syntactically mapping natural languages to complete formal languages like Python and SQL. |
| Approach: | They propose to deconstruct reasoning-independent semantic information into generic symbolic representations, thereby efficiently capturing more generalized reasoning knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves in-context reasoning accuracy, learning efficiency, out-of-domain generalization, and output stability compared to the Chain-of thought technique. |
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| Challenge: | a recent study has enriched pre-trained language models with syntactic, semantic and other linguistic information to improve their performance. |
| Approach: | They use a pre-trained language model to leverage coreference information to enhance word embeddings . they use additional encoder layers to focus on coreference mentions or a relational graph convolutional network to model the coreference relations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model imitates the human reading process and leverages coreference information to enhance word embeddings. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in scale have enabled large language models to perform NLP tasks zero-shot . however, it is not known whether ChatGPT can serve as a generalist model that can perform many NLP jobs zero- shot. |
| Approach: | They empirically evaluate ChatGPT's zero-shot learning ability on 20 popular NLP datasets . they find it performs well on many tasks favoring reasoning abilities . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can perform many NLP tasks zero-shot without adaptation on downstream data. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work has demonstrated the power of large language models in recalling knowledge and reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose to erase shortcut neurons to mitigate the associated risks . 20% of the failures are attributed to shortcuts, they find . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach reduces failures in multi-hop knowledge editing caused by shortcuts by 20% . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to improve translation quality using human feedback have not been validated. |
| Approach: | They propose to use quality estimation to predict human preferences for feedback training . they propose to detect incorrect translations and assign a penalty term to the reward scores . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms systems using larger parallel corpora by a small amount of monolingual data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to the problem of open-retrieval conversational machine reading (OR-CMR) use two separate modules to approach the problem's two successive sub-tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to model OR-CMR as a unified text-to-text task in a fully end-to end style and propose to use a text-based approach to solve the problem. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on the ShARC and OR-ShARC dataset show that the proposed framework can generalize to different backbone models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing agent benchmarks focus on task completion while neglecting time efficiency in parallel and asynchronous operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for large language models that allows agents to plan long-horizon tasks in a scalable way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on the Overcooked game and can be used to evaluate time efficiency-aware multi-agent planning. |
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| Challenge: | Current vital challenges for autonomous agents lie in two aspects: dependence on strong (M)LLMs and insufficient GUI environment modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a comprehensive cognitive LLM agent with two novel approaches to improve GUI automation performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed agent achieves state-of-the-art performance on AITW and META-GUI benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | This tutorial aims to deliver a comprehensive review of cutting-edge research in MLLMs. |
| Approach: | This tutorial will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML in learning and reasoning. |
| Outcome: | This course will review cutting-edge research in MLLMs and examine the impact of ML models on learning, learning, and multimodal reasoning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on deep question-answering tasks from admission exams is challenging since it requires effective representation to capture complicated semantic relations between questions and answers. |
| Approach: | They propose a hybrid neural model for deep question-answering task from history examinations using a gated network and a machine labeler. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains substantial performance gains over baseline models in terms of multiple evaluation metrics. |
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| Challenge: | Using a novel approach, we can evaluate an agent’s bargaining abilities as an asymmetric incomplete information game. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach that integrates a deterministic Offer Generator and an LLM Narrator to create natural language sentences for generated offers. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the buyer’s deal rates from 26.67% to 88.88% and brings a ten times multiplication of profits on all baselines, even a model that has not been aligned. |
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| Challenge: | Existing efforts to build GUI agents focused on the autonomous mode have failed to address the problem of over-execution. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive GUI agent that predicts confidence levels at each interaction step and elicits adaptive interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed GUI agent outperforms existing models on a complex dataset and on established benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing backdoor defense methods are ineffective for generative large language models . generative LLMs output sequences of high-dimensional token logits instead of low-dimensional classification logits . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages sample-wise gradients to identify backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines significantly in identifying backdoor samples without retraining LLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents extend the utility of LLMs by interacting with dynamic environments. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter fusion framework based on directional consensus evaluation that disentangles knowledge updates through a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework disentangles knowledge updates through a two-stage process with minimal computational overhead and parameter updates. |
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| Challenge: | Syntactic information has been paid a great attention over the role of enhancing SRL . but the gap between syntax-aware and syntax-gnostic SRL is smaller . a new framework proposes syntax-based SRL for a wide range of NLP tasks . |
| Approach: | They propose to extend existing models to investigate more effective ways of incorporating syntax into sequential neural networks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing models on CoNLL-2009 benchmarks in English and Chinese. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on grasping unstructured evidence or potential reasoning paths from structured knowledge bases, yet failing to exploit the benefits of heterogeneous knowledge simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a commonsense fact verification model that bridging heterogeneous knowledge by uncovering latent relationships between structured and unstructured knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can bridge heterogeneous knowledge by uncovering latent relationships between structured and unstructured knowledge. |
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| Challenge: | a pinyin input method engine (IME) allows users to input Chinese into a computer by typing pinyan through the common keyboard. |
| Approach: | They present a pinyin IME that integrates neural machine translation and IR to offer amusive and customizable association ability. |
| Outcome: | The Moon IME integrates neural machine translation and IR to offer amusive association ability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing attacks are classified into end-to-end and pre-training types based on the attack phase . Existing backdoor attacks are based upon perplexity, fine-pruning, and maxEntropy. |
| Approach: | They propose an entropy-based poisoning filter that mitigates backdoor attacks . they propose an invisible and universal task-agnostic backdoor attack via syntactic transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack can transfer backdoors to various downstream tasks while preserving pre-trained language models' pre-training capabilities. |
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| Challenge: | MLLM-powered GUI agents expose multiple interaction-level triggers, causing backdoor attacks . backdoor injection maximizes feature difference across sample classes, improving flexibility . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks using MLLMs . they construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is effective and stealthy for red-teaming backdoor attacks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to planning for GUI tasks are limited due to long historical dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel approach to dynamic planning based on environmental feedback and execution history to guide action prediction in GUI tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach surpasses the strong GPT-4V baseline by +12.7% in accuracy. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies focus on improving negative sampling strategy or extra pretraining for dense passage representations, but these studies are not capturing passage with internal representation conflicts. |
| Approach: | They propose a model with a smaller granularity to capture internal representation conflicts . they introduce a negative sampling strategy to encourage a diverse generation of sentence representations within the same passage. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on three benchmark datasets to alleviate internal representation conflicts. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on retrieval-based context modeling for multi-turn conversation ignores interactions among previous utterances. |
| Approach: | They propose retrieval-based response matching for multi-turn conversation . they propose to combine previous utterances into context using a deep utterrance aggregation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on three multi-turn conversation benchmarks including an e-commerce dialogue corpus. |
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| Challenge: | Prior work attempts to mitigate backdoor learning during training LMs on poisoned datasets . backdoor attack poisons a small portion of training data by implanting specific text patterns . |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-scale low-rank adaptive model that prioritizes learning of clean mapping . they propose radial scalings to reduce the success rate of diverse backdoor attacks . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines significantly in the frequency space . it reduces the success rate of diverse backdoor attacks to below 15% across datasets . |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained language models are time-consuming and lack flexibility. |
| Approach: | They propose a span fine-tuning method which allows for a more efficient and efficient way of incorporating span-level information into pre-training. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on GLUE benchmark show that the proposed method significantly enhances the PrLM and offers more flexibility in an efficient way. |
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| Challenge: | Existing language models are usually trained on large amounts of unlabeled text data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task language representations learning framework for multi-linguistics tasks by Multi-Task Learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the baseline Whole Word Masking BERT on both dependency and constituent syntactic/semantic parsing, GLUE benchmark, and SNLI task. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large-scale pre-training language models (PrLMs) have achieved remarkable successes in a variety of natural language processing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to use SPIDER to capture dialogue exclusive features from dialogue texts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on widely used dialogue benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting unsafe mobile GUI agents are underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a mobile agent safety detection framework that integrates a formal verifier and a VLM-based contextual judge to detect system-level violations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 10%–30% improvements over existing approaches across multiple metrics. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown compelling abilities in reasoning, decision-making, and instruction following. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in judging and identifying safety risks given agent interaction records. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms the best-performing model, GPT-4o, while no other models significantly exceed the random. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have exhibited impressive success and significant potential. |
| Approach: | They propose to modify the knowledge memory with minimum computational cost while preserving the performance on the retained knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods avoid retraining to update the model parameters and have demonstrated promising performance and efficiency. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for large language models (LLMs) lean on handcrafted or task-specific demonstrations and lack reliable knowledge base. |
| Approach: | They propose a one-for-all platform for augmented reasoning and refining based on chain-of-thought prompting that excels in adaptability, reliability, integrity, and interpretability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system exhibits superior performances across six reasoning tasks and offers real-time visual analysis. |
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| Challenge: | Existing PrLMs adopt a Random-Token Masking strategy with a fixed masking ratio and different contents are masked by an equal probability throughout the training. |
| Approach: | They propose two scheduled masking approaches that adaptively tune masking ratio and masked content in different training stages, which improves pre-training efficiency and effectiveness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve the pre-training efficiency and effectiveness on the downstream tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to creating autonomous graphical user interfaces rely on external tools and application-specific APIs to interpret the environment. |
| Approach: | They propose a multimodal solution that directly interacts with the user interface without environment parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution bypasses environment parsing and reliance on application-dependent APIs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing text watermarking technologies lack consistency when texts are translated into different languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual watermark removal attack to bypass watermarking by first obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can remove watermarks without performance loss by obtaining a response from an LLM in a pivot language and then translating it into the target language. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies on adversarial attacks achieve high success rates against PrLMs, claiming that they are not robust. |
| Approach: | They propose to use anomaly detector to evaluate PrLMs with more natural adversarial samples to evaluate their robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to defend all types of attacks and achieve higher accuracy on adversarial samples and compliant samples than other defense frameworks. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities by leveraging chain-of-thought reasoning techniques to solve complex questions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that assesses the entailment relationship between the question and the candidate reasoning chain and uses it to predict the answer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the fine-tuned T5 baseline over the ScienceQA, ECQA, and LastLetter tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that multimodal GUI agents are susceptible to environmental distractions. |
| Approach: | They propose a scenario where both user and agent are benign and environment is not malicious . they implement an adversarial environment injection and analyze the approach to improve faithfulness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves faithfulness of multimodal large language model agents in a graphical user interface environment. |
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| Challenge: | Xue et al., 2025): deploying autonomous web agents in production remains difficult due to site heterogeneity and long-horizon instability. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge-evolving agent that can be used to automate web workflows . they use human-in-the-loop knowledge adaptation and knowledge-aligned progressive summarization . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on WebArena, WebChoreAren and industrial deployment show it outperforms baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for machine reading comprehension use word and character representations, but character is not the minimal unit. |
| Approach: | They propose to use subword rather than character for word embedding enhancement . they also empirically explore different augmentation strategies on subword-augmented embedded embedders . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models on public datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Pinyin-to-character conversion is the core component of pinyin based Chinese input method engine (IME). |
| Approach: | They propose a neural P2C conversion model augmented by an online updated vocabulary to support open vocabulary learning during IME working. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms commercial IMEs and state-of-the-art models on standard corpus and true inputting history dataset in terms of multiple metrics and the online updated vocabulary helps it follow user inputting behavior. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies show that multi-task learning with large-scale supervised tasks suffers from negative effects across tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a task prefix guided multi-task pre-training framework to explore the relationships among tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used as a foundation backbone for a wide range of tasks and as augmentation tool for data augmentation with complementary tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have explored leveraging the LLM itself as an optimizer to identify optimal prompts that maximize task accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a gold label-agnostic prompt evaluation method to reduce dependence on gold labels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method produces more effective prompts even without gold labels. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that automatic summarization generates concise summaries that contain key ideas of source documents. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Element-aware test sets to annotate news-related reference summaries to focus on more fine-grained news elements objectively and comprehensively. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art fine-tuned PLMs and zero-shot LLMs by +4.33/+4.77 on the two datasets, respectively. |
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| Challenge: | e-commerce chatbots usually need a mass of human dialogue data to train, but for multi-turn conversations, the performance is poor. |
| Approach: | They propose an information retrieval augmented multi-turn chatbot which can answer questions based on unstructured documents and deal with multi-turned conversations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed solution outperforms all other models in multi-turn conversations and can learn from conversation records. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training large language models are limited to yes-or-no discriminative tasks, leading users to underestimate the potential risks. |
| Approach: | They propose an editing-based generative backdoor that expands the backdoor to generative tasks in a unified format of any text-to-any text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves high attack success rate by adjusting only a small set of local parameters with few-shot samples. |