Papers by Zihan Chen
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| Challenge: | Existing adaptive methods focus on a single axis, overlooking evidence need and reasoning depth are only partially correlated. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-axis routing framework that separates retrieval necessity from reasoning necessity under a user-defined cost–quality trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage and latency while improving answer quality over strong baselines. |
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| Challenge: | Existing legal language models struggle with dynamic courtroom interactions, resulting in overfitting to standardized legal tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new adversarial evolutionary approach for agents that performs dynamic knowledge learning and evolution through structured adversarials in a simulated courtroom program. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing LLM-based models in three critical dimensions: cognitive agility, professional knowledge, and logical rigor. |
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| Challenge: | Code Large Language Models (CLLMs) are reshaping how software is built, maintained, and evolved. |
| Approach: | They propose to use BPE tokenization to inadvertently leak code secrets . they propose to mitigate the gibberish bias by using a newer tokenizer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is based on a novel method that can be used to detect and mitigate gibberish bias in CLLMs. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in NLP have been driven by the development of Large Language Models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a self-renewal approach to optimize LLM outputs to better align with human preferences without supervised fine-tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves outputs to better align with human preferences across LLMs and tasks without supervised fine-tuning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to search for images using single-modality are limited by representation space fragmentation. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified representation framework that achieves efficient query-target alignment . they introduce a multi-level Chain-of-Thought prompting strategy that guides MLMs to generate discriminative, semantically compatible captions for target images . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves efficient query-target alignment through synergistic components. |
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| Challenge: | Neural machine translation (NMT) is pivotal for crosslingual conversation and trade . traditional solutions that penalize text redundancy or token reoccurrence have shown limited efficacy . |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm that modulates suppression of tokens dynamically, informed by attention weights and inter-token distances. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm outperforms existing methods in precision and generalizability. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to select unlabeled examples for annotation require a long time due to their complexity, hindering their practical viability. |
| Approach: | They propose a graph-based selection method to efficiently identify high-quality instances while minimizing computational overhead. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly reduces selection time and improves performance on different tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for structural reading comprehension (SRC) only focus on comprehension of plain text, tables, tables or knowledge bases. |
| Approach: | They propose a topological information enhanced model which transforms a token-level task into a tag-level one by introducing a two-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. |
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| Challenge: | a new study examines the potential of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with foundation models to enhance expert-level reasoning. |
| Approach: | They introduce PhoPile, a high-quality multimodal dataset specifically designed for Olympiad-level physics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to solve Olympiad-level physics problems. |
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| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsing models struggle to adapt to unseen database schemas . a new architecture, ShadowGNN, processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels . |
| Approach: | They propose a new architecture which processes schemas at abstract and semantic levels. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture outperforms state-of-the-art models on a text-to-sql benchmark . it uses domain-independent representations to extract logical linking between question and schema . |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are impressive in solving tasks, but they can quickly be outdated after deployment. |
| Approach: | They provide a review of recent advances in aligning deployed large language models with the ever-changing world knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models can be used to perform various tasks directly through in-context learning or for further fine-tuning for domain-specific uses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for reinforcement learning for large language models do not accurately assess generalization. |
| Approach: | They propose three core principles for designing more faithful benchmarks: sufficient difficulty, balanced evaluation, and distributional robustness. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmarks do not accurately assess generalization across distribution shifts, difficulty levels, and counterfactual scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | federated fine-tuning of large language models provides privacy-preserving approach to deploying pervasive generative AI services. |
| Approach: | They propose a federated framework for fine-tuning large language models . they propose unified optimization and local personalized perturbation for ZO gradients . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods for integrating ZO gradients in federated learning over diverse heterogeneous data settings. |
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| Challenge: | Recent large language models (LLMs) overlook children’s reading preferences, which poses challenges in CLA. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that augments large language models with children's reading preferences for adaptation by obtaining characters' personalities and narrative structure as additional information for fine-grained instruction tuning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves performance in automatic and human evaluation. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Automated Theorem Proving have shown the effectiveness of leveraging a (large) language model that generates tactics (i.e. proof steps) to search through proof states. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a large language model that generates tactics to search through proof states. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model solves more unseen theorems with lower trial searches than the current model, which only learns from failed attempts. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in tool learning have enabled large language models to integrate external tools, enhancing their task performance by expanding their knowledge boundaries. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines probabilistic knowledge boundary estimation with dynamic decision-making to allow LLMs to better assess when to invoke tools based on their confidence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework shows significant improvements in tool efficiency by reducing unnecessary tool usage. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have shown that LLMs can be significantly improved by integrating external tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that integrates external tools into large language models to evaluate their ability to generate action plans. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates the ability of large language models to generate action plans and generate action plan templates. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for assessing retrieval of relevant information are understudied . previous studies have neglected to evaluate ARAG methods . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark to evaluate existing ARAG methods that use threshold tuning to adjust retrieval for queries instead of indiscriminate retrieval. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to evaluate existing ARAG methods without calibration or training. |
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| Challenge: | Experimental results show that our method significantly improves ELECTRA’s average performance by 2.8% and 3.2% absolute points respectively on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-perspective course learning method to fetch many degrees and visual angles for sample-efficient pre-training and to fully leverage the relationship between generator and discriminator. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ELECTRA's performance on GLUE and SQuAD 2.0 benchmarks and overshadows recent advanced ELECL-style models under the same settings. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved notable successes in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They propose a Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning paradigm for improved fine-tuning and parameter efficiency in multi-task learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing methods on multi-task learning while reducing training costs by over 80% without losing general capability. |
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| Challenge: | Recent studies suggest that the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) grows with model size and pre-training data. |
| Approach: | They propose to combine quality filtering, conditional routing, and cooperative peer teaching to transfer knowledge from powerful teacher models to compact and transparent students. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that QR-Distill is superior to traditional methods. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work incorporates pre-trained word embeddings into Neural Topic Models (NTMs), generating highly coherent topics. |
| Approach: | They conduct thorough experiments to investigate whether embeddings directly with an appropriate word selection method can generate more coherent and diverse topics than NTMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates more coherent and diverse topics than traditional NTMs, achieving higher efficiency and simplicity. |
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| Challenge: | Current research faces an "Evaluation-Realism Dilemma" due to unstable MLLM judges or manual verification. |
| Approach: | They propose a verifiable evaluation dataset grounded in real-world human GUI intents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art framework in achieving a weighted pathway success rate of 45.6% while reducing token consumption and execution time by 76%. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for instruction tuning do not leverage the rich natural language instructions. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a benchmark to study how instruction tuning works in CL tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can achieve similar or better results than existing CL methods. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) often produce factual errors due to limited internal knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented generation framework that generates plan tokens to guide subsequent generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the accuracy of large language models with external knowledge sources. |
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| Challenge: | Code-switching is a speech phenomenon occurring when a speaker switches language during a conversation. |
| Approach: | They propose to collect Mandarin Chinese-English code-switching corpus from read speech rather than spontaneous speech to address this phenomenon. |
| Outcome: | ASCEND consists of 10.62 hours of clean speech, collected from 23 bilingual speakers of Chinese and English. |
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we introduce a suite of math models that excel in solving complex math problems. |
| Approach: | They propose a supervised fine-tuning process that achieves competitive performance across general domains, followed by targeted fine- tuning for the math domain using a carefully curated set of prompts and synthetically generated responses. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms Qwen2.5-Math-72B-Instruct, GPT-4o and Claude-3.5 Sonnet in the math domain. |
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) enables large language models to perform novel tasks without parameter updates by conditioning on a few input-output examples. |
| Approach: | They propose a cost-efficient two-stage pipeline that reduces reliance on LLMs for data labeling. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline reduces reliance on LLMs for data labeling . it leverages readily available cross-task examples to prompt an LLM and pseudo-label a small set of target task instances. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for predicting judgment results for multiple defendants are ineffective. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to predict the judgment results for each defendant in multi-defendant cases . they formalize the multi-diffendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can predict the judgment results for multiple defendants in multi-defendant cases. |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in language models have demonstrated strong capabilities in semantic understanding and contextual modeling. |
| Approach: | They propose a LLaMA-based language model that incentivizes generalization capabilities for speech enhancement. |
| Outcome: | The proposed language model outperforms prior task-specific discriminative and generative models in acoustic enhancement tasks. |
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| Challenge: | Few-shot named entity recognition methods struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) examples due to their reliance on manual labeling for the target domain. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to enable generalization to an unseen target domain with only a few labeled examples. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves significant performance improvements on in-domain and cross-domain datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base, which often miss relevant information located further away from a global view. |
| Approach: | Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information for RAG . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base . |
| Outcome: | Hybrid-RAG combines textual documents and graph-structured relational information . existing methods only retrieve related documents from local neighbors or subgraphs in the knowledge base . |
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| Challenge: | Using a web page and a question, a machine can't understand the contents of web pages. |
| Approach: | They propose a novel dataset for web-based structural reading comprehension that consists of 400K question-answer pairs and a dataset of 6.4K web pages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset consists of 400K question-answer pairs, collected from 6.4K web pages with corresponding HTML source code, screenshots, and metadata. |
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for multi-agent collaboration rely on static or graph-based topologies lacking flexibility and adaptability. |
| Approach: | They propose a new framework that rethinks multi-agent coordination through a sequential structure rather than a graph structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves superior performance while significantly reducing communication overhead. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to solve the entity recognition task. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to select the most informative and representative samples for LLM in-context learning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines on three specialized domain datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks struggle with identifying whether retrieved documents meaningfully contribute to answer generation. |
| Approach: | They propose a document-related metric to quantify the contribution of retrieved documents to correct answer generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing approaches on both single and multiple retrieval paradigms. |
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| Challenge: | Medical data and tasks require extensive preprocessing and standardization for effective use in training LLMs. |
| Approach: | They propose to use MedINST as a meta-dataset to evaluate LLMs' generalization ability. |
| Outcome: | The meta-dataset of biomedical instruction measures the generalization ability of LLMs across multiple open-domain tasks. |
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| Challenge: | CoSQL is a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They present a corpus for building cross-domain, general-purpose database querying dialogue systems . they use a Wizard-of-Oz collection of 3k turns plus 10k+ annotated SQL queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed corpus is based on a Wizard-of-Oz dataset of 3k dialogues querying 200 complex DBs spanning 138 domains. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to annotate dialogues require supervised training, which requires human workers to manually annotates dialogues. |
| Approach: | They propose a turn-level active learning framework to actively select dialogue turns to annotate . their approach can achieve comparable performance to traditional training approaches . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves comparable performance to existing training approaches with significantly less annotated data. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) for dense-architecture LLMs are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose an expert-specialized fine-tuning method that tunes the experts most relevant to downstream tasks while freezing the other experts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches or surpasses full-parameter fine-tuning. |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to role-playing emotional companion products lack sustained personalization and contextual adaptability, limiting their effectiveness in real-world settings. |
| Approach: | They propose a virtual pet agent that can enhance user engagement through rich, dynamic pet behaviors and interactions tailored to individual preferences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has been deployed in a real-world, non-commercial product for 200 days and has demonstrated its effectiveness in practical applications. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibit a critical failure mode: they exhibit brittle reasoning capabilities on out-of-distribution tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework bridging Structural Causal Models and the Information Bottleneck principle to explain this paradox. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework bridges the framework between SCM and IB principles to explain the problem. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies have focused on extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) due to their quadratic computational complexity and a lack of high-quality long training examples, most LLMs are trained with a limited window size. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free framework that enables large language models to effectively process long texts using a divide-and-conquer strategy for comprehensive document understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms open-source and commercial long-context LLMs and is compatible with several models. |
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| Challenge: | Word-level alignment in speech-text pretraining models is limited by word-level annotated data . authors propose an iterative training method for USDP that reduces the dependency on scarce annotation resources. |
| Approach: | They propose an Unsupervised Speech-text word-level alignment with Dynamic Programming (USDP) this method uses Dynamic programming principles to iteratively refine temporal alignment predictions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves on speech-text pretraining tasks compared to existing methods. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) lack robustness in knowledge-intensive tasks due to noisy or irrelevant retrieved data. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-agent debate-based RAG framework that integrates external knowledge sources into large language models to improve their accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is unsupervised and leverages pretrained LLMs without fine-tuning, making it easily adaptable to various tasks. |