Papers by Zi Wang
Select-Then-Decompose: From Empirical Analysis to Adaptive Selection Strategy for Task Decomposition in Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing task decomposition methods focus on memory, tool usage, and feedback mechanisms, but they often overlook the trade-off between performance and cost. |
| Approach: | They propose a strategy that selects the most suitable decomposition approach based on task characteristics and enhances the reliability of the results through a verification module. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy is based on categories of approaches, characteristics of tasks, and configuration of decomposition and execution models. |
Adaptive Feature-based Low-Rank Compression of Large Language Models via Bayesian Optimization (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yixin Ji, Yang Xiang, Juntao Li, Qingrong Xia, Zi Ye, Xinyu Duan, Zhefeng Wang, Kehai Chen, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Large language models require a balance between efficiency and performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a low-rank compression technique that reduces non-essential parameters by decomposing weight matrices into products of two low-ranked matrici. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing pruning and low-rank compression techniques in maintaining model performance at the same compression ratio. |
On Evaluating Multilingual Compositional Generalization with Translated Datasets (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a growing amount of research investigating compositional generalization in NLP is done on English . a critical semantic distortion is a limitation of the translation of datasets . |
| Approach: | They propose to translate a dataset for evaluating compositional generalization in semantic parsing. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks show that the translation of the MCWQ dataset suffers from semantic distortion. |
“Yes, My LoRD.” Guiding Language Model Extraction with Locality Reinforced Distillation (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for model extraction attacks on large language models are inadequate . existing methods neglect the inconsistency between training tasks and LLM alignment . |
| Approach: | They propose a model extraction algorithm that uses a policy-gradient-style training task to guide the crafting of preference for the local model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm reduces query complexity while mitigating watermark protection . it can extract various state-of-the-art commercial LLMs while minimizing query complexity . |
OPT-Tree: Speculative Decoding with Adaptive Draft Tree Structure (2025.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Autoregressive language models generate one token in one step, limiting inference efficiency . Existing methods do not adapt to different situations to maximize acceptance length . speculative decoding has shown great potential for lossless acceleration . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to construct adaptive and scalable draft trees for autoregressive language models. |
| Outcome: | Experimental results show that OPT-Tree outperforms existing draft trees and achieves speed-up ratio of up to 3.2 compared with autoregressive decoding. |
Text Meets Topology: Rethinking Out-of-distribution Detection in Text-Rich Networks (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for out-of-distribution (OOD) detection ignore textual-structural diversity . text-rich networks (TrNs) represent complex interplay between textual content and relational structures . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating out-of-distribution detection in text-rich networks . they propose augmentations, structural shifts, and domain-based divisions to model interplay . |
| Outcome: | Experiments on 11 datasets show the framework is effective in out-of-distribution detection. |
ForestCast: Open-Ended Event Forecasting with Semantic News Forest (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches and datasets overlook the complex relationships among events . current research lacks comprehensive evaluation methods to evaluate OEEF . |
| Approach: | They propose a prediction pipeline that extracts forecast-relevant events from news data . forestcast organizes news events into a story tree and predicts subsequent events along each path . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline extracts forecast-relevant events from news data and predicts subsequent events along each path. |
Event-Content-Oriented Dialogue Generation in Short Video (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing multi-modal dialogue models are limited to incapacity of reading visual information and multi-dimensional interactions. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel event-oriented video-dialogue dataset called SportsVD to overcome these challenges by generating human-like response according to event contents in the video and related external knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods on SportsVD and other baselines under several automatic metrics. |
Beyond Prompt Engineering: A Systematic Analysis of Prompt Lexical Sensitivity and Its Impacts on Quality (2026.findings-acl)
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Qipeng Xie, Zi Liang, Jiafei Wu, Yufei Chen, Weizheng Wang, Wenao Ma, Zhong Ming, Haiqin Yang, Kaishun Wu
| Challenge: | Existing studies on prompt engineering have focused on optimizing models for performance under stylistic perturbations. |
| Approach: | They conduct the first analysis of n-gram token-level mechanisms . they find that higher average performance is inherently associated with lower variance and greater stability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model reduces the variance of the generated code by 40% . the proposed model is based on a large-scale dataset of 132,000 prompt variants . |
ESDM: Early Sensing Depression Model in Social Media Streams (2024.lrec-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to use social media data for depression detection are based on traditional risk detection (TRD) and early risk detection of depression (ERD). |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses two modules: classification with partial information module (CPI) and decision for classification moment module (DMC) and an early detection loss function. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms benchmarks in both accuracy and accuracy with evolving partial data. |
Hint-Based Training for Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | AutoRegressive Translation models have to generate tokens sequentially during decoding and thus suffer from high inference latency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use hidden states and word alignments to help train NART models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the WMT14 En-De and De-En datasets but is faster in inference than the current models. |
End-to-End Learnable Psychiatric Scale Guided Risky Post Screening for Depression Detection on Social Media (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to detect depression from social media posting history are limited by frozen screening models and lack of learning. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a frozen screening model to train a risky post detection model with psychiatric scales to enable a learnable end-to-end learning process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms several strong baseline methods and qualitative analysis confirms that it better captures users’ mental states than others. |
Making Every Step Effective: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models Through Hierarchical KV Equalization (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | HKVE selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers, ensuring that every optimization step positively contributes to the attack. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that selectively accepts gradient optimization results based on the distribution of attention scores across different layers and selectively takes them into account when calculating the attack success rate. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods by achieving success rates of 75.08% on MiniGPT4, 85.84% on LLaVA and 81.00% on Qwen-VL. |
ToxicChat: Unveiling Hidden Challenges of Toxicity Detection in Real-World User-AI Conversation (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | toxicity detection has been largely based on social media content, leaving the unique challenges inherent to real-world user-AI interactions insufficiently explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to detect toxicity in real-world user-AI conversations . they compare existing models with social media content to find toxicity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark reveals that existing models fail to recognize toxicity in real-world user-AI conversations. |
LSEG: A Fine-tuning Free Method for NL2FOL via Logic-Structure and Entropy Guided Inference Controlling (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large language models struggle with natural language to first order logic (NL2FOL) translation due to logical hallucination. |
| Approach: | They propose a fine-tuning free framework to correct hidden state deviation by leveraging logical stability across logic preserving perturbations of the input. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves logical consistency during inference and improves accuracy over baselines. |
SOM-NCSCM : An Efficient Neural Chinese Sentence Compression Model Enhanced with Self-Organizing Map (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Sentence Compression (SC) is an important natural language processing task . it aims to shorten sentences while preserving the original meanings of the words . improvements on Chinese SC models are still lacking due to several difficulties . |
| Approach: | They propose a neural Chinese SC model enhanced with a Self-Organizing Map from Chinese colloquial sentences from a real-life question answering system. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves a promising F1 score of 89.655 and BLEU4 score of 70.116 . it improves the performance of the whole neural Chinese SC model in a valid manner . |
Balancing Forget Quality and Model Utility: A Reverse KL-Divergence Knowledge Distillation Approach for Better Unlearning in LLMs (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for unlearning large language models struggle with forget quality and model utility, leading to over-unlearning or partial unlearning. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses reverse KL-divergence based knowledge distillation for unlearning to achieve significant forget quality while maintaining model utility. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing methods in forget quality and model utility with larger unlearning datasets. |
CoLA: Compute-Efficient Pre-Training of LLMs via Low-Rank Activation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Ziyue Liu, Ruijie Zhang, Zhengyang Wang, Mingsong Yan, Zi Yang, Paul D. Hovland, Bogdan Nicolae, Franck Cappello, Sui Tang, Zheng Zhang
| Challenge: | Large foundation models have become huge, but they consume computational resources in pretraining. |
| Approach: | They propose to replace full-size layers with compute-efficient auto-encoders that enforce low-rank activations throughout training. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces the computing cost by 2pmbtimes and improves training throughput by 1.86pmtime. |