Papers by Zihan Xu
TIE: Topological Information Enhanced Structural Reading Comprehension on Web Pages (2022.naacl-main)
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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. |
ShadowGNN: Graph Projection Neural Network for Text-to-SQL Parser (2021.naacl-main)
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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 . |
Zero-shot Cross-lingual Dialogue Systems with Transferable Latent Variables (D19-1)
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| Challenge: | a lack of research on multilingual or cross-lingual task-oriented dialog systems has limited results . we propose a zero-shot adaptation of task-orientated dialog systems to low-resource languages . task-focused systems are often trained with monolingual datasets that are expensive to build or acquire . |
| Approach: | They propose a zero-shot adaptation of multilingual task-oriented dialog systems to low-resource languages using latent variables and a set of very few parallel word pairs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better in natural language understanding task compared to state-of-the-art model . the proposed model uses very few parallel word pairs to refine cross-lingual representations . |
Enhancing Character-Level Understanding in LLMs through Token Internal Structure Learning (2025.acl-long)
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Zhu Xu, Zhiqiang Zhao, Zihan Zhang, Yuchi Liu, Quanwei Shen, Fei Liu, Yu Kuang, Jian He, Conglin Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) use tokenization methods but often obscure internal character structures within tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that improves models’ ability to capture character positions within tokens by training them on reverse character prediction tasks using the tokenizer’s vocabulary. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the proposed method improves position prediction accuracy in large language models, enabling more precise identification of target characters in original text. |
Alignment for Efficient Tool Calling of Large Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Generalizing Question Answering System with Pre-trained Language Model Fine-tuning (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods focus on improving in-domain performance, leaving open the question of how they can generalize to out-of-domain and unseen RC tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-task learning framework that learns the shared representation across different tasks and builds on a large pre-trained language model and fine-tuned on multiple RC datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the BERT-Large baseline by 8.39 and 7.22 respectively. |
Answer-driven Deep Question Generation based on Reinforcement Learning (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for deep question generation focus on enhancing document representations, but little attention is paid to the answer information. |
| Approach: | They propose a deep question generation model that makes better use of the target answer as a guidance to facilitate question generation. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in automatic and human evaluations on the hotpotQA dataset. |
ChatGLM-Math: Improving Math Problem-Solving in Large Language Models with a Self-Critique Pipeline (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Yifan Xu, Xiao Liu, Xinghan Liu, Zhenyu Hou, Yueyan Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Aohan Zeng, Zhengxiao Du, Zhao Wenyi, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent mastering of human language but struggle in real-world applications that require mathematical problem-solving. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline to train a general Math-Critique model from the LLM itself to provide feedback signals and employ rejective fine-tuning and direct preference optimization over the Llm's own generations for data collection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed pipeline outperforms existing LLMs that could be two times larger. |
MatPlotAgent: Method and Evaluation for LLM-Based Agentic Scientific Data Visualization (2024.findings-acl)
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Zhiyu Yang, Zihan Zhou, Shuo Wang, Xin Cong, Xu Han, Yukun Yan, Zhenghao Liu, Zhixing Tan, Pengyuan Liu, Dong Yu, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiaodong Shi, Maosong Sun
| Challenge: | Scientific data visualization is an essential process in research, but its use of large language models remains unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic LLM agent framework to automate scientific data visualization tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves performance of commercial and open-source models. |
Sinkhorn Distance Minimization for Knowledge Distillation (2024.lrec-main)
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Xiao Cui, Yulei Qin, Yuting Gao, Enwei Zhang, Zihan Xu, Tong Wu, Ke Li, Xing Sun, Wengang Zhou, Houqiang Li
| Challenge: | Existing knowledge distillation methods investigate divergence measures but fail to deliver effective supervision when few distribution overlap exists between teacher and student. |
| Approach: | They propose a knowledge distillation method that exploits the Sinkhorn distance to ensure a nuanced assessment of the disparity between teacher and student distributions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on all kinds of LLMs with encoder-only, encoder decoder, and decoded architectures. |
Coach: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Cross-domain Slot Filling (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to slot filling are expensive and time-consuming. |
| Approach: | They propose a Coarse-to-fine approach for cross-domain slot filling . they propose utterance templates to regularize the representation of utterrances . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in slot filling . it can be applied to the cross-domain named entity recognition task . |
Retrieve-Plan-Generation: An Iterative Planning and Answering Framework for Knowledge-Intensive LLM Generation (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Meta-Transfer Learning for Code-Switched Speech Recognition (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Increasing number of people in the world today speak a mixed-language as a result of being multilingual. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to transfer learn on a code-switched speech recognition system by extracting information from high-resource monolingual datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines on speech recognition and language modeling tasks and is faster to converge. |
ASCEND: A Spontaneous Chinese-English Dataset for Code-switching in Multi-turn Conversation (2022.lrec-1)
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Holy Lovenia, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Winata, Peng Xu, Yan Xu, Zihan Liu, Rita Frieske, Tiezheng Yu, Wenliang Dai, Elham J. Barezi, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, Pascale Fung
| 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. |
WebCPM: Interactive Web Search for Chinese Long-form Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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Yujia Qin, Zihan Cai, Dian Jin, Lan Yan, Shihao Liang, Kunlun Zhu, Yankai Lin, Xu Han, Ning Ding, Huadong Wang, Ruobing Xie, Fanchao Qi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou
| Challenge: | Long-form question answering requires two procedures: information retrieval and information synthesis. |
| Approach: | They propose a Chinese long-form question answering dataset called WebCPM . the dataset is based on a web search interface that engages with a search engine in real time . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset generates answers that are no worse than human-written ones . the dataset is the first Chinese LFQA dataset . |
Identifying Collective Intelligence Factor in LLM Agent Groups for Generalizable Multi-Agent System Design (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Prior studies have focused on designing customized MAS for specific tasks . a critical research question remains: do LLM agent groups exhibit a form of "general intelligence" |
| Approach: | They find a Collective Intelligence factor in human groups that captures their general capability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts the ACI factor based on the features of LLM agent groups and can improve generalization abilities. |
From 128K to 4M: Efficient Training of Ultra-Long Context Large Language Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Long-context capabilities are essential for document and video understanding, in-contact learning, and inference-time scaling. |
| Approach: | They propose an efficient training recipe for building ultra-long context LLMs from aligned instruct model, pushing the boundaries of context lengths from 128K to 1M, 2M, and 4M tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model extends the context window while maintaining short context capabilities while maintaining the performance of the existing model. |
Shall We Pretrain Autoregressive Language Models with Retrieval? A Comprehensive Study (2023.emnlp-main)
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Boxin Wang, Wei Ping, Peng Xu, Lawrence McAfee, Zihan Liu, Mohammad Shoeybi, Yi Dong, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Bo Li, Chaowei Xiao, Anima Anandkumar, Bryan Catanzaro
| Challenge: | a recent study shows that retrieval-augmented LMs can improve text generation quality and accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that reproduces RETRO parameters while retrieving a text corpus . they find RETRO outperforms GPT on text generation with less repetition . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms standard retrieval-augmented GPT and retrieval augmented GTP on text generation and accuracy tasks. |
Cross-lingual Spoken Language Understanding with Regularized Representation Alignment (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | despite promising results, current cross-lingual models suffer from imperfect cross-linguistic representation alignments between the source and target languages, which makes the performance sub-optimal. |
| Approach: | They propose a regularization approach to align word-level and sentence-level representations across languages without external resources. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models in few-shot and zero-shot scenarios and achieves comparable performance to supervised training with all training data. |
Let the Expert Stick to His Last: Expert-Specialized Fine-Tuning for Sparse Architectural Large Language Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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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. |
Natural Language Processing in Support of Evidence-based Medicine: A Scoping Review (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Evidence-based medicine (EBM) is at the forefront of modern healthcare, emphasizing the use of the best available scientific evidence to guide clinical decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose to investigate the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to identify, appraise, synthesize, apply, and disseminate evidence in EBM. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods support the five fundamental steps of EBM—Ask, Acquire, Appraise, Apply, and Assess. |
iPET: An Interactive Emotional Companion Dialogue System with LLM-Powered Virtual Pet World Simulation (2025.acl-demo)
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Zheyong Xie, Shaosheng Cao, Zuozhu Liu, Zheyu Ye, Zihan Niu, Chonggang Lu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen, Zhe Xu, Yao Hu, Wei Lu
| 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. |
LLM×MapReduce: Simplified Long-Sequence Processing using Large Language Models (2025.acl-long)
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Zihan Zhou, Chong Li, Xinyi Chen, Shuo Wang, Yu Chao, Zhili Li, Haoyu Wang, Qi Shi, Zhixing Tan, Xu Han, Xiaodong Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
| 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. |
Learning Knowledge Bases with Parameters for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems (2020.findings-emnlp)
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Andrea Madotto, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Genta Indra Winata, Yan Xu, Zihan Liu, Zhaojiang Lin, Pascale Fung
| Challenge: | End-to-end systems rely on dialogue state tracking and annotations to fulfill user requests . modularized systems require multiple steps, including a direct interaction with the KB . |
| Approach: | They propose a method to embed the KB directly into the model parameters . they evaluate five task-oriented dialogue datasets with small, medium, and large KBs . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can embed the KB directly into the model parameters without any DST or template responses, nor the kb as input. |
MulVul: Retrieval-augmented Multi-Agent Code Vulnerability Detection via Cross-Model Prompt Evolution (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) struggle to automate real-world vulnerability detection due to the heterogeneity of vulnerability patterns and manual prompt engineering for massive weakness categories is unscalable. |
| Approach: | They propose a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework for precise and broad-coverage vulnerability detection using a coarse-to-fine strategy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the baseline model on 130 CWE types and achieves 34.79% Macro-F1 performance. |