Papers by Zichao Wang
Open-ended Knowledge Tracing for Computer Science Education (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge tracing (KT) is a method used to estimate student mastery of concepts/skills/knowledge components from their responses to questions and to predict future performance. |
| Approach: | They propose a student knowledge-guided code generation approach that combines program synthesis methods with student knowledge tracing methods to solve the OKT problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method is based on a student knowledge-guided code generation approach and validates on coding questions. |
UniEDU: Toward Unified and Efficient Large Multimodal Models for Educational Tasks (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing research has focused on plain text, while real-world K-12 scenarios often involve multimodal data. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified language and vision assistant called UniEDU for educational applications . it excels across multiple educational tasks while maintaining strong generalization capabilities . authors propose to use UniEDu for industry-scale deployment . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model excels across multiple educational tasks while maintaining strong generalization capabilities. |
A Survey on LLM-based Conversational User Simulation (2026.eacl-long)
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Bo Ni, Yu Wang, Leyao Wang, Branislav Kveton, Franck Dernoncourt, Yu Xia, Hongjie Chen, Reuben Luera, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Puneet Mathur, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Junda Wu, Li Li, Huixin Zhang, Ruiyi Zhang, Tong Yu, Sungchul Kim, Jiuxiang Gu, Zhengzhong Tu, Alexa Siu, Zichao Wang, Seunghyun Yoon, Nedim Lipka, Namyong Park, Zihao Lin, Trung Bui, Yue Zhao, Tyler Derr, Ryan A. Rossi
| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy covering user granularity and simulation objectives . they analyze core techniques and evaluation methodologies to help them understand the latest developments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model enables high-fidelity generation of synthetic user conversation. |
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Principled Content Selection to Generate Diverse and Personalized Multi-Document Summaries (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large language models exhibit the _”lost in the middle” phenomenon when they are unevenly attending to different parts of the provided context. |
| Approach: | They propose principled content selection as a way to increase source coverage . they use determinantal point processes to prioritize diverse content . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves source coverage on the DiverseSumm benchmark. |
ATLAS: A System for PDF-centric Human Interaction Data Collection (2024.naacl-demo)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in AI only make the importance of high-quality data more pronounced. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Portable Document Format (PDF) as a data format to better support researchers in collecting rich PDF-centric datasets from users. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit and extensible schema allows researchers to customize the data collection tasks for a variety of purposes, including annotations, drawing, and reading behavior analytics. |
Interpretable Math Word Problem Solution Generation via Step-by-step Planning (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to solving math word problems focus on obtaining the correct answer. |
| Approach: | They propose a step-by-step planning approach for intermediate solution generation that strategically plans the generation of the next solution step based on the MWP and the previous solution steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves the accuracy and interpretability of the solution on automatic metrics and human evaluation. |
From Selection to Generation: A Survey of LLM-based Active Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have been used for selection and training of data for active learning. |
| Approach: | They propose an intuitive taxonomy that categorizes LLM-based active learning techniques and discuss the transformative roles they can play in the active learning loop. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can generate entirely new data instances and provide more cost-effective annotations with fewer labeled data instances. |
Math Word Problem Generation with Mathematical Consistency and Problem Context Constraints (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate arithmetic math word problems are invalid or have unsatisfactory language quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for automatically generating arithmetic math word problems from equations and context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves language quality and mathematical validity on three real-world MWP datasets. |
Local Additivity Based Data Augmentation for Semi-supervised NER (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Named Entity Recognition (NER) is one of the first stages in deep language understanding yet current NER models heavily rely on human-annotated data. |
| Approach: | They propose a Local Additivity based Data Augmentation method for semi-supervised Named Entity Recognition (NER) that creates virtual samples by interpolating sequences close to each other. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves both entity and context learning by adding to training data and extending it to semi-supervised setting. |
AnalystBench: Benchmarking professional long-form report generation with web-mined multimodal tasks (2026.findings-acl)
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Chau Minh Pham, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Alexa Siu, Akriti Jain, Aparna Garimella, Ananya B. Sai, Nedim Lipka, Mohit Iyyer, Varun Manjunatha
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks decompose the end-to-end professional report generation into individual components. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmarking tool that evaluates 20 real-world professional report generation tasks grounded in multimodal document collections. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms closed-source models on executive summarization tasks but drops significantly on long-horizon synthesis tasks. |
AutoAlign: Get Your LLM Aligned with Minimal Annotations (2025.acl-demo)
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Xinyu Lu, Dong Xu, Chunkang Zhang, Xinyan Guan, Junxiang Wang, Qingyu Zhang, Pengbo Wang, Yingzhi Mao, Hao Xiang, Xueru Wen, Zichao Li, Yaojie Lu, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
| Challenge: | Automated Alignment (ALM) is a set of algorithms designed to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intentions and values while minimizing manual intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit that integrates mainstream automated algorithms through a consistent interface and an accessible workflow supporting one-click execution for prompt synthesis and automatic alignment signal construction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables easy reproduction of existing results through extensive benchmarks and facilitates the development of novel approaches via modular components. |
UrbanVideo-Bench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Embodied Intelligence with Video Data in Urban Spaces (2025.acl-long)
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Baining Zhao, Jianjie Fang, Zichao Dai, Ziyou Wang, Jirong Zha, Weichen Zhang, Chen Gao, Yue Wang, Jinqiang Cui, Xinlei Chen, Yong Li
| Challenge: | Large multimodal models exhibit remarkable intelligence, yet their embodied cognitive abilities during motion in open-ended urban aerial spaces remain to be explored. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate whether large multimodal models can process continuous first-person visual observations like humans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can process first-person visual observations like humans, enabling recall, perception, reasoning, and navigation. |
Data-to-Text Generation with Style Imitation (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches to data-to-text generation focus on improving content fidelity, but lack explicit control over writing styles. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to control writing styles by using existing sentences as "soft" templates . they conduct experiments in restaurants and sports domains to test their approach . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves stronger performance than a range of comparison methods. |
Sycophancy Mitigation Through Reinforcement Learning with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptive Reasoning Trajectories (2025.emnlp-main)
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Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Parshin Shojaee, Qifan Wang, Zichao Wang, Chandan K. Reddy, Ming Jin, Lifu Huang
| Challenge: | Existing studies show that large language models inadvertently foster sycophancy . scophancies are a tendency of models to blindly conform to user preferences without critical reasoning or self-reflection. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to reduce sycophancy by combining uncertainty-aware Monte Carlo tree search and progress-based reinforcement learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models in effectively reducing sycophancy while maintaining performance on out-of-distribution inputs. |
WebMMU: A Benchmark for Multimodal Multilingual Website Understanding and Code Generation (2025.emnlp-main)
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Rabiul Awal, Mahsa Massoud, Aarash Feizi, Zichao Li, Suyuchen Wang, Christopher Pal, Aishwarya Agrawal, David Vazquez, Siva Reddy, Juan A. Rodriguez, Perouz Taslakian, Spandana Gella, Sai Rajeswar
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks focus on specific aspects of web tasks but lack comprehensive coverage. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual benchmark that evaluates three core web tasks: (1) website visual question answering, (2) code editing involving HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and (3) mockup-to-code generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well on basic information extraction, but struggles with reasoning and grounding, editing code to preserve functionality, and generating design-to-code that maintains hierarchy and supports multilingual content. |