Papers by Zi Yang
TURING: an Accurate and Interpretable Multi-Hypothesis Cross-Domain Natural Language Database Interface (2021.acl-demo)
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Peng Xu, Wenjie Zi, Hamidreza Shahidi, Ákos Kádár, Keyi Tang, Wei Yang, Jawad Ateeq, Harsh Barot, Meidan Alon, Yanshuai Cao
| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL semantic parsers cannot achieve high accuracy in cross-database setting . TURING is a NLDB system that can be used to democratize data-driven insights for non-technical users . |
| Approach: | They propose a TURING system that provides high-precision natural language explanations of SQL queries in a beam. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 75.1% execution accuracy and 78.3% top-5 beam execution accuracy on the Spider validation set. |
Optimizing Deeper Transformers on Small Datasets (2021.acl-long)
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Peng Xu, Dhruv Kumar, Wei Yang, Wenjie Zi, Keyi Tang, Chenyang Huang, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Simon J.D. Prince, Yanshuai Cao
| Challenge: | a common belief that training deep transformers from scratch requires large datasets is wrong . however, with proper initialization and optimization, the benefits of very deep transformer can carry over to challenging tasks with small datasets. |
| Approach: | They train 48 layers of transformers from pre-trained RoBERTa and 24 relation-aware layers from scratch. |
| Outcome: | The proposed scheme achieves state-of-the-art performance on a text-to-sql parsing benchmark . it uses 24 fine-tuned layers from pre-trained RoBERTa and 24 relation-aware layers from scratch . |
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. |
Pruning Redundant Mappings in Transformer Models via Spectral-Normalized Identity Prior (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Spectral-normalized identity priors (SNIP) is a structured pruning approach for a Transformer model. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured pruning approach which penalizes an entire residual module toward an identity mapping. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on 5 GLUE benchmark tasks while maintaining comparable performance. |
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 . |
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. |
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. |