Papers by Zihang Liu
HTMuon: Improving Muon via Heavy-Tailed Spectral Correction (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Muon’s orthogonalized update rule suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes the training along noise-dominated directions. |
| Approach: | They propose to preserve Muon's ability to capture parameter interdependencies while producing heavier-tailed updates and inducing heavier-tail weight spectra. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm suppresses the emergence of heavy-tailed weight spectra and over-emphasizes training along noise-dominated directions. |
RFS-Guard: Detecting Reasoning Hallucinations via Cross-Phase Routing Focus in Large Reasoning Models (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate intermediate reasoning traces before the final answer, yet they remain vulnerable to reasoning hallucinations such as subtle arithmetic errors. |
| Approach: | They propose a Routing Focus Score (RFS) that measures how strongly cross-step attention routing aligns with semantic proximity derived from hidden-state cosine similarity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework detects and localizes hallucinations without external tools or repeated sampling. |
Model Balancing Helps Low-data Training and Fine-tuning (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in foundation models have emphasized the need to align pre-trained models with specialized domains using small, curated datasets. |
| Approach: | They propose a layer-wise learning rate scheduler that balances training quality across layers . they adapt it to a curated dataset to achieve alignment with specialized domains . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that it can be used to balance training quality across layers and improve low-data training and fine-tuning for both NLP and SciML tasks. |
Audio-Reasoner: Improving Reasoning Capability in Large Audio Language Models (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in multimodal reasoning overlook the audio modality. |
| Approach: | They propose a large-scale audio language model for deep reasoning that leverages a multitask audio dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs well across key benchmarks including MMAU-mini, AIR-Bench chat/foundation, and MELD. |
Long-form Hallucination Detection with Self-elicitation (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for hallucination detection tend to decompose text into isolated statements, unable to understand contextual semantics. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to leverage self-generated thoughts derived from prior statements as catalysts to elicit the expression of intrinsic knowledge and understand contextual semantics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework enables self-elicitation to elicit expressions of knowledge and understand semantics. |
Beyond the Turn-Based Game: Enabling Real-Time Conversations with Duplex Models (2024.emnlp-main)
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Xinrong Zhang, Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Xu Han, Zihang Xu, Yuanwei Xu, Weilin Zhao, Maosong Sun, Zhiyuan Liu
| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly permeating daily lives and require real-time interactions that mirror human conversations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use time-division-multiplexing to process queries and responses pseudo-simultaneously. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can listen to users while generating output and adjust to provide instant feedback. |