Papers by Zijian Zhou
Closed Boundary Learning for Classification Tasks with the Universum Class (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods treat the Universum class equally with the classes of interest, leading to problems such as overfitting, misclassification, and diminished model robustness. |
| Approach: | They propose a closed boundary learning method that applies closed decision boundaries to classes of interest and designates the area outside all closed boundaries as the Universum class. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves accuracy and robustness of classification models on six state-of-the-art tasks. |
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. |
Beyond the Next Token: Towards Prompt-Robust Zero-Shot Classification via Efficient Multi-Token Prediction (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for zero-shot text classification lack prompt engineering due to prompt brittleness . however, these methods are not effective for zero shot text classifications . |
| Approach: | They propose a method that predicts token probabilities across multiple positions and simulates comprehensive sampling of generation paths in a single run of a language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves accuracy and reduces standard deviation by 98% . it maintains comparable performance even without a prompt, reducing the need for prompt engineering . |
FreeCtrl: Constructing Control Centers with Feedforward Layers for Learning-Free Controllable Text Generation (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Controllable text generation (CTG) focuses on crafting texts adhering to specific attributes . studies show learning-based methods require extensive computational and data resources . |
| Approach: | They propose a learning-free approach that dynamically adjusts the weights of selected feedforward neural network vectors to steer the outputs of large language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms learning-based and learning-free methods on multi-attribute control. |
Rethinking Prompt Optimizers: From Prompt Merits to Optimization (2026.eacl-long)
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Zixiao Zhu, Hanzhang Zhou, Zijian Feng, Tianjiao Li, Chua Jia Jim Deryl, Lee Onn Mak, Gee Wah Ng, Kezhi Mao
| Challenge: | Existing methods to optimize prompts rely on LLMs' self-generation ability but lack interpretability due to implicit optimization. |
| Approach: | They propose a model-agnostic prompt quality merits and a merit-guided, locally deployable prompt optimizer trained on a lightweight LLM to improve prompt quality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model avoids online optimization, reduces privacy concerns, and generalizes effectively to both large-scale and lightweight inference models. |
Logit Separability-Driven Samples and Multiple Class-Related Words Selection for Advancing In-Context Learning (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Effective organization of in-context learning (ICL) demonstrations is key to improving the quality of large language models (LLMs). |
| Approach: | They propose a logit separability-based method that integrates multiple class-related words into each sample-label pair to improve LLM understanding. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves ICL performance by providing clearer instructions and richer label information. |
EDEntail: An Entailment-based Few-shot Text Classification with Extensional Definition (2024.findings-naacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for few-shot text classification use either class labels or intensional definitions of class labels for label semantics expression. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that employs extensional definition of class labels in hypotheses and then order and format them into a sequence to form hypothese . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method surpasses supervised-learning methods and prompt-based methods on five classification datasets and is comparable to state-of-the-art models. |
LLMs Learn Task Heuristics from Demonstrations: A Heuristic-Driven Prompting Strategy for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging ability of large-scale labeled data for document-level event argument extraction (EAE). |
| Approach: | They propose an explicit heuristic-driven demonstration construction approach that emphasizes task heurs in document-level event argument extraction tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning methods on document-level EAE datasets. |
Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization with Reward Co-Evolution for Long-Context Reasoning (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Evidence-Augmented Policy Optimization (EAPO) improves long-context reasoning performance . Xu et al., 2025): large language models are a critical part of NLP . |
| Approach: | They propose an Evidence-Augmented Reasoning paradigm that uses a group-relative reward to improve evidence quality. |
| Outcome: | EAPO significantly improves long-context reasoning performance compared to baselines. |
PromptExplainer: Explaining Language Models through Prompt-based Learning (2024.findings-eacl)
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| Challenge: | Existing explanation methods rely on linear approximations, accentuating irrelevant input tokens. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that aligns the explanation process with the masked language modeling task of pretrained language models and leverages prompt-based learning to generate class-dependent explanations. |
| Outcome: | Extensive experiments show that PromptExplainer outperforms state-of-the-art explanation methods. |
TETRIS: Optimal Draft Token Selection for Batch Speculative Decoding (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods that optimize for a single request or a group of requests as a whole only select the most promising draft tokens to be accepted when verified in parallel. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that optimizes the total throughput of batch speculative decoding in multi-request settings by actively selecting the most promising draft tokens to be accepted when verified in parallel. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baseline speculative decoding and existing methods that dynamically select draft tokens, leading to a more efficient batch inference in large language models. |
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 . |