Papers by Zijian Chen
Uncovering Scaling Laws for Large Language Models via Inverse Problems (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Arun Verma, Zhaoxuan Wu, Zijian Zhou, Xiaoqiang Lin, Zhiliang Chen, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Rui Qiao, Jingtan Wang, Nhung Bui, Xinyuan Niu, Wenyang Hu, Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Zi-Yu Khoo, Zitong Zhao, Xinyi Xu, Apivich Hemachandra, See-Kiong Ng, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
| Challenge: | Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | inverse problems can efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs, authors argue . authors propose brute-force approaches to improve LLM training costs due to high costs . |
| Outcome: | This paper advocates that inverse problems can efficiently uncover scaling laws that guide the building of LLMs to achieve the desirable performance with significantly better cost-effectiveness. |
SpecCache: Speculative KV Cache Reuse for Efficient RAG Serving (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Shuangwu Chen, Shenghao Ye, Yu Guo, Qirui Chen, Jingxian Shuai, Yunpeng Hou, Huasen He, null Jianyang
| Challenge: | Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves LLMs but faces high prefill latency during long contexts. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses deep-layer hidden-state norms to guide token selection . they propose to use deep-layered hidden-status norms as a proxy to guide the token selection. |
| Outcome: | The proposed SpecCache outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) benchmarks. |
QuackIR: Retrieval in DuckDB and Other Relational Database Management Systems (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Existing vector databases for RAG are needed for large language models, but there are no alternatives. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage existing relational databases for retrieval-augmented generation . they use duckDB, SQLite, and PostgreSQL integrations to demonstrate their effectiveness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is comparable to existing IR tools. |
TAG : Type Auxiliary Guiding for Code Comment Generation (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing code comment generation approaches ignore type information of interpretation of the code, e.g., operator, string, etc. Existing approaches ignore the type information due to the hierarchical dependence among the type. |
| Approach: | They propose an encoder-decoder framework which considers the source code as an N-ary tree with type information associated with each node. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is based on a Type Auxiliary Guiding encoder-decoder framework and a type-restricted Decoder to resolve training difficulties. |
Mirror: A Universal Framework for Various Information Extraction Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)
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Tong Zhu, Junfei Ren, Zijian Yu, Mengsong Wu, Guoliang Zhang, Xiaoye Qu, Wenliang Chen, Zhefeng Wang, Baoxing Huai, Min Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent studies often formulate IE tasks as a triplet extraction problem, but this paradigm does not support multi-span and n-ary extraction, leading to weak versatility. |
| Approach: | They propose a multi-span cyclic graph extraction problem and a non-autoregressive graph decoding algorithm to extract all spans in a single step. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms or reaches competitive performance with SOTA systems under few-shot and zero-shot settings and it is compatible with 57 datasets. |
Personal Travel Solver: A Preference-Driven LLM-Solver System for Travel Planning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in understanding complex instructions and reasoning across diverse domains. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate user’s implicit preference into the progress of travel planning by integrating real user reviews and point-of-interest metadata from Google Local into RealTravel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves better performance than baseline methods and improves the level of personalization. |
Rethinking Table Pruning in TableQA: From Sequential Revisions to Gold Trajectory-Supervised Parallel Search (2026.acl-long)
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Yu Guo, Shenghao Ye, Shuangwu Chen, Zijian Wen, Tao Zhang, Bai Qirui, Dong Jin, Yunpeng Hou, Huasen He, null Jianyang, Xiaobin Tan
| Challenge: | Existing pruning methods rely on sequential revisions and unreliable critique signals . Existing methods fail to detect the loss of answer-critical data . |
| Approach: | They propose a table pruning framework which transforms table pruning to gold trajectory-supervised parallel search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the strongest baseline pruning framework by 3.2% on various tabular reasoning tasks. |
BrowseComp-Plus: A Fair and Disentangled Evaluation Benchmark for Deep Search Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zijian Chen, Xueguang Ma, Shengyao Zhuang, Ping Nie, Kai Zou, Sahel Sharifymoghaddam, Andrew Liu, Joshua Green, Kshama Patel, Ruoxi Meng, Mingyi Su, Yanxi Li, Haoran Hong, Xinyu Shi, Xuye Liu, Hosna Oyarhoseini, Nandan Thakur, Crystina Zhang, Luyu Gao, Wenhu Chen, Jimmy Lin
| Challenge: | Existing benchmarks for deep search agents rely on blackbox web search APIs . dynamic and opaque web APIs hinder reproducibility and fair comparisons - authors . |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark that employs a fixed corpus for controlled retrieval for deep search agents. |
| Outcome: | The new benchmark shows that agents that combine large language models with retrieval tools excel at complex, reasoning-intensive queries. |
Improving Visual-Semantic Embedding with Adaptive Pooling and Optimization Objective (2023.eacl-main)
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Zijian Zhang, Chang Shu, Ya Xiao, Yuan Shen, Di Zhu, Youxin Chen, Jing Xiao, Jey Han Lau, Qian Zhang, Zheng Lu
| Challenge: | Recent VSE models combine simple pooling methods with hard triplet loss to improve performance. |
| Approach: | They propose an adaptive pooling strategy that allows the model to learn how to aggregate features through a combination of simple pooling methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed strategy outperforms current state-of-the-art systems on image-to-text and text-toimage retrieval. |
Zero-Shot ATC Coding with Large Language Models for Clinical Assessments (2025.naacl-industry)
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| Challenge: | Manual assignment of ATC codes to prescription records is a significant bottleneck in healthcare operations. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to automate the assignment of ATC codes to prescription records . they use locally deployable large language models to guide LLMs through the ontology . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method achieves 78% exact match accuracy with GPT-4o and 60% with Llama 3.1 70B. |
Position Paper: Data-Centric AI in the Age of Large Language Models (2024.findings-emnlp)
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Xinyi Xu, Zhaoxuan Wu, Rui Qiao, Arun Verma, Yao Shu, Jingtan Wang, Xinyuan Niu, Zhenfeng He, Jiangwei Chen, Zijian Zhou, Gregory Kang Ruey Lau, Hieu Dao, Lucas Agussurja, Rachael Hwee Ling Sim, Xiaoqiang Lin, Wenyang Hu, Zhongxiang Dai, Pang Wei Koh, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low
| Challenge: | a paper proposes a data-centric perspective of AI research, focusing on large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a data-centric viewpoint of AI research, focusing on large language models . they propose four scenarios centered around data, including data curation, attribution, knowledge transfer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed research focuses on large language models with data centric benchmarks . the proposed benchmarks can be used to develop new data curation methods . |